6 Women-only Dormitory Area Available Starting March 1st ------------------------------------------------------ The Housing Office is offering, for the first time, a women's-only dormitory area in the Fermilab village. Six rooms on the second floor of Aspen East are designated for this area. The rooms are located close together and have a large womens' bathroom located close by. The location provides more privacy for an all-women's area than is otherwise available anywhere else in Aspen East or, for that matter, in the whole village, short of designating a much larger space. A Fermilab Today article published on January 18, 2006 explains that this is an experiment. See http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2006/today06-01-18.html For this first trial period, the Housing Office has started with this 6-room area. If the all-women's area has sufficient occupancy, it is possible that one of the small village dormitories, including a kitchen and common area, would be converted for this purpose. Wyatt M. asked Jackie Cyko how the women-only area occupancy is looking. Five out of the six rooms are booked for March. One room is open, evidently. Fermilab "Guide-to-Life" Update is Ready ---------------------------------------- Alexis Aguilar reports he has finished updates to the Guide-to-life. This is the first major update since Yr 2000. The URL http://www.fnal.gov/orgs/gsa/guide/index.html will get you to a page that has an obvious link to the present version. He notes: "All the sections that previously existed in the older printed version of the GTL (version 2000) have been revised and some of them have been expanded to include the information that was available in the old online version, as well as updated information on the FNAL websites. The links to web sites that are provided in the various sections have been revised and checked to be working. It was decided to leave the listings at the end (things like grocery stores, restaurants, etc.) the in a similar format as they were before, but they were completely re-done by using the current information from the Yahoo search engine, and were listed according to their driving distance from the intersection of Batavia Rd. and Eola Rd. at in the site (places are now more evenly distributed around Fermilab). The guide has a total of 109 pages. This may increase after some editing. The GTL is currently being proof-read by the GSA members and, provided not many corrections/suggestions are made, it is essentially ready. Nonetheless, I would like to ask for at least one more month to double check some of the information and to produce the HTML version (pdflatex convertion to HTML is in principle straightforward)." Helpdesk & Email Center ----------------------- The Email Center, located in the ground floor of Wilson Hall, has been renovated and reopened. It has six workstations with two tables each. The workstations have PC's plus seats for cable (and wireless) connection to laptops. There are connections that can be used to update personal computers to the present computer security standard. In addition, the Computing Helpdesk staff have moved to that site. Recycling in the Village ------------------------ In late December we talked with Eric Mieland. He said that there's paper and cardboard recycling now. He said the Housing Office (Jack Hawkins) is working to add recycling bins for aluminum and metal cans next. A bin will appear, probably next to the paper one. We don't think there is plastic recycling in the works for the village. People are expected to carry their recyclebles to the bins themselves.