Daily Bulletin

Uninhibited and well dressed on Friday were Suzanne Havens and Carrie Howells, tutors in the computer science department who showed up in something a little special to celebrate Hallowe'en. Doug Mulholland, also of CS, took the photo.

East Asian festival this week

The festival marks the 10th anniversary of the East Asian studies program at Renison, which now has more than 500 enrolments each year in language and culture courses touching on China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea.

Described as "a real west-meets-east experience", the annual festival begins tomorrow with a special exhibition of prints ("Gardens of the Survivors") by Gloria Kagawa, in Renison's chapel lounge. Admission to the preview, from 7 to 9 p.m., is free, as are most events during the five-day festival.

"The Festival is a wonderful opportunity to immerse oneself in the texture, colour and splendour of East Asian culture through an array of activities organized by the college with the help of the local Asian community," said festival chair Kathryn McKie.

Festivities kick off on Wednesday evening at Kitchener city Hall, with food, speeches, martial arts, music and dance. Thursday brings a lecture by Senator Vivienne Poy, and that evening at 7:00 Choy will read from his new book, Paper Shadows, at Waterloo Public Library. A day-long seminar on doing business in east Asia is offered Friday (registration $99), and Saturday is Family Day, with activities from origami to martial arts.

Bell lowers price for Internet

Jay Black, associate provost (information systems and technology), said the new arrangement doesn't provide an "agency fee" to UW. Previously, Bell Canada, which operates Sympatico, had agreed to turn over money to the university based on the number of UW-affiliated people who signed up for the service.

"UW will not be receiving anything," Black said Friday. "Our intention was always to offer the lowest possible price," and that's the emphasis under the revised contract.

Liane Sullivan of Bell's broadband development division issued this announcement about the change:

In addition to UW, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto and Algonquin College have also signed three-year agreements with Bell Canada to promote Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition service as the preferred solution for high speed access to the University and the Internet from the off-campus homes of students, faculty and staff.

Bell offered the universities a choice of options in offering this service: either a discount for an ISP-like service (UWO, UT) or a sales agency agreement for the consumer service (UW). The technical details of the ISP-like service did not satisfy UW requirements as specified in the original request for information, and so Bell and UW executed the agency agreement. This resulted in a discrepancy in pricing among the university communities.

To rectify the situation, Bell Canada has renegotiated the contract with UW. The Sympatico High Speed Edition service will be available to UW students, faculty and staff for $35.95 per month for those subscribers who choose Bell as their long distance provider. For current UW affiliated subscribers, Bell will provide a retroactive credit of $4.00 per month that will appear in the December statement. UW will not be receiving an agency fee.

In addition, Bell is extending the special offer of 50% off installation for another two weeks, until November 14.

As well, as way of apology for our initial teething problems with our order processing, Bell will provide a credit for one month's service to members of the university community who sign up for Sympatico High Speed Edition service between September 15 and November 14. Again, a credit will appear on the December statement.

Computing courses on the web

"Now there is another option. The University of Waterloo has subscribed to a Web based training facility offered by ZD Incorporated."

He explains: "There are two types of training offered: self-study and instructor-led. You take both types of training using your Web browser. The course is a simulation of the application you are learning, giving you hands-on, interactive training as if you were actually in the real desktop application. You can take these courses at any time. In instructor-led courses, you are led by industry experts and taught online using a message board. The instructor-led courses are offered only at specified times."

Courses are offered in eight categories: Business, Databases, Design, Desktop, Net User, Networking, Programming, and Webmaster. Hicks says there are many courses for the applications that people on campus use in their office, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and FrontPage.

"Another exciting part of this training," he says, "is that we can now offer training about computing topics that are seldom or never offered on campus. These include Windows NT Administration, CGI Programming with Perl (Getting Started to Advanced), Java Programming (Basics to Advanced), Visual Basic 6.0 (Intro to Advanced), Microsoft Project 98, Outlook 98." Also available: such novelties as Office 2000 applications. Instructor-led courses include Adobe Photoshop, SQL, Macromedia Director 7, and C++ (Introduction to Advanced).

A complete list of available courses can be seen at the ZD web site -- click on "Computing and Internet", along the right side of the window.

Hicks warns that some of the self-study courses, though not all, require a plug-in that's only available for Windows 95 and Windows 98, so Macintosh users are out of luck for those tutorials.

IST has purchased five ZD accounts for faculty, staff and students, and the UW Staff Training and Development Committee has five accounts for staff and faculty. To use or reserve an account for one week, you can call the Computing Help and Information Place (ext. 3456) or the human resources department at ext. 2078.

Laurier 36, Waterloo 15 That was the football score on Saturday afternoon -- enough to move Wilfrid Laurier's Golden Hawks into second place in the OUA league standings. Waterloo's Warriors will face first-place Western Ontario in London next Saturday as the playoffs begin.

Fire hits Village A minor fire did "less than $10,000" in damage to a kitchenette in Village I West 6 at breakfast time Friday. No one was hurt. UW safety director Kevin Stewart said someone apparently left a plastic dish-drainer on a stove burner that wasn't turned off. The resulting fire was put out with hand extinguishers. The main damage was to nearby cupboards, which will have to be replaced, Stewart said. "It's not a bad reminder, he added. "When using kitchen utilities, you turn things off afterwards!"

Just another manic Monday

And then there's the department of statistics and actuarial science, where administrative assistant Lucy Simpson is the quarterback for the United Way efforts, with a lot of support from co-workers and graduate students. "Here's the list of events," says Lamont: "continental breakfast, garage sale, talent show, luncheon, office Olympics, loose change days." And then there was the don't-forget-your-keys event: "Anyone who forgets their keys and need to ask Nandanee or Lucy to let them into their office must pay an entry fee of 25 cents."

Spaces are still available in a couple of staff training courses next month, says Carolyn Vincent of the human resources department. They're "Advanced Customer Service", three mornings in mid-December, and "True Colours", the afternoon of December 9. Anyone interested can get in touch with Vincent at ext. 2078.

And Dianne Scheifele of the university secretariat sends a reminder that applications and nominations for this year's Awards for Volunteerism are due by this Friday. These awards are given annually to recognize students' volunteer work on campus and in the community.

Some 25 students in the school of planning spent most of the weekend taking part in a charrette, an intensive project to work out and present proposals -- in this case, proposals for new uses of the long-abandoned St. Jerome's High School in downtown Kitchener. I'm looking forward to hearing more about how the sleepless weekend went, and what ingenious ideas were presented as the charrette wound up yesterday.

Happening at noon hour today:

• A lecture on "The Status of Women: A Global Perspective" by Sharada Rath of Utkal University, India, in Needles Hall room 3001. The event is sponsored by the women's studies program and the Waterloo Association of University Women; the 12:15 lecture will be followed by discussion at 1:00. Rath is the author of Women in India: A Search for Identity, to be published shortly.
• "Fitness for Everyone" is the topic of a session that will be offered twice today by the faculty of applied health sciences. Session leader Brenda Kramer promises that "Whether you are a couch potato or a fitness buff, this seminar will provide the motivation and information you need to start or maintain an active lifestyle." The noon session is in room 1633 of the Lyle Hallman Institute (the west wing of Matthews Hall); it'll be repeated at 7:00 this evening in the larger, nearby room 1621.
• Doug Crowne, retired from UW's psychology department, speaks in the Kitchener Public Library lecture series downtown. His topic: "When Two Brain Hemispheres Can't Talk to Each Other".

• The executive committee of UW's senate meets in Needles Hall room 3001, to go over the agenda for the November 15 meeting of the full senate. Major items include the annual reports of the University Committee on Student Appeals and the University Tenure Appeals Committee.
• The tourism lecture series continues today, but with a change in speakers. Substituting for a visitor who couldn't make it will be Pam Wight, an Edmonton consultant, speaking on "Tourism in Parks and Protected Areas", in Arts Lecture room 113.
• The physics department presents a seminar in Physics room 145: Chunlei Guo, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, will speak on "Electron Correlation Effects on Strong Field Nonsequential Ionization".

Tomorrow, training in the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System is offered by UW's safety office in the form of a one-hour session (video and quiz) starting at 2 p.m. in Davis Centre room 1304.

Also tomorrow, an MBA Education Fair is planned at Wilfrid Laurier University, with people on hand representing MBA programs not just at WLU but at eight other universities in Ontario and New York. The event runs from 4:30 to 7 p.m. tomorrow in WLU's Paul Martin Centre.

Finally, the human resources department sends word that there's a correction in the memo issued the other day about cutoff dates for casual payroll. The paperwork cutoff date for the December 10 payroll will be December 2, not November 25. A corrected version of the memo is now available on the Web.

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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