kaiyen: pepper

Monthly Archive: February 2009

Drobo-fied…part 2

Quick thoughts on my new drobo:

  • While I want to support TWIP and buy with their coupon from drobo directly, it was way cheaper to buy from newegg with yet another rebate.
  • It really is neat how I can just put a drive in there and suddenly I have more storage.  Or I can take one out and everything is okay and I put in a bigger drive.
  • However…with Vista 64 (yeah!  blazing fast!), I can only do Firewire 400 speeds.  And since Windows handles USB 2.0 at about the same speed as Firewire 400 and I have lots of USB cables around (but not any Firewire 800>Firewire 400 ones), here I am puddling along at USB 2.0 speeds.

This last bit is extremely frustrating.  To find this information, you have to really dig around on the drobo site.  I would link to the knowledge base article except that their site is not designed that way – for direct linking.  I had to dig around as it was to find a Firewire 800 card that even worked in Vista 64, but now I find out that it won’t achieve those speeds.

USB 2.0 is so far doing okay as my primary drive connection.  But I feel that I have been misled by Drobo, to be honest.  The quasi-RAID 5/JBOD config is very nice.  

More of a review forthcoming…

February 2, 2009 General reviews, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, photography 0 Read more >

Breaking news: Laptops are not evil

Law school study links laptop computer use, student engagement: IU News Room: Indiana University

There is this funny and extremely pervasive impression of laptop usage in law schools.  It’s not all faculty, but many consider them to be almost inherently evil and counter productive.  Any student using a laptop must be on Facebook, must be surfing the web, etc.  And that any student who does any of those things at all is not getting as much out of class as he or she could without a laptop.

Now, in no way do I dispute the possibility – the extreme likelihood, in fact – that students with a laptop in front of them will surf the web, go on facebook, etc.  At some point during class.  I do maybe once or twice out of my two classes per night (so that’s about 3 hours, FWIW, with 3-4 visits total or so to non-course-related sites…honestly).  But just because a student may do that doesn’t mean that all students do it, or that they all do it all the time.  In other words, it doesn’t mean that laptops are evil and counter-productive unto themselves. 

For only the second time and only in the last few months, here’s a research article indicating that laptops might actually be helpful, specifically in a law school setting.  This is a pretty big deal. 

February 2, 2009 Articles from the Web, , 1 Read more >

across the sea towards the ice




across the sea towards the ice

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

The last stop on our cruise to Alaska was to look at the giant Hubbard Glacier, which is easy to access even by large ships. It’s not so big that giant iceberg-sized chunks calve off of it, of course, but it’s still quite impressive.

Ice of course reflects the wavelength of light that hits it, so in color the glacier looks like this mess of black and very bright blue (the sky). The black is the moraine, which is all the little bits of rock that the glacier picks up as it grinds its way towards its end point. Actually, some of those bits are huge – Central Park in NYC was created by a glacier, and there are some serious boulders there.

It was a cold day and no, I didn’t get any especially impressive photos of ice calving, but it was still pretty neat to be that close to the edge of a glacier, after having actually hiked on one by Juneau a few days previous.

Between the reflections on the water and the ice itself, plus the layered look of the mountains behind, I thought converting this one to black and white worked well.

February 2, 2009 Uncategorized 0 Read more >