This week in SAL

The big news this week is that our (currently small) herd of COWs had their first teaching experience today. By all reports, they behaved beautifully!

Several members of the School have suggested to me that using their asset numbers to distinguish them is BORING. So one of the challenges as our herd grows is going to be naming them. So far we have:

• Betsy
• Mirabelle
• Clarabelle, and
• Daisy

We are 16 names short and need help! More on that later though. We haven’t just been COW obsessed here in SAL this week:

• Two more machines have been refreshed in the TOL, with another two scheduled for next week. Remember, if you need access to specific software over January, let me know. If you don’t, you may wander in and not have what you need…. (Boo Hiss, we don’t want that to happen 😦 )
• We’ve done some spatial data handling and are working on updating the metadata records for you guys to search so you can more easily see what data is available from SAL for use in your (non-commercial!) research projects.
• The Spatial Teaching Lab will soon be being reconfigured for the 2015 teaching year. Bookings are coming in fast so if you are an academic hoping to run a prac in there, speak to me asap – there isn’t much room left for Autumn Session.

OK, so maybe we have been a little bit COW obsessed, but they are pretty cool 😉

And going back to the naming problem I mentioned earlier, if you have any great COW names to suggest, please leave them in the comments. If we don’t have enough names to go round, the poor COWs are going to have to be known by their asset numbers. I think that might make them sad – and none of us wants that…

Put your thinking hats on and give me some COW names!