Inabilities to access the EC portal or website may be attributed to heavy Internet traffic and the occasional squirrel, Don Treat, supervisor of technical services, said.

At a rate of 1,200 spam e-mails an hour, the EC computer staff is having difficulty combating this continual influx of junk e-mail and is hiring outside help from internet networking company Cisco, director of information technology Alex Kelley, said.

“There are two types of folk- people seeing what they could do and advertisers,” Kelley said.

Some Internet users enjoy seeing how much of the college’s Internet security they can penetrate and thus interfere with the school systems for recreation.

“You truly have the nuisance factor there,” Treat said.

Spam e-mails slowing the EC systems “are from foreign countries that don’t recognize our government laws that restrain spam,” Treat said.

Over the past four years, the squirrels that run rampant on campus have sometimes shorted the power systems when they get caught in power transformers and stations.

“The squirrels like dry, warm places to hide their nuts from the other squirrels,” Treat said.

“Sometimes they wander between two conductors and then a fuse blows; then the college loses power,” Treat said.

This occurrence, however, is rare and has happened only three or four times.

Recently, administrators have discussed illegal Internet activities as the potential culprit of computer complications at EC.

Treat said that while there were no illegal Internet activities on campus, sometimes people who are not enrolled at EC come to use computers here to load spy software for advertising companies.

However, the government is working to track those who create harmful traffic using public computers.

“We’re all taking a lot of our time to train and learn how to prevent this kind of trafficking,” Treat said.

Students who cannot retrieve their grades or transcripts from the EC portal are advised to avoid peak hours of usage, which are from about 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Treat said.

To maintain the integrity of academic information, Treat said to always remember to logout successfully before leaving the EC portal and to keep personal security software up to date at all times.

“The most important thing is the (anti-virus software) need to be updated often,” Treat said.

Kelley encourages students to use their EC-based e-mail addresses.

Our student e-mails, Kelley said, will be more successful when needing to contact teachers or faculty. This is because they are not screened as spam e-mails.

“Try it one time. I think you’ll like it,” Kelley said.