Computational environment coming into focus
For about the last year and a half, I’ve tried to run my life from a laptop (a very nice one, too—an IBM Thinkpad T41 with a big screen (1500×1200) for a laptop and a very nice keyboard. It worked well during that transitional time—it’s been to Europe twice, to China three times, and accompanied me on the big move from Champaign to Ann Arbor. It lost a few keys along the way, victim of a box I was packing for the move, but it’s served me well. But laptops are still compromises and the costs of that compromise became more evident as time has gone on.
Now that I’m settled, I’ve decided to set up a different environment. I bought two small but fast Dell computers (Optiplex GX20 computers for my office and home), (named Lan Tian (蓝天 lan2 tian1, blue sky) and Huang di (黄帝, huang2 di4, or Yellow Emperor), to go with the U of M Maize and Blue theme and have a very nice 24” flat panel display for my office. For a laptop, I now have one of the new IBM/Lenovo X41 tablets. The tablet is very nice, working well in both convertible and tablet mode. I’ve christened the tablet 万能笔 (wan4 neng2 bi3, literally “10,000 capabilities pen,” or “magic ink”), which strikes me as a very good name for a tablet and struck at least one native speaker as a very funny name for a tablet, so close enough).
黄帝 (Yellow Emperor) is homophonous with 皇帝 (Emperor) and differs only by the tone on one syllable from 荒地 huang1 di4, or wasteland. We’ll see what the name means in practice.
I’ve also set up a Buffalotech Terastation, which is a network-attached storage system consisting of 4 250-gigabyte drives set up as a RAID 5 array (so with about 750 gigabytes of usable space). I’m hoping to convince a colleague with a lab across campus to set up a similar array so that we can each use part of the other’s as an off-site backup. The Terastation is impressive; it’s a bit slow to write (because RAID 5 involves writing a checksum for each byte so that you can recover from the loss of any one of the drives without losing any data), but reading speed seems fine. The redundancy won’t save us from theft or catastrophic loss of the device, so I do hope that we’ll be able to get the offsite mirror plan working.
In order to keep my calendar and contact data synchronized, I think I’ll need to move to an Exchange server, but the college of Literature, Science and Arts runs one of those, and I have access to it as a Psychology faculty member.
Otherwise, it seems like smooth sailing. IBM keyboards are very nice, for laptops, but it’s nice to go back to a full-size keyboard and it’s nice to have a small, minimalist laptop to carry around with me.