Back in the day when floppy disks abounded, 40MB hard-drives were tha bomb, and WordPerfect was the wordprocessor du jour, I bet I looked down with poorly masked derision at the old-timers who insisted on printing off hardcopies of everything they generated for peace of mind.
When GoogleDocs came out, paving the way for netbooks and the diminishing need to carry your data around with you, I harrumphed and thought that only death would wrest my hard-drive-resident apps and documents from my cold, stiff fingers (and even then there are the hard and soft boobytraps lying in wait). Okay, so maybe I have a bit of an external hard-drive obsession (six and growing). And yeah, maybe my backups of backups onto a RAID 1 set-up is a little nerdy. But I have peace of mind.
And so, today, I’m travelling light – no Powerbook, just my PortableApps and flashdrives – and there’s an urgent request for some scripts that I’m consulting on.
I thought to myself: How hard can it be to access a shared Gmail account, scroll through the emails, compile the attached scripts and miscellaneous docs, and flick them on through ThunderbirdPortable? I’m using Firefox. I’m at a broadband connection. It’s mid-morning so the bandwidth traffic should be reasonable.
A half-hour – fifteen minutes, even – job has extended to well over an hour as the browsing experience is excruciatingly slow. Attachments won’t download – or if they do, they slow to a crawl and then stall at 51 or 76 or 91%. Reboots, resets and restarts of various hard- and software have made no apparent difference.
I am not happy.
And I now have good cause for my separation anxiety when it comes to my Powerbook.
