Farewell to Ann Lewis

Ann Lewis will be taking early retirement and leaving SSCC at the end of this semester. Anyone who has had the pleasure of interacting with Ann over the past 24 years, whether it be in her jobs at IRP, Economics, SSML/DACC, or SSCC, knows how very much we will all miss her. We wish Ann well in her retirement and hope she drops by to visit in the future when  she's paddling or cross country skiing Lake Mendota or biking the lake shore path.

We are currently recruiting for Ann's replacement and expect to have someone in place before Spring semester begins. If at all possible, please see Ann about scheduling your computer classes for the spring semester before Ann leaves on December 18th. After that, please see Doug Hemken or Nancy McDermott until we get the new person hired.

Welcome Chithra Kamath to SSCC's Staff

Please welcome Chithra Kamath to SSCC's staff. Chithra joins us as the SSCC's new Office Associate, taking the place of Kasey Kolhardt who has left the SSCC. Chithra is a former residential loan processor at Anchor Bank, and will be in charge of software licensing and many other tasks that keep the SSCC running.

Report Spam "False Positives" to the Consultant

(The following only applies to those who use the SSCC's email service.)

We've had a few reports of SpamAssassin misclassifying legitimate mail as spam. If this happens to you, please contact the consultant and tell us about it so we can make adjustments to the program. While we can't completely eliminate such mistakes, we do want to make them so vanishingly rare that most SSCC users will never see one.

The information we'll need is contained in the X-Spam-Status header of the message in question. If you're using Thunderbird you can see it by first clicking View, Headers and setting it to All, then clicking on the small plus sign next to the subject in the message itself. You can then copy the complete tables of X-Spam-Status into an email to the consultant.

Software Upgrades

The approaching end of the year has brought us a wave of software upgrades. We've recently installed new versions of Dreamweaver, NVivo and R on Winstat; SAS, Matlab and Dreamweaver in the labs; and SAS, SPSS and Matlab on the Linux servers.

Tip: Save Files on Network Drives

We strongly recommend that you save all work-related files on network drives. Network drives are more reliable than standard PC hard drives and are backed up every night. We hate to see anyone lose data due to a hard drive crash. Network drives are also convenient to use: you can easily get access to files on network drives from home or other locations simply by logging into Winstat.

It's especially important to save files on network drives when using Winstat: never save files on the Desktop or in My Documents on Winstat. Files in those locations may or may not be there then next time you log in.

Keep in mind that different network drives have different purposes. The U: drive is private space. However, there are shared spaces available such as the SSCC's X: drive where you can put files that your collaborators or coworkers should have access to. If you're out, having a needed file on the X: drive rather than your U: drive can make life much easier for your coworkers!