University of Nebraska Omaha - Tomahawk / Gateway Yearbook (Omaha, NE)

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Pages as Central Vending Company. Weiland owns and services for the com- pany whicii handles pooltables and cigar- ette machines in addition to jukeboxes. He's been operating the machine in the UNO Student Center for seven years. The one presently installed in the Room has now celebrated its first birthday. It arrived here during semester break last year. This machine is really a good one, said Weiland. It's strictly a computer. The idea for the selector system was bought from Northwestern Bell and works on impulses with no moving parts. All the components are in a small box next to the record selector. This makes the operation very smooth, according to Weiland. If something goes bad in the component box, I can replace it temporarily while it's being fixed, if I can't locate such a box in town, he continued, 1 can get one from Des Moines in as little as seven hours. The Room's Jukebox is leased from Weiland with half of the profits going to the Student Center operating funds. He was asked if the advent of KRNO broad- casting in the Room from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m would hurt his business. If it hurts me, it hurts you, he said referring to the profit the Student Center makes. I'll give it a couple of months before I draw any conclusions. The machine has a 124 selection or 62 record capacity. Weiland comes to UNO every week to ten days to change the records. A meter inside the machine indicates how many times each record has been played. I take the ten least played and replace them with ten that are either new and potentially popular or are cur- rently selling well. Sometimes, and Weiland can't explain why it's so, he has to take out popular records because they just aren't being played. Other times, he puts some back because they've climbed so much on the charts.

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Rhythm in the Room IT'S 7:03 a.m. Perhaps it's Tuesday morning . . . maybe it's Wednesday. A young neophyte with a shiny quarter in his hand, sleepy eyes, and two Greek letters across his red tee-shirt approaches the luminous blue- black computer next to the east wall of the Room. He drops the money in and the mon- strous machine fills the Room with music and mood. The computer has just been programmed for the next ten minutes. Meanwhile, UNO's only roomies enter and take their programmed posi- tions at their appropriate tables: card tables, talk tables, cram tables. When the ten minutes has elapsed, a brightly clad black student leaves his table, quarter in hand, and punches up his favorite music to move by. And so, the Room has again been programmed for the next ten. A few minutes before a class starts many of the roomies have left and the Room takes on a momentary quiet. All of a sudden, some roomie gets desperate. She doesn't know how to act. She doesn't know whether to chew her bubblegum with soul or simply in regular bubblegum fashion. She doesn't know whether to shuffle her cards in time to Led Zeppelin, the Jackson Five, or the Undisputed Truth. Her need to be programmed is so great she grabs a quarter from her purse and rushes over to the machine and picks out a few soothing tunes. Some roomies take turns programming their computer. Most just sit and let others do it for them. The programming process continues until 1:00 p.m. when the thoughtful DJ's from KRNO con- scientiously take over the job until 5:00 p.m. as the roomies slowly drift away. Until 7:03 tomorrow, the computer stands semi-silent and waits for the roomies to return. Have you ever wondered what won- drous soul programs the jukebox in the Room? It's a certain Mr. Leonard Weiland, better known in the Yellow 10

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Besides classes, cards, and conferences What's Happening i Momentarily stilled Caterpillar scoops Into the future. 12 at UNO? CONSTRUCTION. Construction. Construction. The last few years on the UNO campus leave fond remembrances of construction crews walking through the Stu- dent Center cafeteria, parking lots being reshuffled, and students taking muddy detours around big red and yellow machines. The entire university wants more space, better classrooms, and larger labs. But such inconveniences make these hard-to-come-by additions a bit intoler- able ... at least until they're finished. This semester, students were forced to schedule their daily routines around not one, but two areas of construction. The Student Center addition, begun last spring, put many students out of their way. For two and a half months students could not use the south entrance to MBSC. It was necessary to use the east or west entrances even for a previously short trip from the Room to Engineering room 101. But all was not lost. A special opening ceremony for the south doors in mid- November came just in time for the closing of the walkway between the Student Center and the library. Why closed? For the construction of a mall wall (an enchanted wall around the enchanted mall where students may relax, study, daydream, etc.) Now to Phase I of the Fine Arts Complex. In order to initiate work on the long-awaited extravaganza, the northwest parking lot was ripped up with over a fourth of the lot being sacrificed to the Muses. The parking stall lines were re-painted in shocking yellow, and now the unpaved area between that lot and MBSC staff area serves as a muddy moat between the two blacktop surfaces. •