Five-digit phone numbers next week

The switch to five-digit numbers for on-campus phone extensions, scheduled to take place next week, would be a lot more difficult without Chickenfoot.

“There are about 3,700 CallPilot voicemail accounts that need to be changed,” says Bruce Uttley of information systems and technology, “and the only way we have to do this is with a web forms application. There's a useful web tool called Chickenfoot that we'll be using to fill in all those web form changes, and it will take several hours to complete.”

That’ll happen on August 8 — a week from tonight — as part of the campus-wide conversion, involving some 5,400 four-digit phone numbers.

IST says it’s simply running out of four-digit phone extensions. "New buildings on campus, the addition of the School of Architecture building in Cambridge and the common dialing plan with St. Jerome's University have resulted in a significant decrease in the pool of available phone numbers. The solution is to move to five-digit dialing."

The change will be effective next Tuesday evening, the day after the Civic Holiday.

Most existing extensions will add a 3 in front of what's there now: my phone, now 3004, will become 3-3004. Extensions that have "direct in-dial" service, and now start with a 4, will add an 8, so that the Student Life Centre turnkey desk will move from 4434 to 8‑4434.

With those changes made, IST will start assigning new extensions that begin with a 2 when additional phone lines are needed on campus.

Some special numbers: 2-2222 will reach the UW police, as an alternative to the present 4911. The extension to check voicemail will be 7-0000 (but the existing number from off-campus, 888-4966, is unchanged). And 7-7777 will be the "speech attendant" that locates people when their name is spoken (currently ext. 7777).

Dialing an outside number from a UW extension will call for a 6, rather than the present 9, so that the only thing that starts with dialing 9 will be 911 for emergencies.

Uttley tells more about how the conversion will be done: “Our PBX is made up of two independent telephone switches. Normally the primary switch handles all calls and the secondary switch just monitors the primary, waiting to take over if the primary switch should fail. Since June our secondary telephone switch has been used to program all the sets on campus with five-digits. After 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 8, the secondary switch will become the primary, changes will be made in the Central Office for incoming DID lines and we'll be converted to five-digit extensions after a brief interruption in service. Without the secondary switch to prepare for the conversion we would have been out of service for many hours.”

He notes that some extensions are already converted to five digits, “but these are extensions that people do not call directly. All the emergency phones in elevators and the ports for CallPilot voicemail are five-digit extensions today -- so we know it works.”

The online printable campus directory has been updated for August 1, he said, and contains only five-digit extensions. The white and yellow page directories on the web will be updated to show five-digit extensions today.

There’s more about the phone number conversion in an FAQ that’s available on the web.

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Campaign grateful for scholarship gift

from the Talent Trust News, published by Campaign Waterloo

When Nona and Bill Heaslip established the scholarships that bear their name, their goal was to help promising young people realize their full potential. “Bill and Nona Heaslip’s commitment to help youth pursue higher education is impressive,” says UW President David Johnston. “We are privileged to be in a position to educate future Heaslip Scholars.”

Thanks to the donors’ vision, Grace Fan, Kinesiology, and Jennifer Thai, Accounting and Financial Management, received the first William and Nona Heaslip Scholarships in 2005. These $15,000-a-year awards help to alleviate the financial burden that many promising young scholars often face.

In her first year, Grace Fan combined three part-time jobs with a full course schedule in Kinesiology. “Time management was definitely a skill I learned!” she says. Although her parents were unable to help financially, Grace never gave up her dream of working in the medical field, helping people to overcome their disabilities through rehabilitation.

“The award has not only lifted a huge burden off my family’s shoulders, it has allowed me to concentrate more on school work, and to volunteer,” says Fan, who serves as a student therapist for the Varsity men’s volleyball team and as a member of the Campus Response Team, providing first aid treatment at on-campus events. The award also has her thinking about her future — perhaps medical school, a health professional program, or grad school.

In 2005/06, two scholarships were awarded to second-year students with demonstrated financial need. The awards are renewed in the students’ third and fourth years, provided they maintain a 70 percent average. Two more awards will be presented in each of 2006 and 2007.

The awards will be offered in perpetuity. Our friend Bill Heaslip passed away in early March but his legacy continues and the UW family is honoured to commemorate the life of a remarkable man.

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Hot news on a blistering day

Data from UW weather station Forecast from Waterloo Centre for Atmospheric Sciences

Weather-in-a-word: stinky. Yesterday was both hot and humid, and today is expected to set temperature records; there's also an official smog advisory. "We made it through yesterday," says Allan Swan at UW's central plant, adding that "we were getting up pretty close to our full load!" Three new chillers that were installed over the winter were "put to the full test", he says, and performed fine. The university was consuming 14 megawatts of electricity at the peak point in the day, which may be a record. Swan's energy conservation advice to the campus: shut all the doors and windows to keep cool air in and hot air out. "If there's double doors," he adds, "make sure both doors are closed."

Faculty members, staff and students are being invited to a one-day conference August 15 under the title "The Power of IDEAS", where IDEAS stands for (no kidding) "Innovative Design and Delivery Engenders Access and Academic Success". The event is sponsored by a cluster of departments, including LT3, Information Systems and Technology, and Communications and Public Affairs, and is in part a successor to the "accessibility fair" that's been held in several past years. Says an invitation "Network with colleagues to gain insight and ideas in key areas of research, curriculum design, teaching and learning strategies, and the application of technology to provide optimal learning outcomes". A program for the day is available online, and the Daily Bulletin will have more information over the days ahead.

Giuseppe Tenti (left) is scheduled to retire officially on September 1, after 23 years as a faculty member in the department of applied mathematics. An important area of his research has been brain biomechanics, and his web site describes one major project dealing with blood flow and another with the medical condition called hydrocephalus, or "water on the brain": "Our group consists of faculty and students in Applied Mathematics at Waterloo and researchers at the Hydrocephalus Research Laboratory, headed by Dr. J.M. Drake, of the Hospital for Sick Children at the University of Toronto. In recent work we have modeled the brain by a drastic simplification of its geometric structure, and then used the well-known theory of consolidation in porous media in order to extract information about the brain's mechanical properties. Standard consolidation theory, however, assumes the system to undergo small displacements, so that the constitutive equations are linear; fully developed hydrocephalus, on the other hand, involves very large strains, and hence the need to develop appropriate nonlinear stress-strain relations. This work is currently in progress."

This announcement (from the university secretariat) one more time before the deadline: "Catherine Fry of the Conflict Management and Human Rights Office finished a three-year term on the Board of Governors on April 30. Nominations are now requested from full-time staff of the University (at least five nominators are required in each case) to fill the vacant seat on the Board, term to April 30, 2009. Full-time staff members who are Canadian citizens are eligible for nomination. Completed nomination forms should be submitted to the Secretariat, Needles Hall, Room 3060, no later than 3:00 p.m., Friday, August 4, 2006. "

Student fee payments for the fall term will be due on September 6 (or August 28 if they're paid by cheque rather than bank transfer). . . . The UW Recreation Committee says its proposed book club will start operation in the fall term. . . . The teaching resource office in the Math and Computer building will be closed on August 23 and 24 "for fall planning". . . .

CAR

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