Monday, July 9, 2007

Well, Blogger is acting up and won't let me post a title. I've been plagued with computer issues lately, especially at work. My computer's been super super slow lately, so I got the nicest guy from IT to have a look at my machine. Just a few clicks and the problem was found: I only had half a meg of RAM available.
"Augh!" Donnie exclaimed. "Windows likes about 30% of your hard drive free for running programs, and you've got like 1% free."
"Oh," I said, deeply and with great intellect.
"Question," he said. "Do you have an iPod or iTunes on your machine?"
"...yyeeahh, how come?"
"Do you store the music on your hard drive?"
"...yyeeahh?"
"There's your problem, then," said Donnie. A few more clicks and Donnie illustrated the issue for me. "Your iTunes is taking up 18 gigs of memory...18 gigs that your computer needs to run things smoothly."

So, i finally bought an external hard drive onto which all my music has been moved. Donnie ran a defragmentation program (usually called defragging) on my machine when I left for the day, so between these two things my machine should run like a champ tomorrow morning. That should be a relief: my AutoCAD and Adobe Reader have been chugging along at glacial speed for the past few months. It was my music slowing it down all along.

From the time we start architecture school, we listen to music while drawing in Studio. And with good reason: one works in Studio with a certain amount of solitude during class hours (usually a 3-4 hour long class that meets three days a week) and especially so after hours. Also, Studio classes are often held in big open rooms with more than one class in them, and sometimes you've just got to shut out the noise. After five or six years of thinking about spaces and churning out drawings to the sound of The Cure or Sarah McLachlan or Depeche Mode or Rollins Band (all good choices for the Pixie), it's hard to enter the work world and think about space or churn out drawings without that same stimuli. There are a very few architecture firms that don't allow music, but the vast majority of firms allow their staff to listen to headphones. It's a good policy, really, in terms of productivity, and especially in open offices like DA's. I can hear people laughing 120 feet away n the Landscape Department, and I know they can hear my witch's cackle, so it's nice to have a way to block that out.

With the hard drive, I can still have my music while not impeding my computer's progress. I need tunes and speed to get work done. And coffee. Yeah, coffee too.

6 comments:

Enginerd said...

I have no problem with music at work - IF its on head phones and they aren't so loud you can't hear emergency sirens.

My roomie my sophomore spring was an Architoture major - she would stumble in about 4:30 a couple of mornings a week. I thought she was nuts. She was also engaged to her little sister's swim coach, whom she'd been dating since she was 16 (she was 19 then, and a junior at Tech - you figure it out.) He was 32 or something like that.

her family didn't know, I think.

eww. She was an odd duck, poor thing. Odd, but sweet. And not a bad roomie as they go.

Anonymous said...

A little Bailey's would go a long way toward making the day pass...

Anonymous said...

Depeche Mode is always a solid choice to listen to while drawing. When I need to bolck out the world, I put on Violator or Music for the Masses, or go through both 101 discs.

Can't go wrong with DM.

Mile High Pixie said...

Bax: if you were at Tech when i was there, something tells me I know who your roommate was....

WG: Who says that's not Bailey's in my coffee? It only *smells* like Coffee mate!

Anon: Oh! Violator is one of my favorite albums of all time, much less favorite album by DM. Indeed, one cannot go wrong with Dave Gahan and the boys.

Anonymous said...

Whenever I work, I work in silence. I have always been that way. I can focus on the task at hand and just work.

When I was doing a lot of Autocad drafting at Pickles, Pickles and Pickles architects I would plan my work and start. The Autocad and the architectural details got to be a motor skill and I would dream while I was working. I would start laying out a master wall section for a building and then I would dream and the work would be done. It was a crummy office tgo work in, it was nice to do the wortk and not be there all at the same time.

Mile High Pixie said...

Faded! Glad to have you back! I have a few colleague that work in silence as well. To each his/her own.