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March 31, 2011
The Electric Bike Lives
Here's a photo of me riding my electric bike back to work after lunch:
Ridin' every day, some days getting soaked!
Posted by rossm at 2:01 PM | Comments (0)
The Health and Wellness Center
Once again, I see the blog has gotten away from me. Well, the new HWC - Health and Wellness Center has been a big project over the past 3-6 months. This is a good time to review some of the issues, how they were resolved, and the current status of the HWC from a Sysadmin point of view.
The software purchased to assist in the functioning of the HWC is called RecTrac. RecTrac is a very large, widely used application that performs tasks such as Access Control, Locker Rental, Intramural Leagues, Activities (aerobics classes, first aid classes for example), Equipment Rentals and many other tasks associated with a Rec Center.
In our particular situation, we needed RecTrac to monitor those who are permitted to use the facility (students and paid faculty/staff/dependents), and to control the access turnstiles/gates. This proved to be a complicated, Class IV problem. The system now has two feeds from Banner - a "One Mintue" and a "Nightly" feed. These interfaces keep the information current as to who is/is not eligible to enter the facility. There is also an application written by Christina Robb which allows staff, faculty, and students to purchase passes to the HWC by using Wolf Web - very similar to purchasing parking stickers.
Another major undertaking was ID card encoding. All student ID cards plus ID cards of faculty/staff who pay to use the facility had to be encoded. We needed to be able to create dependent ID cards as well. This resulted in a campus-wide restructuring of the card encoding process. Adam Wehner did a lot of the heavy lifting on that project.
So, at this time, most student ID cards have been encoded to allow them access to the HWC by swiping their card at the entry gate. Many students have also had their fingerprint "registered" with RecTrac and can gain access to the facility or rent equipment with a finger scan (cool? Yes!!).
For the remainder of this week faculty and staff can tour or use the facility for free. After that, a pass must be purchased prior to entering the HWC facility. A note: The access control applies only to the pool/workout/climbing wall/gym/locker room area of the building. Persons can attend classes, which are in the public side of the building, without going through the access control points by using the West entrance and making a sharp right before getting to the front desk.
In the future I will break down some of the more specific solutions and key pieces that make it all run.
Posted by rossm at 1:10 PM | Comments (0)