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Newfoundland and the Great War


  Daily Bulletin



University of Waterloo | Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Wednesday, November 11, 1998

  • Today Canada mourns its war dead
  • Got time for a web page?
  • A way to help in hurricane relief
  • What's happening this windy day
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Today Canada mourns its war dead

[Poppy] No words can add to their fame, nor so long as gratitude holds a place in men's hearts can our forgetfulness be suffered to detract from their renown. For as the war dwarfed by its magnitude all contests of the past, so the wonder of human resource, the splendour of human heroism, reached a height never witnessed before.
-- Arthur Meighen, prime minister of Canada
. . . and honours those who, daring to die, survived service in the First World War, the Second World War, and Canada's more recent conflicts. At 11 a.m. it will be precisely 80 years since the guns fell silent over Flanders, marking the armistice that ended the First World War.

I think there can be no one left on the active staff or faculty at UW who served during the World Wars, although there are certainly retired professors and staff members among us who bore arms. And still on campus are some whose youthful memories include the bravery of the home front, the furor of the Blitz, even in a few cases the horrors of the Nazi camps. For their sake, and for the sake of those who are no longer among us, we remember.

Two ceremonies on campus will mark Remembrance Day. A service begins at 10:45 a.m. at the Chapel of St. Bede at Renison College, with music, prayers and a speaker (Tony Clarke, the visiting Stanley Knowles professor of Canadian studies). A ceremony in the foyer of Carl Pollock Hall begins at 11 a.m., organized by the Engineering Society.

In ceremonies this morning at the Cenotaph in downtown Waterloo, Martin Van Nierop, director of information and public affairs, will place a wreath on behalf of the university.

Got time for a web page?

The UWinfo home page is smaller than ever -- not on your screen, but in the amount of data that has to travel over wires to the computer of each person who calls it up with a web browser. And that means the page shows up on the screen faster.

Mistake in yesterday's Bulletin: I shouldn't have used "CE" as the abbreviation for "computer engineering". To those in the know, CE is civil engineering -- and in some contexts at least, I've learned, the abbreviation for computer engineering is "Q".
A little work on the photo at the top of the page -- a view up the Engineering Lecture Hall steps, based on artwork used in a recent student recruitment campaign -- means the whole page, including photo, text and UW logo, is just 24,570 bytes of data. And according to "Bobby 3.0", a piece of software that rates web pages for speed and accessibility, that means it'll load over a 28.8K modem in 8.33 seconds. Such machines are far from the latest technology, but there are still lots of them out there.

"The current UW homepage is the result of a recent redesign," says Roger Watt of information systems and technology, one of my colleagues on the UWinfo operations committee, "done because we believed the previous one was even more boring, more plain, and too cluttered. But no doubt we could still do with something more interesting."

Says Watt: "The current version is about as far as one can go with a native-HTML approach without relying on CSS stylesheets, which are not well supported by all browsers yet. For anything more visually impressive, one has to move into the realm of the 'very attractive but download-intensive' pages that derive from graphic-arts webpage design tools.

Football again

I am determined to get the details of the national football playoffs right sooner or later, but apparently it's going to take a while. The champion of the Canada West league is not Alberta, as I said yesterday, but will be the winner of a game this Saturday between Saskatchewan and British Columbia. In other cup games across Canada on Saturday, Mount Allison meets St. Francis Xavier, Concordia meets Laval, and Waterloo meets Western.
"We very much need the 'attractive' but at the same time need to worry about the 'download-intensive' impact on users outside the campus network who are using a modem to get to the Internet. Some studies of 'World Wide Wait' demonstrate that people start to form negative impressions of an organization if its homepage takes much more than 10 seconds to download."

I took a few minutes yesterday to try out Bobby on various pages both at Waterloo and elsewhere, and here are some of the results -- how many seconds Bobby thinks the page takes to download.

Some UW pages: the Electronic Library, 4.48 seconds; the IST home page, 5.09; yesterday's Daily Bulletin, 5.58; the mathematics faculty home page, 31.28; the environmental studies home page, 34.65; the arts home page, 35.92.

Some other Canadian universities: Toronto, 14.06; McMaster, 16.43; Wilfrid Laurier, 17.58; Guelph, 20.50; York, 24.72; British Columbia, 28.54.

Some popular commercial pages: Yahoo Canada, 6.70; the Ontario government English-language home page, 21.24; Canoe, 21.81.

A way to help in hurricane relief

Everything from soap to money is wanted, as the Federation of Students and the Waterloo Public Interest Research Group is mounting a hurried campaign to collect help for hurricane-devastated Nicaragua and Honduras.

The idea is to fill "life-saving pails" with supplies, and to send them -- plus cash donations -- to the Mennonite Central Committee, which is doing relief work in the wake of Hurricane Mitch two weeks ago. "There are 323 MCC long-term development workers who are now fully involved in disaster relief along with partner agencies," writes Barbara Saunders of WPIRG. "The money raised will purchase food and medical supplies from nearby countries for expedient delivery." Relief efforts began in earnest this week, when MCC purchased 60 tons of rice, beans and corn in Belize for shipment to Honduras. A ship sails from Houston to Honduras today, carrying 22 tons of MCC canned meat, blankets, soap and food.

As for the pails, they're 20-litre plastic containers filled with such items as combs, toothpaste, anti-fungal cream, sanitary pads, lightweight bath towels, soap, and "notes of encouragement". WPIRG and the Federation have 30 pails to fill, and are welcoming donations of items to go in them.

Such items, along with cash donations, can be dropped off at the Federation or WPIRG offices in the Student Life Centre, or at the Village I office. "The pails will be delivered to the local MCC offices on Saturday," Saunders writes, "so we don't have much time. Please help out. The people of Nicaragua are the most generous loving people -- I know, because I've been there and experienced their warmth and kindness." For details on how to help, WPIRG can be reached at ext. 2578.

What's happening this windy day

Strike at Brandon

Faculty members at the smallest university in Manitoba, Brandon University, went on strike Monday morning. Classes were cancelled Monday and Tuesday as talks between faculty and administration continued with the help of a mediator. Brandon is closed today in any case because of Remembrance Day, and an announcement is expected about whether classes will resume tomorrow. "In addition to salaries and benefits," says a release from the Brandon faculty association, "the outstanding issues include tenure, copyright, privacy and technological change." Bill Graham, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, is expected to join the picket line tomorrow. (Southern Manitoba has four inches of snow on the ground this morning and more is falling.)
The health services department is offering only limited services today, because of staff training: no allergy injections, no immunizations, no birth control pill dispensing, no laboratory services. Back to normal tomorrow (but another day of limited service next Wednesday).

A three-day toy fair begins today in the Davis Centre lounge. It's sponsored by the Hildegard Marsden Day Nursery, which promises "a superb variety of items for all ages, including toys, books, crafts, and much more. Christmas shopping has never been so easy!" Last year's sale raised more than $900 for the non-profit day care centre.

As co-op students wait in suspense for job matches that will arrive on Monday, more jobs are still being made available. Posting #1 of the "continuous phase" goes up by 12 noon today. "Students who have not had interviews, or who were not ranked, should apply to this posting," the co-op department says.

The St. Jerome's Centre for Catholic Experience is sponsoring a talk today at Resurrection Catholic Secondary School (4 p.m.). The speaker is Heather Eaton of Université St. Paul in Ottawa; she'll talk on "Ecology, Justice and the Sacred: Ecotheology, Ecofeminism and Education".

The "Films for Awareness" series at Conrad Grebel College today presents "Out: Stories of Gay and Lesbian Youth", which will be shown at 7 p.m. in room 267 at Grebel. It's a 1993 production of the National Film Board.

The Jewish Students' Association is hosting a Holocaust education and memorial night this evening at the Maureen Forrester Recital Hall foyer, Wilfrid Laurier University. Doors open at 7, and the proceedings will begin at 7:30. Admission is free. The evening will feature Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz relating his experiences in Nazi Europe along with other speakers and a film. "It should be meaningful for all," promises Robert Bridson of the JSA.

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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