On Using Microsoft Windows in a Computer Lab

The need for SPSS caused me to try to do actual work in a computer lab. This is my story.

So I've been trying to do some statistics lately. The last time I fussed with such, I insisted on using R, an Open Source stats package that's modeled after (are you ready for this?) S, or more accurately, S-plus. It's this really cool object-oriented language. If I cared more about stats, I'd definitely learn it right now. For those who do stats only occasionally, however, having a decent WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer) interface is really helpful since you can poke around and ostensibly make reasonable things happen. Even when I'm using SPSS, however, it's much easier for me to edit the scripts by hand than to figure out which menus things are hidden on. It seems that R's graphical interface has improved substantially in the past three years and there's a stats guy here who's starting to learn it. Perhaps the next project I do I can avoid using SPSS, Windows, and using a computer in a lab.

For the past several days, though, I've been trying to set up shop in the lab, connect to my data, run SPSS, IM with my stats consultant/writing partner, and listen to music. I was annoyed to find that the lab still has a several year old version of OpenOffice.org installed. It seams reasonable to update such stuff when a new image is rolled out, but I haven't run a lab in nearly 15 years, so there's probably a lot I don't know. I'm pleased to report that the Portable Apps people have this cool new PortableAppsSuite. You can download this thing and drag it to your USB or other removable drive and have a whole little computing environment with a cool little program launcher. I added VLC Media player. It's not integrated into their suite, so I couldn't find the .paf.exe file that they described, but I dropped the VLCPortable folder in with the stuff and it showed up in the cool little menu.

I started to put this stuff on a USB drive. Those things are slow! I wised up and mounted my desktop and ran the stuff from there. So if you've got an extra 300MB of space that you can get to, it doesn't matter if your lab manager is a couple years behind where you want him to be.

Being able to sit down and crank up IM and Firefox with all of my settings intact makes it dramatically easier to walk in to a lab and do productive work. It still takes a few minutes to log in, mount my drive and crank stuff up, but it's TONS easier than sitting down to a generic interface every time.