Posted by Danny on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:06 am
There is no dead gremlin lying across a circuit connection within Caligula, waiting to be gently expunged so that my computer can again roar into productivity and entertainment; Byron has confirmed this after an evening of pulling out components to see if one of them was broken and causing grief to the otherwise healthy workings, like a dead but unborn septuplet. We got down to the motherboard and processor without removing an offender, and according to the Dell community resources I found, a lot of folks with my model find themselves about two years into their ownership with a suddenly fried motherboard producing exactly the same symptoms as are displayed by Little Boots, so there it (probably) is.
Excitingly, the Dell XPS 710 uses a proprietary (exclusive!) motherboard layout to fit its generically inaccessible ports into signature inconvenience on the back end of my honkin’ tower, which means that replacements are limited to the stock that Dell has remaining and are way more expensive than they deserve to be for the hardware they represent. Also, because Dell has moved back to the standard, non-proprietary layout for its more recent XPS line, they probably won’t be manufacturing many more, so I feel like hunting down a replacement and paying for it would lock me deeper into a dead-end device. My other option is to buy both a new motherboard and a new tower, and then schlep Caligula’s working guts into it; this is morally correct but financially prohibitive and means that I won’t have a desktop for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I’m running the universe out of my capable but modest laptop left over from my B.Ed. year at Nipissing.
Its name is The Gentleman Caller and it will service.
Posted by Danny on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This post is written defiantly on paper, in green fountain pen ink, amidst the high-pitched whine of computer monitors and the low-pitched rumble of the subway beneath the building. My computer is dead. It won’t reach the BIOS so I can’t jiggle its software guts from the command prompt or safe mode, and I don’t have time to qualify myself to noodle around with the hardware where the real problem probably resides. My laptop is useless for accessing my online class, so I’m in the computer lab at OISE, contacting the people who need to be contacted, downloading my readings for the week, and gradually pushing through the shock of being without my personal computer into a state of giddy, Luddish novelty that will in turn give way to the awareness that my paper-crunch and correspondence and peripheral device-charging are going to take place in this room, probably for the next two weeks.
It’s a good room! The lights and noises are ugly, but I’ve got space to work, it’s clean, it’s got broadband, and it’s free. I could be so much more unplugged than I am, and the disrepair of my computer could be so much more devastating to me, my family, my education, and my prospects than it is. When my big paper for Student Experience in Higher Education is finished, I’ll have time to try and resurrect Caligula, and if my data is really gone, I’ll be able to panic and writhe then, responsibly. This is such a petty catastrophe.
The potential for online education to obviate barriers of finance and geography continues to drive my research interest, but it remains that for most of the people who stand to benefit from it, online distance education won’t be delivered to personal computers with big, bright screens in private rooms with lovingly-tailored sound systems and a clean bathroom and ready food only seconds away. It probably won’t even be delivered to computer labs as nice as this. I feel like that expectation could probably be planned for, pedagogically. When I’ve got time, I want to look into the design of public computer terminals and quantify the tradeoffs between (say) the savings on fluorescent lighting costs vs. incandescent on the one hand, and student comfort, tenacity, and health on the other. Is the present arrangement of computers and monitors in a sort of wall-less cubicle system ideal for students working in parallel, with screens blocking face-to-face interaction, or could other configurations benefit learning by fostering local collaboration that could subsequently enhance or transfer to work online? I’m not asking this rhetorically–it may be that face-to-face obstructions prevent more disruption than collaboration of a sort we’d deem valuable, or that instant-messaging interfaces will frustrate this kind of thinking entirely as they become more transparent to the way we communicate.
I wish I could make better use of my time and actually explore some of this stuff.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 