Luke’s Notebook

Five short months ago, we upgraded to a gigabit network connection here in the building. We essentially multiplied our potential network transfer speed by 10 times.

Right now, at 3:00 in the morning, I am very, very thankful that we did just that.

The past few hours, Paul and I have been sending gigabytes of data back and forth over the network, as we put the finishing touches on a few different wedding videos that we shot recently. Thanks to the high-speed internal network here, we are able to transfer entire wedding videos in super high quality in just minutes. A simple transfer that would have taken an hour might now take five or six minutes.

This is huge now, because we have been ping-ponging these different videos, sending a five-gigabyte file there, a 10-gigabyte here. If we were on our older and slower 100 megabits-per-second connection, this would be a nightmare!

Even now, we’re burning the midnight oil (or, more appropriately, the 3:00 AM oil), doing all we can to wrap these up in enough time to get a little bit of sleep before hitting the road Saturday morning.

So basically, I am so happy that we were able to have the foresight to invest in this piece of hardware, this gigabit switch. It is paying off big time, when we need to have these files moving across the network, and it would be so torturous to have to sit and wait for the data to slowly trickle through.

Now, to put this all in English. A network switch, in computer terms, is very much like a hub or a router, where you plug all of your computers into. Most people are familiar with little four-port routers that you might have with your cable or DSL modem. The switch is like that, although it has 16 ports in it.

And the term “gigabit” simply refers to the speed of the network. Gigabit means 1,000 megabits, so that is obviously 10 times faster than our old 100-megabit connection.

By the way, it’s not really relevant here, but megabits and megabytes are totally different things, as are gigabits/gigabytes, kilobits/kilobytes, et cetera. Basically, one byte equals eight bits. Therefore, one gigabyte is eight gigabits.

Since most devices (hard drives, DVDs, memory cards, iPods) are measured using a form of bytes — that is, megabyte, gigabyte, and so on — it can get kind of confusing. Basically, your 8 GB (gigabyte) iPod would actually equal to 64 gigabits (8 x 8 = 64). Conversely, if your home Internet connection is 6 megabits per second, then your maximum speed is actually only .75 megabytes per second (6 / 8 = 0.75).

I didn’t mean for this to end up being a Networking 101 course, but there you have it! Bottom line, we are seeing a very real benefit from upgrading, and it’s ending up saving us a lot of time, and hopefully giving us a few hours of sleep before it’s time to begin the drive.

I acquired my IBM Thinkpad T42p. Aside from briefly using a couple of other Thinkpads in transition, this was my first IBM laptop. Five months later, I’m hooked, and I’m also sadly saying farewell to this Thinkpad.

It’s bittersweet, because I’m replacing him with another Thinkpad. It actually ends up being a major, major upgrade, as I move from a T42p to a brand-new Lenovo Thinkpad W500.

This new laptop is a little different. Aside from being much faster, the major difference is the screen size and shape. In my T42p, I had a 15-inch super-high-resolution 1600×1200 4:3 (squarish) display. In this W500, I have a 15.4-inch 1920×1200 16:9 (widescreen) display. I kind of miss the old setup, but I think I’ll get used to this. The good thing about this is that the resolution is higher, giving me some extra pixels to work with.

The W500 have all of the important features that the T42p had — ThinkLight, fingerprint reader, Bluetooth. It also has a Firewire port, which the T42p did not have. That’s a nice upgrade.

All in all, this thing is a huge step up from the T42p. So while I’m definitely not complaining about the upgrade, it is a little sad to say goodbye to my first love. That was a great laptop, for sure.

This new lappy is very promising, though. In addition to the huge improvements in speed and expandability, the battery life on this guy seems to be outstanding! I can get over four hours on the basic battery! And with the extended battery I’m getting, I might be able to go for six or seven hours. Pretty great!

Additionally, this newer Thinkpad is pretty much as durable as they come. The T42p was already durable in that it had a titanium lid and a built-in accelerometer to protect the hard drive from damage due to a drop or sudden jolt. This machine has all of that, but it also has sort of a “roll cage” on the inside, which pretty much protects all of the components from damage in case of trauma. I’m not going to intentionally test it out, but it sounds like this thing can take some abuse!

Size-wise, this is about the same size as the old T42p. It’s about the same thickness. Being widescreen, it’s a bit wider than the T42p, but also a little shorter top to bottom.

The really nice part about this is that IBM sent me this for free, to replace the T42p. That older Thinkpad was under warranty, and I was getting a couple of different things repaired on it. Nothing major, but just a screen problem here, a motherboard problem there. Long story short, after many, many attempts to repair the computer, we just couldn’t get everything taken care of. Be it a wrong part that was sent, a used part, or even a non-working part — it was always something!

So the kind folks over at IBM actually ended up replacing it free of charge, since we had made so many attempts to solve the problems. What was really amazing is that they said they would replace it with this W500, which is pretty much top-of-the-line! So when I heard that news, I was thrilled!

The only downside to this is that I must say goodbye to Old Reliable. But I don’t think I’ll lose too much sleep over it. I’m thinking this W500 and I are going to get along reeeal well.

In other news, it is officially Sprint Day! If all goes well, then by the end of Monday I should be a proud BlackBerry Curve user! We have been with Verizon Wireless for as long as I can remember. Even earlier, when they were Ameritech, and then possibly even another company before them. They are all I’ve ever known. I’ve had a cell phone for six years, and I’ve been with Verizon through that time.

So here we go, ready to jump ship. As I alluded to in a recent post, Sprint has just basically made an offer we couldn’t refuse! It still seems too good to true, but here we go. I have my BlackBerry on the desk in my office, charging up, getting all ready for the big day.

This whole Sprint thing has been a project of mine for a couple of months. I’ve spent many hours researching online, talking to people, comparing plans, trying to figure out if we can save some money, or just what we can do with our nine (now 10, with the addition of Seth) phone lines. It is very gratifying to have stumbled onto this! Who would have thought??