[snowriders] Cannon, Sugarloaf, Certificates, and Graduate Subsidies

[MIT Snowriders Members]

        Hey Snowriders,
                
        First item of business: the Cannon bus is full and the waitlist
        is open. If you want to go to Cannon this weekend, join the
        waitlist and if anyone who has signed up discovers they cannot
        go, you can take their spot.
        
        Since the Cannon trip is finished filling up, we'll go ahead and
        open up sales for Sugarloaf the following weekend. We're going
        to move this trip to Feb 27th (Sunday, instead of Saturday)
        because lift tickets will be $20 cheaper and we feel like most
        people would prefer the cheaper lift tickets on Sunday versus
        the scheduling convenience of going on Saturday. I'll try to
        set-up the sales tonight, but they will definitely be up by noon
        tomorrow. I'll email the list when it's open.
        
        A couple of people had trouble signing up for Cannon with the
        Graduate Student Subsidies. Just so everyone knows how it works,
        the system looks up your student status from the MIT directory
        service. If you are a graduate student it's a good idea to check
        your directory listing by going to
        http://web.mit.edu/bin/cgicso?query=username (replacing
        "username" with your athena name) and making sure that it
        displays "year: G" in the resulting record. These records are
        maintained by "Departmental Telephone Coordinators", so if your
        record is incorrect please contact your coordinator to have the
        record updated. If you do not know who your coordinator is you
        may contact the reference publications office at
        referencepubs at mit.edu.
        
        In addition, a few people have been unable to login to the
        system. By far the most common cause is Safari, which does not
        correctly implement the SSL standards. In short, Safari will not
        give you the option to identify yourself with your certificate
        when you click the "login" link on our website. You can work
        around this issue by using another browser (like firefox). This
        issue is on our list of things to do for the website and we'll
        try to fix it sometime after the bus trips are done.
        
        Lastly, we'd like to address an abuse the graduate student
        subsidies. It happens very rarely, but it seems that every once
        in a while someone who is unsure of their schedule will sign up
        for bus-only using a graduate student subsidy, with the plan
        that if their schedule prevents them from going they will only
        lose a couple of dollars when they don't show up for the bus and
        that they can always buy a lift ticket and a rental when they
        get on the bus. We work very hard to find funding for these
        subsidies so that graduate students *go to the mountain*. When
        people use them in this manner the result is that *fewer*
        graduate students get to go on the trip, which is directly
        contrary to the goal of this funding. In addition, every
        additional rental that we add on the bus makes things a lot more
        difficult for the bus monitor, and for some mountains it's not
        possible to add lift tickets to our order. So, if you sign up
        for a bus trip using a graduate subsidy and do not attend, you
        will be asked to pay the club back for the cost of the subsidy.
        Furthermore, if the number of lift-tickets and rentals that
        people request *on the bus* gets large, we will stop offering
        this service and you will have to purchase them yourselves for
        full price at the mountain. We are constantly looking for ways
        to run the trips more efficiently and satisfy our mission, so if
        you would like to discuss this issue or others please feel free
        to open a topic on the forums. We appreciate your understanding
        in this matter.
        
        The Snowriders officers