Well things settled down fine and the crowds came to our booth. The shiny black wall on the left is Apple Business Solutions Center, where you walk through a serpintine path checking out cool furniture and cool stuff on it.

If you walked to the right of our sign and took a stroll around the whole Northeast Macintosh User Groups booth, you would see the other user groups are generating a lot of interest too. You may also notice our banner is two sided and rather visible.

Follow the booth around counter-clockwise and you would see this long shot from rear or top of the booth. You can see why the Javit's expo center is also known as the crystal palace from the inside view of the windows. Lucky the air conditioning was working fine this year. From this view you can see the 3dNY booth's banner. They were at the expo on Wednesday as well as Friday. Their leader Lance designed the graphic for the raffle boxes from a suggestion by Bradley.

Here is a better shot of the 3dNY booth. Hanging from their banner are examples of some of their impressive work. The group was known as Mac3dNY until just before the expo, but dropped the Mac part of the name as they got more members without Macs. They do not charge for membership so anybody interested can join. They have meetings in New York City.

Back to the LIMac end of the booth, we see it sometimes gets busy. With three people manning the booth sometimes, there was enough interest to keep us busy. We would answer questions about the user group and meetings. Bradley often answered technical questions thrown at him from interested attendees. Can you recognize Mr. Hoffman on the right, coming around the corner? You can maybe make out the G4 cube raffle box near Rick. The side with the rules and pictures of the prizes is facing us here. The raffle box made a Apple employee give it a double take.

Even more crowds. Luckily we got part time volunteers to help out. Here we see Bill Medlow (on the right in the two-tone grey) on the outside of the booth. Can you see the half empty glass bowl for candy next to the newslettee display on the left of the picture? We enticed people to come over any way we could.

Mr. Hoffman (at the corner of the desks) kept Bradley (partly obscured by the table sign) busy with more questions. There was always lots of traffic going by our booth. We had a great location. Here you can see the Boston Mac Users Group getting questions too. All the groups had plenty of traffic.

We had a shutter bug among us so we had to pose for a few shots. I think this one came out well. You can get a feel for the size of the room in this picture. Over our heads is just the back corner of one of two linked rooms. You should recognize the people in this shot. The color on the desktop are multicolored paper bookmarkes we handed out by the dozen. I hope the web site gets more traffic now that the word is out about us.

Back to answering questions, Bradley and John try to help anybody who glided by our booth. We also got some folks who were interested in demonstrating at future meetings, so we hope to have some unique presentations on the future.

Bradley spent quite a bit of time with this guy, so Bill had to help with other attendees. Can you see the bright orange and black motif of the Princeton Mac Users Group ladies over Bradley's right sholder? They even had matching orange candies!

John Learchic was busy too that first day. Looks like Bradley was distracted for a minute. It was a bit of a challenge trying to field questions from all three sides, while keeping an eye on replenishing the displays with brochures and newsletters and bookmarks and refilling the candy bowl. The Macintosh community seems to continue to need user groups. The recent breakdown of the New York Macintosh User Group meetings left a local hole and a need these local area groups try to fill. You can see the raffle "cube" behind and to Bradley's right. The sides with the Statue of Liberty graphic and the winners notice are visible. The other user groups got a plain white box with the rules, graphic and winner notices.

The shutter bug bites again, so Rick and Shelly posed.

Shelly, Rick, Bill and Max. Max stopped by for a few minutes and gets his picture taken. Like us hard workers. What nerve! He didn't even have on the requisite white polo shirt.

Harold had the second shift on Wednesday. Look how tidy the bookmarks are. Neatly arranged between the full color brochures and the raffle box. The one side without anything on it. We could have put an Apple logo on it, but it would have been the wrong side relative to the slot on top. The top by the way had fake ventilation slots and holes to make it look more like the real thing. This was under the plexiglass top to complete the look. Not perfect, but close enough.

Now we skip to the end on Friday. Our booth was visited by a pair of nuns. But nuns want to win a raffle prize too and Friday's prize was the most valuable one of all, Apple's Final Cut Pro 2. Notice over their shoulders, the wide open space of the aisle intersection. That visual gap helped draw expo attendees to our booths.

We couldn't ask for a more trustworthy raffle ticket picker. She did have an entry in the box though, but who would question the honesty of a nun? So we opened all the raffle boxes, dumped the contents into one and the winner is... Notice the expectant video professionals looking on.

This lucky guy. The shorter guy on his right can't be smiling, can he? He lost. This was just a half hour before the end of the expo. Perfect time to win a heavy box.

The winner and his family. This certainly was worth coming for, the wife must be thinking.

Bill Medlow gets the prize from the User Group Lounge and presents the smiling winner with his prize.

Finally time to break down the booth, load up the car and go home, exhausted. So Bill lowers the poles and starts to remove the eight foot long banner. See the nice little badge on his shirt. All the LIMac booth staffers wore them. This picture shows it best. Just our logo, like on our home page.

You can see part of MacNJ's banner in the above picture, but this is a much better view. They had great table top easle displays.

I wish we had a few more pictures of the other user groups' booths, but I hope you get the idea. Visit the other user group's web sites to get a taste of what goes on at other groups meetings. You can go through The MUG Center's web page for a launching pad.