Last week’s club meeting featured the official installation of the club’s officers and directors for the Rotary year beginning July 1, 2012. Congratulations are in order to our new President-Elect, Nick Martinez, and the other new officers and directors, and thanks to Past District Governor Rich Carson who handled the installations.

President Gary Lett presented awards to last year’s club officers and directors, and also honored the bulletin editors, Dan Daniels and Chuck Boteler, by the presentation of specially engraved trophies for their work in putting together the club bulletin for the past twelve years. It goes without saying that they were surprised and grateful for the recognition. Little did they realize that the next few days would bring one of the area’s worst electrical storm in many years.

Last week’s breakfast speaker was Past President- Lasse Syversen, who spoke about our current web site and the development of new next generation technology. Lasse’s company “Flagship by Bloksberg, Inc.” has maintained and hosted our web site for the past 10 years, and the club’s Board of Directors has hired and agreed to continue using them for the new generation web site.

The new web site (above) was created and put together by one of Flagship’s key employees who is known by “Geronimo”, and it includes easy access to a large number of locations. Lasse is hopeful that club members will be helpful in suggesting improvements, and correcting errors, etc.

Flagship is a 26-year old computer company based in Rockville with a computer center in the Pittsburgh area . It has been serving the shipping industry and is a partner with Homeland Security on import and export documentation.

Our speaker was Bernd Wrede, a Rotarian from Germany, a Pastor at the German Lutheran Church where he is responsible for the pastoral duties in the congregation, and a visitor at our club for the past several weeks. His subject was “Germany—20 years since unification.”

To start, Bernd described unification as “still a miracle as it occurred without a single shot, and East Germany went out of existence after October 3, 1990.” East Germany is now under the rule of law surrounded only by friends with less than 4% unemployment, a steady infrastructure, and a tribute to unification.

A new Germany speaks of NATO and the European Union, although there are doubts about its capacity and leadership in Europe