Yesterday: I got hit by a car while riding on my bicycle.  I was riding down Speedway towards Dean Keeton in the morning.  Since the signal ahead was for pedestrians, I sped up a bit to catch the upcoming green light and eventually came close behind a car.  Unfortunately, that car swerved into a parking spot near the Seay Psychology building and hit me.  Of course, I fell off my bike and subjected my laptop to a pretty hefty bump.  After I got up knowing that I’m OK, the driver got out of the car and apologized profusely.  I checked my electronics (which turned out fine) and the car (which only received some rubber from my front tire — rubs right off).  Seeing that I am all right, I laughed it off and said that I wish he/she signaled before turning; and seeing that no damage was done, we went on with our lives.

Today: There is a computer lab in the ECJ that I make my large-format printouts in.  Being recently-built, full-blown workstations, they perform reasonably well, although I think it could be even better because they stream the operating system from network storage to the desktops.  I disagree with that idea because I think (a) it creates a potential for network congestion and (b) they are working with full-blown machines with modern hard disks.  While that change was tolerable, my computing experience today went south… FAST!

Since I had the poster stored on the home directory on ECE’s servers, I had to transfer it using Secure Shell.  Since that was not there, I had to go back and upload the file to a more accessible place.  So far, I noticed that Firefox is being streamed using some VMWare product and took a minute to load.  After I came back, Firefox and many other basic programs were GONE.  Although Adobe Reader was there, I was unable to open the .pdf file by double-clicking on it.  Instead, I had to open the program and open the .pdf file the roundabout method.  Even as I did this, I received a security prompt that asked me whether I wanted to open a link or not.  Excuse me?!  Are they seriously streaming even basic programs through the network?!  I smell disaster when the entire lab (of about 30 computers) tries to stream something like LabVIEW to their desktops at the same time.  Alas, despite jumping through hoops, I was still unable to print the poster using the plotter and had to have someone else print it for me.

For me, the moral of the story is this: Imaging drives once every half a year really isn’t that bad after all.  Also, never, ever treat full-blown workstations like thin clients.