Fellow MUG friends:
We tried to kill the old beimac group (beimac = Beijing Mac user group) twice. I thought of giving it up in January 2004, when I fell in semi-love with a girl who spoke perfect English (in China that counts; we've seen too many signs of botched-up English: "Please you initiative to accept the security check", anyone?), only to miss out on her (she had a boyfriend already, which I never knew) and getting members mad. Just before bedtime one February evening, I got a call from a member who went (all caps intended):
"WHERE THE H#@L DID THE BEIMAC GROUP GO!?!?!?!?"
That was it. The group had to come back. And then there was the late 2007 inaction. The Beijing games were coming, but there was just too much to do. For some odd reason the group simply did not "work" then; the big interest was more in mass transit, as "how do I get people from A to B in Beijing" and stuff. Of course this was all done on Macs, but sans beimac.
In between karaoke parties in Taiwan (which I just visited about a few weeks ago), the rhetoric, both in Beijing and in Taiwan, was clear: this beimac thing simply has to — well — un-die. This wasn't like consensus reached because we had angry members hate-mailing us (which never happened, by the way), but because people, from Mac vendor "bigs" to tech columnists in Taiwan and everywhere else, were like: "You run beimac. This thing can't die!..."
The thing that got the group back: I did an interview just before the launch of the iPad and was referred to as the beimac president. Oh cool. Now I appear courtesy of a phantom user group. See, nobody could really "take it" that the user group, which in full used to be the Beijing Mac users group, "died".
This beimac user group, then, is back, and although we're trying to get the user group website back into order, we already have our sights set on a reunion in April. One of these big, 100-member reunions which we did about twice or three times already. We can pull this thing off. :-)
We're also announcing that we'll be there. As in Macworld 2011, from January 25-29, 2011. It's going to run into Chinese New Years 2011, but I myself have a bad history of getting out of town by then, like I did in 2009. ;-) beimac is not only back, but we're committed to being part of the worldwide user group arena and the Mac arena. (We had to put a space in the latter to avoid disputes with the Los Del Rio hit of 1996 fame.) ;-)
beimac exists and has been reborn twice because Mac folks wanted it to be there. And when they say they want us onstage, we just do it.
Happy Spring Festival (Chinese New Year of the Tiger) + Valentine's Day
from Beijing
David Feng _______________________________________________