Impressed or disappointed?

At least it wasn’t a cow tipping! Instead, it was a cow in the dorm. That’s right, a real live cow, found munching on alfalfa in a Laben Hall stairwell on June 7, amid spring finals.

“I figured right away it was a senior prank,” said Ralph Nuno, bike patrol officer with the campus Police Department, who got the call first thing in the morning.

The cow had been spirited away from the Dairy Barn, which, conveniently, sits almost right across the street from Laben Hall.Nuno said he did not know who put the cow in the stairwell, or how long the animal had been in there.

Jeremy Ogul, a former editor of The California Aggie, said he learned of the incident via Twitter. He responded with a Tweet of his own: “This prank is legendary! People are going to be talking about this for years. I’m impressed.”

Dairy Barn friends, in a posting on the barn’s Facebook page, noted that they were neither amused nor impressed: “We friends of the dairy are very disappointed by the actions of some individuals yesterday who jeopardized both human and animal health and safety by leading a halter-trained and pregnant heifer into Tercero,” reads a post from 3 p.m. June 7.

Read more (and check out the photos).

Election results for pension advisory board

The results are in from the election to fill two staff seats on the UC Retirement System Advisory Board. The winners are Paul D. Brooks, a UC Davis graduate who works at UC Berkeley, and Catherine A. Brennan of UCLA. They earned four-year terms on the board.

More than 11,000 staff members cast ballots, either online or by mail, in the election that ran from May 23 to June 17. There were no UC Davis staff members among the seven candidates on the ballot.

Brooks, a spectroscopist in UC Berkeley’s plant and soil biology department, has been a UC employee for 31 years and is a member of the University Professional and Technical Employees union. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from UC Davis.

He was unavailable for comment, but said in his campaign statement that he will work to make the pension plan sustainable for all employees past, present, and future.

Brennan, a researcher at UCLA’s AIDS Institute and Department of Medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine, joined UCLA in 2009. Reacting to her election, she said, "I want to bring my analytical skills and sense of fairness to discussions of pension issues."

Read more.

— UC Office of the President

Goodbye, Distauth authentication service

UC Davis will retire its Distauth authentication service this fall. The change will eliminate the cost of maintaining a service that the campus no longer needs.

Information and Educational Technology plans to retire Distauth on Nov. 15, but can provide some flexibility for individual clients, based on need.

Authentication services verify your identity when you sign in to a computer account. Distauth, short for Distributed Authentication, was developed at UC Davis in 1997 as a single sign-on service to allow system administrators to restrict access to information on local websites. It has served the campus well, but alternatives that are more secure and modern are now available.

Administrators of the remaining websites that use Distauth will need to switch to the Central Authentication Service (CAS) or Shibboleth, widely used alternatives already deployed at UC Davis.

Most people on campus should not notice any difference when Distauth is retired. Some might notice that their website log-in screen has changed, because the CAS sign-on looks different from the one for Distauth.

More information.

— Information and Educational Technology

Give some blood, get some ice cream

If the hot weather has you thinking about ice cream, you’ll want to pay a visit to the ASUCD Blood and Marrow drive next week — where each participant will receive a coupon for a free pint of Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

The Sacramento-based BloodSource is bringing in bloodmobiles for the drive, scheduled from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday (June 29 and 30). Look for the bloodmobiles alongside the Quad.

BloodSource advises prospective donors to drink plenty of fluids and to eat beforehand, and to bring photo identification.

For more information or to volunteer at the blood and marrow drive, contact BloodSource’s Brie Leon, (916) 416-9459 or brie_leon@bloodsource.org.

Band-uh! invites you to the jam-uh!

The Cal Aggie Marching Band-uh! is ready to jam-uh, as in Summer Jam-uh! — every other Monday, June 27 through Aug. 22. The free music programs are scheduled from 7 to 9 p.m. on the grass just north of the Rec Pool.

You may want to consider going for a swim, then, at 7, when the pool closes, walk on over to hear the band.

Pool admission is free for Activities and Recreation Center members and summer session students. If you are a continuing student (but not attending summer session), the price is $2. Admission is $4.50 for the general public, $4 for ages 3 to 17, and free for ages 2 and under.

Hours through Labor Day: 2-7 p.m. Monday-Thursday, noon-7 p.m. Friday-Sunday, and noon-7 p.m. Monday, the Fourth of July, and Monday, Sept. 5, Labor Day.

More information.

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