New School Year, New Office Hours

Esteemed Students of The University of Pittsburgh,

I intend on updating everyone with my progress on various projects in the coming weeks, for the time being, my new office hours are as follows:

Tuesday: 9a.m.-1p.m.
Thursday: 9a.m.-1p.m.
Friday: 1p.m.-3p.m.

I strongly support students of this university and would love to hear your views, come visit me during these times. You may also email me to set up a separate appointment if these hours do not work for you.

perryservedio@gmail.com

CSSD, improving your life

The doors of CSSD swing wide open to student input. Wednesday March 26, President Link and I had a meeting with Jinx Walton. The agenda was simple: Making the web portal easier to use, Explore options for checking the occupancy levels in the computer labs remotely, and examining a free legal music downloading alternative.

It brings me great pleasure to announce that in a joint effort between Student Government Board, and Computer Services and Systems Development, a Task-Force will be formed to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and usability of my.pitt.edu. We are interested in bringing together a diverse group of students from all areas of concentration within the University of Pittsburgh to gather input and suggestions on how to make the web portal more powerful, and easy to use. From what I could gather from our meeting, Pitt’s webmail is of particular interest to CSSD as well. President Link and I spent a considerable amount of time discussing this topic with Jinx.

Next, we discussed the sometimes overbearing demand for computers in the campus computing labs. It has been determined long ago that the reason for this is because of the necessity to be at a computer within the lab to print to the university printers. Jinx assures us that CSSD’s “print from anywhere” option will be available by Fall of this year. With this option, you will be able to print any document just as easy as you print in the labs, only you will select which lab you want to print to. It is very important to note that with this new system, we will have open-space printers which you can easily walk up to, swipe your card, and print your documents. Board Members Sanderson and Haddad are ecstatic about this, because we will be cutting down on the wasted cover-page sheets that are currently used in the labs. In addition, these open-space printers will afford CSSD a live Pilot program, and metric, to determine how effective the system would be if all printers were open-space; similar to the systems that many other universities use.

In line with my Platform, I introduced the idea of being able to check the lab usage remotely. CSSD was excited to look into what would be a first-in-nation deployment of this technology.

Last on the Agenda was to examine a free legal music downloading alternative for students. The main topic on this Agenda item was the possibility of using Ruckus to allow students to download music for free. According to a 2006 questionnaire performed by Board Member Joe Leinbach, a big issue is the availability of using the music with Apple products. CSSD, President Link, and I all agreed that we do not want to disenfranchise our Apple students through the selection of an alternative that does not cater to their needs. Since the last time that the Ruckus deal fell through in 2006 for university legal reasons, they have made changes to their options and contracts. I presented these changes to Jinx to have them reviewed. On this issue, we will continue to work and strive that the needs of our students are met. The way students use music, and the nature of music in general lends itself to be a very personal issue with many people. For this reason, we do not want to rush into an option that will force students to adapt to a different music listening lifestyle.

News, Current Events, my agenda

Panthers,

I just thought I would update everyone on what I have been up to, in case you may have missed our Public Meetings at 8:45pm on Tuesdays.

Today, President Link and I have a meeting with the USA Today to discuss funding for the possible deployment of the Readership Program. The Board has decided that it would not be proper use of the Student Activities Fund money to fund a program that is not directly involved with student activity. It should still be noted that a majority of students here voted in favor of the program, which is reason enough to pursue it.

A Personal Aside: It is my strong belief that the Students Activity Fund money is not only for members of the over 350 student organizations on campus, but for ALL students. Therefore, programs such as the USA Today Readership Program (and others) is one way to reach out to ALL students, and give them an opportunity to see a direct benefit from paying in to the Student Activities Fund.

Dean Humphrey, President Link, and myself have confirmed a meeting with Jynx Walton on March 26th. We will bring up technology related issues at this meeting, so if you have any technology related comments, please drop me a line: servedio.perry@gmail.com

Lastly, my 2008 Agenda is available in pdf format, as promised. Note: some portions of my 2008 agenda are blacked out. The portions that are not available, will be made available after my meeting with Jynx on March 26th.

My Agenda is available here: http://www.pitt.edu/~sgb/servedio/PublicAgenda2008_PerryServedio.pdf

Facilities Management, 2008 Agenda, New Office Hours

My Fellow Students,

I have completed the final draft of my formal 2008 Agenda, I will make it available publicly next Tuesday.

This past week I met with Facilities Management to discuss elevator maintenance procedures. The following are my findings:

Facilities Management manages approximately 175 lifting devices on campus.
Elevators undergo full inspections every 3 years.
Elevators undergo intermediate inspections every 6 months or so.
Elevators undergo Preventative Maintenance (PM) every month.

I find their current procedures excellent, and only suggested that they maybe post copies of the Certificates of Inspections in the elevators (like is done in Benedum Hall). They promise to keep me in the loop on that.

I am also changing my office hours to the following:
Wednesday: 4p.m.-7p.m.
Thursday: 2p.m.-6p.m.
Friday: 9a.m.-12p.m.

I appologize if there is an inconvenience. I am doing this to accomodate community service which I will be doing on Wednesdays at 2p.m. I will be spending time reading to elementary school kids.

State of My Board Projects

This week, I made a lot of progress on the necessary initial stages to my ambitious board projects. For anyone who is just now tuning in, I will list the 3 major projects I am taking on along side improving the quality of living for our students:

• Bring a free legal music downloading service to PITT
• Re-vamp of my.pitt.edu
• Text message service to check the current occupancy levels in the computer labs

President Link and I had a conference call with a representative from Ruckus on Friday, it went well. I also had a meeting with Joe Leinbach who was the last Board Member that tried to bring the service here. We discussed potential roadblocks, and what his problems and hang-ups were. Interesting enough, Ruckus has expanded their offering (since 2 years ago) to allow easier adoption of the service here.

While I can not disclose anything about the re-vamp of my.pitt.edu at this time, initial steps are being taken to determine the current effectiveness, efficiency, and usability of the portal. I look forward to working with CSSD to evaluate.

I will be pursuing the text messaging service in the coming month and my goal is to have it implemented by the time finals rolls around.

As always, all comments are welcome. Plus if anyone knows or has heard anything bad/good about the Ruckus music downloading service, by all means, come to my office hours, or call me!

Office Hours

Welcome back, I am confident that you are ready for another rigorous academic term. If you would like to express your concerns to me, my office hours are as follows:

Student Government Board Office
848 William Pitt Union

Wednesday: 1pm-5pm
Thursday: 1pm-5pm
Friday: 8am-10am

Or just stop in to say hi.