PROTECT YOUR WORK!

You will be gathering data and samples which will represent a huge investment of your time and energy. The loss of this material could be devastating so you should be careful about how you care for it. Try to keep irreplaceable samples in a safe place, label your samples, disks, etc with your name and date and consider the possibility and consequences of their being lost, stolen, or accidentally discarded if you leave them in the wrong place. Computer based work should be saved frequently, and you should always maintain an up-to date back-up copy that is not on the computer. You can do this very easily by taking advantage of My UWinnipeg. This gives you 20MB of storage that you can access at your lab, from home, or at PUBS, without the need to copy a floppy or burn a CD. Failure to correctly back-up has caused a few past 4111 students to come to the brink of nervous breakdown as a result of losing weeks of work through physical loss of disks or corruption of files. Avoid mental break-down by keeping current back-ups in a safe place! Bear in mind that multi-user computers such as ours are notorious for viruses - please be careful bringing disks from home to the university computers and vice-versa.

If you plan to attend the PUBS conference take special care to bring not only a back-up on a flash drive or CD but also back-up material you can rely on such as overhead transparencies, notes on paper or the like in case of hardware breakdowns or unexpected system and hardware incompatibilities at the conference location. Avoid being the person everyone at the conference feels sorry for!