Flash is my homeboy

Dear editor:

Look at your college transcript. I bet it says you attend school at Kent State. I went to the Ohio State-Kent football game and climbed the stairs to the “Kent Section.” The section had about 200 people in it and it was a wall of red with about 20 or so Kent State colors mixed in. I do not understand why Kent State students could not root for the school they pay all that money to attend. I understand you are a Buckeye fan, but you either did not get into Ohio State or did not apply, so why are you rooting against your own school? Go to a Kent State football game once – you pay for the tickets (It’s that $400 athletics charge on your tuition). They are fun, and if you get bored there is always the $2 beer. Our running back, Eugene Jarvis, has been mentioned as a Heisman Trophy candidate and he is only a sophomore. Remember our old quarterback Josh Cribbs? He is doing a lot more to help the Browns than any OSU product. After attending the football game, check out our basketball team while you’re at it. Maybe then you can put your scarlet and gray aside and put on some real colors: blue and gold. Oh, and a made-up bird can beat up a talking nut with a face any day of the week.

Jason Kaczor

Senior computer information systems major

New WFS on FlashLine falls short

Dear editor:

What exactly was wrong with the old FlashLine Web for Students that was just a portal-frame to the Web site? It was easier to navigate and took far less time to use. This new one has no function that I can see, whereby a student can simply register for classes by narrowing down categories page by page, then go back to the department’s class list and sign up for another course in the same thing. And there’s no convenient list of all the courses with their numbers in case you just know the name and year of the course. I realize that to university administrators it’s really sexy to have a brand new system that everyone will use, but may I remind these decision makers that if something isn’t broken, there’s no need to fix it. The Kent State Web site was such a thing not long ago. Now it offers you graphic options that somehow are supposed to make you feel better despite the fact it takes more time to load than a three-trailer semi (the only thing worse being Vista)! Any computing student will tell you the best Web sites are nice, neat, organized, intuitive to navigate and take no time to load on even the slowest machine. FlashLine was slow to begin with, kept crashing and they finally found a format that worked and didn’t take forever to load. Even the e-mail was working.

Giving students a new Web site in the middle of a semester, right after midterms, and just as they’re having to sign up for classes just gets frustrating, and I hope these administrators can get their heads together before the gobbledy mess of FlashLine gets any worse!

Karl Hopkins-Lutz

Senior German Major