Donations sought for homeless people's pets

UC Davis veterinary volunteers are once again taking donations for holiday gift “baskets” for pets belonging to homeless people.

The baskets are actually decorated boxes, filled with canned and dry food, treats, toys, leashes and pet care products.

“We really depend on the generous monetary donations of the community to help purchase pet toys, which are such a source of joy for the animals and their owners,” said Eileen Samitz, a clinical microbiologist at the William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital.

She said pet supply companies provide food and some of the other items for the holiday baskets, while monetary donations from the community are needed to buy the toys and treats.

Some 130 baskets are due to be distributed on Dec. 11 at the Mercer Veterinary Clinic for the Homeless. It is adjacent to Sacramento Loaves & Fishes, which offers assistance to homeless people.

Veterinary students run the clinic and assist in assembling the pet baskets, in conjunction with Samitz and other volunteers from the hospital’s Voice newsletter committee. This year’s basket assembly session is scheduled from noon to 1 p.m. Dec. 9.

Checks should be made out to "UC Regents-Mercer Holiday Pet Baskets" and sent to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, Office of the Dean, P.O. Box 1167, Davis 95617-1167, to the attention of Mercer Holiday Pet Baskets.

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Davis-Berkeley shuttle survey

Responses are due by Dec. 8 in Fleet Services' online survey to determine the optimal departure time for the afternoon shuttle run to UC Berkeley.

This is a follow-up survey to one that brought in almost 1,000 responses, the majority of which indicated that people favored a later departure time from Davis.

Under the existing schedule, the afternoon shuttle departs Davis at 2:15. The follow-up survey asks people to pick a new departure time from among the following: 3:30, 4, 4:30, 5 or 5:30 p.m.

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Causeway Classic: A double win

UC Davis this year scored its first-ever double win in the Causeway Classic — on the football field and at the blood bank.

The blood drive competition between UC Davis and California State University, Sacramento, originated three years ago, and the Aggies have won all three years.

But this year marked the first time that the Aggies won the blood drive contest and the game, defeating the Hornets 17-16 on Nov. 20.

The Sacramento-based BloodSource conducted blood drives on each campus in the month leading up to the game. The UC Davis drive, held in partnership with the ASUCD, brought in 1,887 potential donors and yielded 1,453 pints.

BloodSource chose the blood drive winner on the basis of registered participants: 1,887 for UC Davis, 1,765 for Sac State.

But while only UC Davis could claim victory, together the schools set a record for total participation in the Causeway Classic Blood Drive: 3,652 people.

The winning school receives custody of a perpetual trophy, presented this year by BloodSource’s Brie Leon to ASUCD President Jack Zwald. The presentation took place during the Nov. 20 football game, on the field during the first media break.

The blood drive also brought cash prizes to three UC Davis organizations for bringing in the most potential donors: Alpha Phi Omega, $300; Tau Kappa Epsilon, $200; and American Red Cross, $100.

Xeda is now uConnect, with new features

Information and Educational Technology announced improved Blackberry support and communication options in the Davis campus’s centrally Active Directory and Exchange service.

And, to reflect the additions, the service is now called uConnect, instead of Xeda (which was a backwards abbreviation of “Exchange” and “Active Directory”).

The new features, which build on a core of integrated e-mail and calendaring, include:

• Unified Communications, which includes instant messaging, audio-video conferencing, and computer-to-computer phone calls, all on secure connections.

• Blackberry Express server, which supports uConnect on Blackberries at a reduced cost (eliminating the one-time $70 fee, and the $10-to-$15 monthly Blackberry Enterprise Services fee charged by a user’s cell phone carrier).

More improvements are in the works, according to IET. Those improvements include SharePoint, a set of Microsoft-developed tools that help people work together over the Web.

The service also is benefiting from a partnership between the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and IET to make sure that uConnect, as it expands, addresses the needs of campus administrative and academic units — with special attention to faculty.

Read more.

Listproc retirement date: Dec. 14

More than 3,000 inactive e-mail lists are subject to deletion on Dec. 14 when the campus retires Listproc.

Information and Educational Technology already has move more than 8,000 active e-mail lists to the campus’s new list software, Sympa, and has reached out to the owners of the inactive lists, advising of the Dec. 14 deletion date.

Listproc’s Dec. 14 retirement completes a project that began in 2009 to upgrade the campus’s e-mail list service. Read more.

A list is judged “inactive” if there has been no activity for at least a year. In most cases, presumably, the owners never deleted the lists after the need for such lists had ended.

If you own a list that has been put on the “inactive” list, you can protect it from deletion by asking IET to migrate the list to Sympa. To do so, send an e-mail to sympa-migrations@ucdavis.edu, indicating the name of the list or lists that you wish to save.

Questions or need assistance? Contact the IT Express Computing Services Help Desk, (530) 754-HELP (4357).