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.
