That’s the word my instructor used a long time ago, when I was in driver education class. He was an old guy who repeatedly bored us with is long and overdramatic tales of woe, about “The War” and his injury he sustained in it. I remember that about him, and I remember his frequent use of the word “velocitized.”

Today I think I finally caught up with what he meant. Originally, the context was travelling too quickly for long periods of time, and being unable to gauge speed when moving into a slower speed zone. For example, after driving on an expressway at high speed for a couple of hours, the average driver generally travels too fast on an accessory road, where the speed limit is lower. Or so my instructor constantly told us.

You’re probably wondering what the point is in all that. Well, today I threw the Slitaz CD into my Thinkpad, partly as an experiment and partly just to be reminded of what the GUI looked like on that machine, before X went and scrambled the siliconmotion driver. (Who knows? Maybe it works now. I should probably check, except I don’t handle rejection well. 😉 )

Point being, I immediately overwhelmed the machine and brought it’s perky little 550Mhz heart to a crawl. Ordinarily I regale Slitaz as a masterpiece of ultralight software, comparing it speedwise to the fastest customized systems around. And I am still comfortable doing that.

But I found its limit today. Looking back I am not sure what possessed me to try and surf the web with Firefox and open six tabs and run Alsaplayer and mount the hard drive and start swapping Openbox themes, all from the live environment. But thinking about it now, the answer is obvious.

I was velocitized.

I was so used to working with that machine in a framebuffer-only, Crux-plus-screen-plus-console environment that just the thought of doing all those things at once didn’t even raise a warning flag. It wasn’t that I thought the machine was fast enough, it was that I was so comfortable with the speed that I see in it on a daily basis that I didn’t think twice about the demands that were being placed on it now, in a graphical environment. I had been moving so fast for so long, I didn’t consider the drag I was incurring doing the same things with a GUI.

So there is a downside to using the framebuffer and relying on things like screen and console programs to get your day-to-day chores done — you suddenly expect a machine to perform at the same level when you go back to a graphical environment.

Velocitized. So that’s what he meant. … Silly me. 🙄