Xactec is a 15-year-old business headquartered in Williamsburg serving Southeast Virginia. Although it was started as a hardware/software/services vendor of IBM midrange solutions, the company now assists small to medium-sized businesses in the selection, installation, and maintenance of end user, networking, and telephone technology. Xactec is a Virginia Class A licensed contractor delivering cable, wireless, and fiber infrastructure solutions.

Prior to joining Xactec, Marv was the technology director for Colonial Webb Contractors, a major mechanical construction company, headquartered in Richmond. He previously served as director of internal technology for the Virginia Department of Taxation and is a 21 year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Marv and his wife Christine have 3 children. Their oldest son, Brian, is a junior officer aboard the attack submarine USS Honolulu. Their daughter, Kimberly, is a senior at Longwood University and is in the application process hoping to attend the U.S. Coast Guard’s Officer Candidate School. Their youngest son, Andrew, is a sophomore studying business at Virginia Tech.

With a lifelong passion for learning, Marv has earned undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Computer Science. He has also been awarded graduate degrees in Computer Science and Management.

Please plan on joining us and bring a friend.

Lorene is a graduate of Johnson & Wales University, and after a successful career as a chef and restaurateur; she decided to turn her passion for volunteerism into a full-time job. She has over 15 years of volunteer recruitment and management experience. She has volunteered her time with organizations such as the John Elway Foundation, Relay for Life, The Alzheimer’s Association and the SPCA. She was a campaign coordinator with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and while at the Peninsula Agency on Aging, Inc. she was responsible for the recruitment and management of 400+ volunteers.

An increase in cost for Guest dinners will be determined at a later date.

RSS is technology - a simple software program - that allows you to access web and blog content automatically. The acronym's most popular translation is "Really Simple Syndication. Once your browser or computer has an RSS reader on board, you can subscribe to any number of RSS "feeds." A feed is simply a way in which a reader may subscribe to website content - most commonly blogs or news sites. A news site, for example, may list their latest headlines or entire articles in their feed every time a new article is published. A blog would publish this feed as a series of recent posts.

Feeds are published by millions of publishers, from small individuals to large organizations like Newsweek. The value of a feed is that it brings the most current site content to you in a format that is easily scanned; further, you are spared the task of visiting each source site each day. This is typically done through the use of what is called an 'aggregator' or 'feed reader'.

Feed readers or RSS readers, are software programs that run on your computer (or PDA or phone); let you easily subscribe to feeds, and allow you to read through them efficiently. Some are relatively simple, showing the headline and summary. The fancier ones often work with (or in) your browser to make viewing the material look much like the source page. Once you have a reader on your computer, subscribing to a feed with is an easy click or drag from your browser. Sites that provide RSS feeds will usually have a button for that purpose.

There are several RSS feed formats as well as one with an entirely different methodology called Atom. Atom has become popular with some bloggers and blogging tools. Some aggregators can read both. The other acronyms you will see in "feedspeak" are XML, which stands for 'extensible markup language' and is the code standard for these simple text feeds. An 'OPML" file is a format for indexing hierarchical feed lists. If you dive into this web habit in a big way, your aggregator or reader may keep your subscription list in an OPML file.

An RSS feed is a great method for staying abreast of issues and topics that interest you. There are a number of feed "libraries," so to speak, from which you can learn what's out there in your areas of interest. Google has a built-in reader that makes the subscription process easy, as does Yahoo. Firefox has a downloadable extension for the purpose of aggregating RSS feeds, as well as a default ability to save RSS feeds as "live bookmarks" that update via the RSS feed. You can download a number of stand alone readers and aggregators; you can find them through a simple web search.

The whole RSS "movement" is a step towards utilizing the Internet more efficiently. The trick is to avoid overloading your email inbox with daily reports that you end up ignoring most of the time. For that purpose, there are sites like Feedster that will search millions of RSS feeds for articles that are relevant to your interests. Like any search tool, however, these services are hit and miss. They are still working off keywords and sometimes what they find is relevant, sometimes not. But if you want daily news broken into categories, it's great technology once you learn how to make it work for you.

About The Author

Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate for http://www.apollohosting.com. She helps clients understand how a website may benefit them both personally and professionally. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, & VPS hosting to a wide range of customers