Daily Bulletin

Fall fees are due Tuesday

"Enclosing a copy of the OSAP Notice of Assessment or a copy of a scholarship/award letter with the fee statement is an acceptable means of payment. Students can post date payment," up to September 7.

A separate note for grad students: "Graduate students will receive a registration form and fee statement during the week of August 4 and can mail payment. Receipts and validation stickers will be returned by mail for part time and full-time off-campus graduate students and sent to the academic department for full time on campus graduate students. The university will accept and receipt post dated cheques dated no later than September 4 throughout the summer. A copy of the OSAP Student Information Document or a copy of the letter confirming a scholarship, RA or TA are acceptable for a fee arrangement."

Late fees will be charged starting September 1. Late fees start at $50 ($20 for part-time students) and go up week by week. The "absolute last day" to pay fees is September 30.

Students who paid their fees by mid-August will be getting receipts in the mail. "If you are a full-time student," says the registrar's office, "and you submit your payment after August 18, 1999, you can pick up your receipt and validation sticker in the Registrar's Office, Needles Hall. If your payment is received after August 25, 1999, your receipt and validation sticker may not be available for pick up until September 13, 1999. If you are a part-time student, your receipt and validation sticker will be mailed to you regardless of date."

Questions and answers from the relevant web page:

• Can I use VISA, Mastercard, or debit card (INTERAC)? No. We are sorry that we do not accept VISA, Mastercard, or debit card (INTERAC) for payment of tuition.
• I'll be on campus this summer and would like to pay my fees in person. No, your fee payment cannot be accepted in person. However, you may send it to us by mail . . . or you may drop it off in one of the . . . Express Payment Boxes.
• I am receiving a bursary/scholarship. How should I use this award to pay for my fees? If you are receiving any kind of bursary or scholarship, it will be applied towards your tuition so that you do not have to wait for a cheque before you pay fees; most cheques will not be produced until the end of the fall term. Indicate the award and dollar value on the bottom left-hand corner of your fee statement and deduct the total of the awards from the fees owing. Pay the amount remaining by August 31, 1999.
• I use OSAP to arrange my fees. Can I use OSAP to register by mail? Yes. If you apply for OSAP by June 30, 1999, your Notice of Assessment or OSAP Website assessment will be available in sufficient time to arrange your fee payment by mail by August 31, 1999. Your OSAP Notice of Assessment or a print-out of your assessment from the OSAP Website confirms the amount of your OSAP assistance. Enclose your proof of OSAP and return your Fee Statement by mail with the Promissory Note signed. Signing and submitting the Promissory Note on the Fee Statement before August 31, 1999 will satisfy your fee arrangement and registration requirements until you are able to pick up your OSAP loan documents in September. If you didn't apply for OSAP by June 30, 1999, we cannot guarantee that your Notice of Assessment or OSAP Website assessment will be available in time to arrange your fee payment by mail.

Heading north for university

She is Elizabeth Patterson, not a flesh-and-blood student but a character in the comic strip "For Better or for Worse", which is firmly based in Ontario although it now appears in newspapers in 25 countries. (There were expressions of disbelief from American readers four years ago when Elizabeth's older brother, Michael, headed off to "London" for university -- to the University of Western Ontario, that is.)

Elizabeth's boyfriend, Anthony, is going to Western too, the strip revealed earlier this month, but the girl herself is heading to little Nipissing University in North Bay. "It's sort of up north," she explained to Anthony in a strip last week. His disbelieving response: "Liz, it's off the map!"

Why Nipissing? Elizabeth Patterson's own words tell of her decision in more detail on the comic strip's web site: "I wanted to go to a small school. I don't know why. I guess I wanted to go where it may be easier to make friends (BIG MAYBE!) It's a beautiful campus, and the residences are like small apartments and like a two-minute walk over to the main buildings. There's also a small lake and walking trails and a ski hill. September will be beautiful. They make maple sugar up there, too."

Elizabeth will be one of a little more than 300 first-year students coming to Nipissing this fall, entering programs in arts, business administration, science, education, commerce and "applied technology". The university has "a critical shortage" of space, president Dave Marshall said earlier this summer, although a new athletics facility and a $4 million Information Technology Wing are under construction.

Everybody's eight-letter name

It can help you, and them, avoid all kinds of confusion, says Paul Snyder of the department of information systems and technology, whose projects include helping users move to a new "mail server" computer that will handle e-mail for many staff in UW administrative departments. It's called admmail.uwaterloo.ca, but with a little bit of luck you won't need to care.

Instead, you can have people send your e-mail to your uwuserid @uwaterloo.ca, and they won't need to worry about spelling watserv1 wrong or knowing whether mc3adm is the same as nh3adm, or choosing among descartes, pythagoras and euclid, or distinguishing undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca from math.uwaterloo.ca.

A uwuserid is assigned automatically to each staff member, faculty member and student at UW. Generally it consists of initials and surname. "If necessary," says the official rubric, "a numeric value is inserted between INITIAL(S) and SURNAME to guarantee that the first 8 characters of UWUSERID are unique." (There are exceptions, though -- mostly people who were on e-mail before the system was standardized, whose uwuserid is a surname alone, or a set of initials.)

The uwuserid can be long if your surname is long, but for most purposes you need only look at the "unique" first eight characters, your campus-wide "userid". Then when you get a userid on a particular computer or system, whether it's healthy or engmail or nh4.adm or monet, the userid should be the same as the campus-wide eight-character userid.

E-mail from on campus or anywhere in the world can be addressed using the uwuserid. Mine, for instance, is credmond, so I invite people to e-mail me at credmond@uwaterloo.ca. That mail is forwarded automatically to my computer of choice, watserv1.

"Of course, for this to work," says Snyder, "their e-mail address must be set properly in UWdir. Try sending yourself an e-mail using the uwuserid@uwaterloo.ca format to make sure it's working properly for you." He notes that requests for corrections should be sent to uwdir-updates@uwdir.uwaterloo.ca. "We will soon be providing a web page that will allow people to set their own e-mail addresses."

You can check your own uwuserid, or anyone else's, using the UWdir search facility. And -- did you notice? -- uwuserids for staff and faculty members are listed for the first time in the yellow-covered campus phone book that was distributed earlier this year. Look up the name and there you have it: Jim Kalbfleisch becomes jgk@uwaterloo.ca, staff association president Paul McKone becomes pdmckone@uwaterloo.ca, Catharine Scott becomes cscott@uwaterloo.ca, and so on.

Maps, skills, SSHRC research

The September-October brochure for the Skills for the Electronic Workplace program hit campus the other day. It lists 11 courses "designed to teach recommended computing skills for UW staff and faculty", ranging from spreadsheets to web pages. The brochure includes a registration form: "Before your registration form can be processed," a note adds, "you must have your supervisor's approval. Your department will be charged $50 if you do not show up for a class for which you are registered," but otherwise the courses are free.

The research office sends word that a program officer from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council will be on campus Thursday morning, September 9. Michael Hodgson "intends to discuss current programs under SSHRC's mandate including the Research Grants and Strategic Grants Programs, as well as to provide an overview on new initiatives from the Council," says Barb Cooke of the research office. "The session also will provide an opportunity for researchers to raise general issues and to ask questions specific to their own research." Faculty members who would like to attend the session with Hodgson should send word to Cooke (bcooke@uwaterloo.ca, phone ext. 5018) by September 2.

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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