·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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Well, it’s official – our house now contains a sampling of every Apple mobile device – frankly, it’s sickening.

We have been enjoying our iPod Touches for quite a while and Jenny recently sold her Blackberry soul to the iPhone devil.  I had been thinking about getting an iPad just because I was so intrigued by the idea of it as a replacement for our mini laptop.  But as with any purchase over $100, I have to research and mull and fret for a while before I can commit (you should see what it is like if we are shopping for a car).  Finally this weekend, I grabbed a 32GB wifi-only model.

Having now spent some time with all of these devices, here are my ranting points (you weren’t expecting anything else, were you??)…

• It sucks to have to pay for OS version updates for an iPod Touch while the iPhone gets them for free.
• The iPad is actually a little heavy, weighing in at 1.5 pounds naked and without a case.
• Why doesn’t the iPad dock-to-VGA connection output video all of the time?  Only certain apps do so, and only for certain functions, Safari browsing being the most notable absence: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4108
• Let’s not even open the can of worms about Apple not supporting Flash.
• I know the iPad OS is based on the same stuff as the Phone and Touch, but it would be a whole lot more useful if it could multitask in some way and if it supported a limited file system of some kind.  Having to sync files for apps through iTunes is a pain.
• After having the iPad for a few days, the screen and buttons on the Touch seem really small!

OK, all complaining aside, there is plenty good to say…

• I love my iPod Touch and you will have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers.  Dare I say it, the thing is prettier and better than my precious Blackberry at many things.  If it weren’t for the iPhone being exclusive to AT&T, I may well have one.  But until some other carrier offers me UMA or similar access to make and receive calls over wifi like T-Mobile, that’s where I will stay.
• The iPad is hands down better than a netbook, especially if you just use your netbook casually to browse, check mail, etc.  Safari is lightning fast and there’s no booting, waiting for it to come out of standby, etc.  I think netbooks are dead with the advent of tablets akin to the iPad.
• Free apps like AP, NPR and New York Times will probably render my Sunday paper obsolete.  It is so easy to read on the iPad while sipping coffee, and some of the apps will even grab local news for you.
• You really and truly can type on the iPad.  I never saw this working on the iPhone/Touch and having a tactile keyboard is one of my reasons for keeping a Blackberry.  However, the screen size (and resulting key size) on the iPad make it totally doable, so $10 for the iPad version of Pages is worth it.

Of course, the next question about my iPad is when will it become the “old, first generation” iPad?  Probably not too long from now…

A handful of our students volunteer long hours each week to crank out the weekly school paper.  They work out of an old sandwich shop that has been converted into a student publications office in the basement of one of the dorms.  Their adviser is a former newspaper lady that puts in a lot of effort to help them produce a professional looking rag.

After a recent grant money ordering fiasco, we found ourselves with some leftover play money to burn.  We decided to help these dedicated folks out with some new gear for student publications.  They had been using some much older PCs that were underpowered for their needs with Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Needless to say, the students were thrilled with the new machines and I think the upgrade has made them more productive.  We even helped them rearrange the office when we delivered the gear.

I stopped in one night while they were hard at work on the next issue.  I was amazed at how seriously they took their work – it was like standing in a real world newsroom.  For me, this is another example of how good technology on campus can make a big difference for students, and something that our IT staff can be proud of having made better.

We maintain several traditional computer labs on campus.  These are your run-of-the-mill labs with PCs as you would expect, imaged with our standard lab software build.

Over the last year, two of our labs have gone in completely opposite directions.  One uses high end workstations with demanding software, where each desk is packed with specialized peripherals.  The other contains thin client terminals with just enough brains to run a remote desktop session to a virtual machine on a server.  Both have been an interesting exercise in fulfilling the needs of faculty and students.

On the thick side, we have the Fine Arts Technology, or FAT lab.  The FAT lab offers software and devices for audio recording/editing, photography editing, video recording and drafting/design.  This lab has a special place in our hearts because we have spent so much time in it!

Our Fine Arts division chose a vendor to build this lab, one that supposedly specialized in labs for music and art instruction.  To make a long story short, the vendor laid a great big egg, leaving our IT staff to pick up the pieces.

The eventual result is a set of dual quad-core workstations, each with 8GB of memory, SAS disks and dual displays.  They dual boot 32 and 64 bit Windows XP because some of the software must run on a 32 bit platform (M-Audio’s Pro Tools and Adobe Premiere CS3)  while some can take advantage of 64 bit processing and memory over 4GB (Adobe Photoshop CS4, Autodesk’s AutoCAD).  The vendor’s biggest mistake (and there were several) was thinking that everything would run OK on 64 bit Windows.

On the lighter side, we have a lab space that is used as much as a classroom as it is a computer lab.  It was a traditional lab in the past, but needed to be quieter and have a smaller footprint on the desks so that it could be used for lectures.  We retrofitted this one with thin clients and began calling it the THIN lab.

The THIN lab is used for Business and Economics courses.  It once had standard desktop PCs, each with a flat panel monitor sitting on top of it.  This arrangement brought complaints from faculty about not being able to make eye contact with students during lectures, not to mention that students would sometimes turn the computers on and use them.

This lab became our testing ground for thin client computing.  We removed the desktop PCs and installed Wyse S10 thin clients at each station.  We took the “poor man’s” approach, installing the free VMWare ESXi solution on some older servers and creating a virtual machine out of our lab image to back each client.  When a Wyse client boots, it gets its configuration from an FTP server and opens an RDP session to an XP lab image VM.

The experience is quite similar to sitting at a standard lab PC, with the obvious exceptions that video and audio do not perform well over a remote session.  We were willing to take that chance because we knew that the software required for the courses did not make use of multimedia.  Also, the lab is lightly used by students outside of class time.

This setup lowered the monitors down on the desk, freed up writing space for students and completely silenced the room (the S10 terminals have no fan or disk).  Some courses do make use of the clients during class time, as there is auditing simulation and tax software installed on their VMs.  We completed this installation over holiday break, so we are just starting to get some feedback on the “thin experience”.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog entry about how I didn’t like technology anymore because it was just too complicated and hard to keep up with.  Indeed there are days when it feels like there is no end to the amount of work that we must do just to keep everything up and running.

Thankfully, putting together these two labs has reminded me of why I enjoy it.  It is heartening to see how technology can enhance teaching and learning in so many ways.  It really makes me feel good about the job and proud of the work that we’ve done.

I like to say that the IT staff knows where everything is – we find ourselves in every closet, basement and dark space on campus.  As a result, we often discover little surprises that other people perhaps thought would never be seen… like this switch and thermostat above the tile ceiling in one of the computer labs.  We were moving a projector and running new cables to it when we discovered these jewels.

Faculty members have often complained about the temperature in this lab – no kidding!  It was set to 77 degrees!  Pretty sure that having a switch in the ceiling is not up to code, either (not to mention that I have no idea what it controls).  But never fear!  The IT staff is full service, so we ran the thermostat down the wall and put it next to a light switch where they can actually use it.

Never a dull moment!

I worked for IBM for nearly thirteen years.  Sometimes I wonder how the company actually makes money.  I can tell so many stories as examples of how a giant company can be too big to function.  It is as an IBM customer, however, that I may have the best story of all.

At school, we get matching grants credit toward hardware from IBM.  Thanks to some generous alums employed there, we usually have enough credit to buy several computers each year.  This summer, we decided to use our grant money to get a server for managing backups.  Like everyone, we are tightening our budget belts so using the credit for this need seemed like a great idea.

Here is a time line of events surrounding our IBM server order…

• June 27-28: I spec out a server on ibm.com for the order.  This process takes a while because the form to customize the server is partially broken.  It gives an error for not having picked an OS to be installed, but gives no option to pick an OS when I select a certain configuration.  I end up saving the spec as a quote and having it e-mailed to myself.
• June 29-30: I exchange several e-mails with our matching grants representative.  The e-mail quote generated by the ibm.com site uses four digit “feature codes”, but nobody inside IBM can process these.  She has to send it to a special group known as Techline to convert the four digit numbers to seven digit numbers.
• July 1-2: Techline responds with a completely different configuration because they cannot translate some of the four digit numbers to any seven digit part number equivalent (I can only tell you from having been there that part numbers are a complete fiasco).  I spec out a new machine and try to use options that I know they can convert.
• July 3: Eventually, I settle on one and e-mail the rep a PDF scan of the filled out grant form with my signature (they have accepted this for previous orders) but later I am asked to fax it because they cannot accept a PDF scan.  I finally send the fax at the end of the day.
• July 13: After a week with no word, I send an e-mail to the rep to confirm receipt of the fax.  I get an auto-reply saying she is out until October and to contact her backup named Angie.  I send an e-mail to the address given in the auto-reply, but get another auto-reply from Arthur, so the rep’s auto-reply is wrong.
• July 15: I ask a friend still employed by IBM (they are getting fewer and fewer with all the layoffs) to look up Angie in the directory.  He finds her and gives me her contact information.  I e-mail her and explain the situation.
• July 17: Angie replies that the order was never placed by the first rep, but that she will take care of it and expedite it if at all possible.  She is very apologetic and helpful.
• August 11-12: I send Angie an e-mail asking for an order status.  She can only tell me that the order has been placed and she will try to find out more.
• September 10: I receive a paper mail from IBM with a confirmation of the order and a breakdown of the included server options (with seven digit part numbers).  The letter is dated August 22 and states that the order has been processed, we should allow four to six weeks for delivery and since parts will be shipped based on availability, we may receive several shipments (there’s nothing like ordering a server and having to assemble it yourself).
• Evening of September 10: I receive an e-mail from Angie saying that the server model is now end of life and that I need to select a new one and place another order.

Now I ask you: if I have this much trouble ordering something that I basically get for free, why on earth would I spend real money on IBM hardware after this experience?  What really gets under my skin about this whole episode is that those of us in the trenches at IBM saw very broken things like this process and tried every way possible to convince our bosses that it needed to be fixed.  But such is the way in a huge company – crap only flows in one direction.

Anyone know of a trade market for IBM matching grants dollars?