I would like to lodge a complaint with you on behalf of the entire student body.
For college students, the Internet is invariably the most useful tool given to us to aid our education. It's how we receive the copious amounts of e-mail various departments of the College (I'm looking at you, Career Services) send out on a daily basis. It's how we register for classes. It's how we buy our wristbands for Spring Weekend (and, on the flip side of that, it's how we pay the judicial fines incurred on Spring Weekend). Professors post their syllabi and assignments on Blackboard, and often expect us to submit assignments or posts that way. (The Internet is also the biggest help in honing our procrastination skills, but that's a story for another day...)
What I'm trying to say is that college students need the Internet. So I'm curious as to why TrinAir, the main wireless internet connection on campus, insists on, you know... not working half the time. It's either impossible to connect in the first place, or the signal disappears in the middle of browsing, forcing me to fight with/frantically turn on/off AirPort until the Internet starts working again. This is really, really unhelpful when I am trying to post on Blackboard for Professor Kuyk's class (in which I am dismally falling behind, to the point where I almost want to punch myself in the face) and the Internet craps out and eats my post. Don't tell me that I should write my posts in Microsoft Word and copypasta to Blackboard; the point is that the frequency of these Internet blackouts is troubling and I am not the only person who feels that way (judging by an informal poll of the Tripod staff, and by poll I mean Aley Pickens was swearing at her computer for, like, half an hour because she couldn't connect to the Internet).
What makes this even more grating is that a lot of people (excluding myself; I ♥ you, Long Walk Scholars Society!) pay a metric buttload (and yes, that is a technical term, thank you very much) of money to go here; the least you could do, Trinity, is make sure to provide fully-functioning, basic amenities like indoor plumbing (the problems with which are worth another post, frankly) and wireless Internet.
Also, while you're fixing the terrible wireless service, maybe you could also go ahead and increase the upload/download bit rate. It is so annoying to buy stuff on iTunes or try to send e-mails with pictures attached and have to sit there and wait 40 minutes for the damn thing to upload/download/send. I realize it's meant to be a preventative measure to dissuade students from downloading through peer-to-peer networks (Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, you'd think we were selling crack online instead of downloading music), but it's so annoying. And you can't get around it even if you bring your own router, because everything connects to TrinAir.
Basically, you guys are a bunch of cheap bastards and I hate you.
No Love,
Elizabeth Agresta VI, Ph.D., CBE, D.D.M.
P.S. Now "Internet" doesn't even look like a word anymore.
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