But blink and you might have missed it!
The Midlands User Group have been announcing the date of this year’s Midsummer Midlands MUGShow – but they’ve been doing so by stealth, so it would have been easy to miss any mention of it.
News of the show first came my way at the recent South West Show, which was held on Saturday, 1st March, 2014, and for which I have yet to write a show report. Had I done so already, I would have highlighted the all-important date of the Midlands Show.
Since the South West Show, and armed with knowledge that the date of the Midlands Show had now been set, I’ve been checking every few days to see if the Midlands show website was live yet at the expected address. My intention was to post something to RISCOSitory specifically about the show (over and above any mention in the South West Show report) as soon as I became aware that the website was live.
When I last checked, the site was still not live – but the site was launched yesterday; probably so that it was online in time for yesterday’s announcement of the next Midlands User Group meeting, in which the show is specifically mentioned. If you saw that announcement in the comp.sys.acorn.announce newsgroup and had no interest in the user group meeting, however, you might not have looked beyond the subject line, and might never have spotted that the announcement contained details of the show!
I’m sure everyone who attended last year’s show will remember just how badly attended it was – but, thankfully, it was so badly attended that the number of people who will remember just how badly attended it was isn’t very many at all.
This is important. Towards the end of my report on last year’s show, I highlighted the matter of the poor attendance, saying that the organisers need to think about what they can do to improve it – and “announcing” things in such a stealthy way is definitely not the way to do it. Come on, guys, let’s have a proper announcement about the show itself. Shout about it from the rooftops! Make people aware of it!
Anyway, putting aside criticism of the way the show has been announced, and getting on with the important information:
The date of this year’s show is Saturday, 12th July, 2014, and the venue will be its now familiar home in Kenilworth: St John’s Church Hall, 205 Warwick Road, Kenilworth, CV8 1HY.
Admission is £4.00 for adults, with children getting in for free.
No exhibitors are listed as yet on the show website (though I can confirm that at least one exhibitor has said they will attend – me, representing both RISCOSitory and Soft Rock Software; I’ve even booked my hotel already) but there is a floorplan available to download, from which we can see that there are 15 tables intended for the main hall, which will probably amount to up to a dozen exhibitors, allowing for CJE and R-Comp, who usually occupy two or three tables each.
The website also informs us that the charity stand at this year’s show will, again, be supporting Tools with a Mission, a charity that sends donated tools across the world to places they can be put to good use. All donations are accepted, including hand-tools, PCs, printers and monitors – though PCs and related hardware must be in good working order and, ideally, be no more than five years old.
On the same page, the Midlands User Group states that they intend to provide a theatre at the show – which in recent years has been a similar main-hall/mobile-theatre to that seen at the South West Show. In previous years, the theatre at the Midlands Show has been in the second room of the church hall – but in those years, that second room also housed a number of exhibitors.
A show banner is also available to download – though only as a horizontal version, so I’ll need to spend a few minutes modifying it again before I can use it on RISCOSitory – as is an A4 show advert.
So, can we expect a reasonable turn-out in Kenilworth in exactly four months time?
Let’s hope so.
