On a hot and humid New Orleans day
in August 2005, Paul Hanson sat in his
climate-controlled research laboratory
feeling excited and hopeful.
An assistant professor of chemistry at the
University of New Orleans, Hanson and
his graduate students had just made
some important research findings in their
highly specialized field of nanotechnology
—impressive enough to present at a
major scientific conference several
months away. “We’d been working really
hard and fast during the last two weeks,
collecting some really exciting data and
uploading it on pretty much a daily basis,”
he says.
Hanson’s efficiency came about partly by
discovery, partly by design. About six
months earlier, he had found a way to
kick the lab’s workflow up a notch by
using iDisk, a key feature of Apple’s
membership-based .Mac service
designed for storing and sharing
information. Easily accessed from any
Internet-connected computer (whether
Mac or PC), Hanson’s 1-gigabyte iDisk
gave him and his students a secure
remote location to store their most
current data as they obtained it, using a
simple drag-and-drop process. And
because gathering data was faster and
better organized, they were compiling
and interpreting the data more efficiently
as well.
A tedious process made easier
Before using iDisk, Hanson says, the
process was far more tedious. “The
chemistry department is spread across
two buildings and we have instruments in
a variety of locations,” he explains. “It
was getting out of hand in terms of
collecting data in one room, moving it to
another room, moving it to yet another
room, and then trying to work it all up.
This was an even bigger problem for me,
because the graduate students were
collecting the data and trying to funnel it
all to me.”
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Further compounding the problem,
Hanson needed to work in a number of
locations. “On any given day, I could be
working in four different places,” he
explains. “So I wanted to have a
centralized location where I could get to
my calendar, my contact information, and
all of my research data. iDisk allowed me
to do that—it became vital.”
A port in the storm. Professor
In fact, Hanson had no idea how vital his Hanson and his students access his
iDisk would soon become. In just a few iDisk under the Go menu in the Mac
weeks, he and his life’s work would be on OS X Finder. They drag and drop files
a collision course with Hurricane Katrina. directly into the iDisk Documents folder
for secure remote storage of their
Two hours to leave town valuable scientiic data.
By Saturday morning, August 27, visibly
nervous New Orleans newscasters
advised anyone who could leave the city
to do so as soon as possible. Hanson
and his wife lived in a particularly
vulnerable area: the Gentilly district, near
Lake Pontchartrain. “The way these
hurricanes work is that you have a very
narrow window to leave the city and
avoid getting stuck in gridlock,” he
explains. “So we basically had two hours
to pack our car. We got two backpacks,
our dog, some dog food, our Apple
laptops, and we headed up to Baton
Rouge.”
Once safely out of the city, Hanson and
his wife watched and waited. “It wasn’t
until Monday evening that we started
getting feedback from New Orleans,” he
says. “We were hearing that the main
electrical grid had been blown in the city,
that the water had breached the levees
and was coming in, that there were
whitecaps coming down one of the main
thoroughfares of the city. We said, ‘Well,
it will take awhile for all this to get sorted
out.’ So we drove to see relatives in
California. Every day we were away from
New Orleans it got worse.”
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