It’s one of those days where I need to go outside. The dreaded world on the other side of my keyboard that requires my presence to interact with its inhabitants in order to get done. After a silent morning I hop in the car and drive off. In my personal rolling steel cage, everything is fine. The hum of the airconditioning, the soothing sounds of a podcast or a dulcet Spotify Playlist… I slide into my day. But just before work I just want to pop in for my load of take-away Java. I open the car door and am assaulted by … noise ! Honking cars, the sounds of a jackhammer and a piece of sidewalk having violent intercourse… people shouting.
… this is mostly geared towards single-celled-hard-hearing 3 year olds.
The sounds of a busy city. I scuttle inside the coffee-shop for relief and am confronted by the most terrible torture modern man can inflict upon himself in the morning hours : The RADIO. Blasting from strategically dispersed overhead speakers there is no escape to the blaring sounds of what needs to pass for “morning entertainment” these days. A quick analysis of both the volume, the content and the delivery of ‘Mainstream radio’ teaches me that this is mostly geared towards single-celled-hard-hearing 3 year olds. Its lack of quality and content highly compensated by the overzealous delivery in volume.
Its like people vomiting into my ears .. My hands instinctively reach up to my neck and, like some kind of life jacket grab onto my noise cancelling headphones. I slide them over my ears and … relief. The auditory maelstrom is dimmed and replaced with the a soothing mumbling nothing. All I need to do is tap my smartphone and music surrounds me. In a flash I’m taken back to an old 80’s teen flick. The retro-wave beats streaming from the interwebs into my eardrums form an instant soundtrack for the situation i’m in. The experience is complete. Just like in the movies you ONLY hear the music and see the main character go through the motions. No pesky ambient noise, no people chattering.. Just music and motion.
… In many ways putting on noise cancelling headphones is like putting on your the earphones of your Walkman back in the 80’s
In many ways putting on noise cancelling headphones is like putting on your the earphones of your Walkman back in the 80’s. A defiant and deeply personal gesture to grab those little speakers covered by their orange foam and place them firmly over your ears .Telling to world to be quiet, erecting an auditory wall around you. These days they are wireless and their noise cancelling abilities range much further then their prehistoric ancestors. But the gesture is the same.
Even their roll has changed. In the perfect storm of the pre-covid area where landscape offices, noisy colleagues and constant one-on-one Skype meetings resulted in a never ending landslide of noise and distraction … The noise cancelling headset became an essential component of the office worker. The only way to focus (and in many ways stay sane) was to pop on your headphones and cancel out whatever mayhem was going on around you. The joke of the entire philosophy behind a landscape office: Physically putting everyone in one room, only to end up with a collection of individuals fighting for selective isolation of the people around them. Paradox anyone ?
If you don’t hear me .. are you still willing to listen?
The conclusion is that we all need and enjoy our little personal audio stream that shies away from the mainstream noise around us. Just like we all have our own Twitter feed, watch our own selection of Netflix shows and are addicted to our very personal mix of insanity on Reddit, Youtube our TikTok. My only hope is that (just like with the other social media bubbles) even though we don’t hear each other.. we are still willing to just .. listen.
Yes yes , its the time of the year(s) again that the Knights in the Knightcastle get a little uneasy with the colors they painted on the walls , get bored with the arrangement of furniture and get overdosed by all the 'home improvement' programs on the tv. We dash out to the DIY store and go looking for paint. Now I must say I'm blessed with the fact that Nyana has excellent taste in colors. She picks out two shades of gray (that to me are not even different colors) and says.. 'This will go good together. ' As we left the store I remember grumbling and fretting that we did not go for some cappuccino like shades, and turning the room into one big Starbucks. But when the paint went on .. the result was amazing.The rooms we did so far are the bedroom and the office / small living room upstairs. Now in our bedroom we obviously sleep. (get your brains out of the gutter). But the office / living room is a different matter. This room used to be my office. But because I had room to spare we shoved in an extra couch and a tv so Nyana could hang out while I was behind my beloved workspace. It worked out so well that we spend the most part of the winter upstairs. Nice and cocoon-y. The wife in front of the tube, the resident geek on you-tube. But the mutter was in the clutter. Soon enough Mr geek thought it was needed to overstock the room with computer books, extra systems, a sound-mixer, microphone, main boards and cables lying around etc. To be honest , it sometimes looked like the lovechild of an overturned dumpster truck and a main board factory. This was neither relaxing nor efficient. Thus : The new office. Or could I say : The office 2.0.
What can I say : The results are great. Allthough reluctant to give up my 'matrix style' surroundings of screens and keyboards piled up together. i'm honestly impressed by this new approach. My main desk now consists of my Macbook (docked) and one 19'' widescreen display. When in need of dual screen work , i just flip it open and am able to use my isight camera and more. Instead of using speakers and amplifiers I just routed the audio to either my headphones or the internal speakers of the monitor and thus having less clutter around. Next to this setup resides my Ubuntu machine hooked up to another 19” display. Because the resolution matches up to the resolutions of two other systems I have around the house (my TV computer and my test system) it can run remote desktop sessions to these machines full screen. Its like having them around.. Without having them around. Next , instead of using yet another computer to run Windows , i've opted to use virtual machine to emulate and run any other system I required. This all works fine on my AMD XP 3200 machine that has enough ram to run a nice little Windows XP either in Vmware Player or Paralells. So you see : More machines at my fingertips without taking up space.
Instead of having a big ass tv in our little office/loungeroom we use a mac mini with a 19” screen and a TV tunercard. This whole setup (along with the main router) is compactly crammed into the little TV cabinet that we use. Having all that gear installed in that little space and just one cable leaving the setup makes up for serenity and no clutter whatsoever. To be on the safe side I did mount a smokedetector INSIDE the cabinet. Since the server keeps running at night, I want to be sure we are alerted should anything go wrong. This is a tip I give to all of you geeks who have machines running at night. Smokedetectors are cheap so , mount them over your “beyond midnight” machines.Epilogue.Allthough I did not expect it … the results are quite fab. Keeping the clutter out of the room has given us a very relaxing inviting room to be in. The screens are still the main focalpoints of attention, but due to the lack of crap around them, it works out just great. My main desk is this minimalistic fortress occupied only by 2 screens and two sets of keyboards. I thought this was going to bugg me. No extra stuff to twiddle and fiddle with seamed cumbersome. No pheripherals piled up around the setup was something to get used to . But imagine my surprise when I actually found out that I was much more focussed on my systems and could work in a concentraded manner. Also the lack of phisical devices makes one use the virtual possibilities of ones computer more. Less craptime = more screentime. The wife is very happy with all this having a couch strategicly posted in the middle of the room , facing the tv. I can look over her shoulder and peer along to the mainstream mayhem withouth having to leave my chair. All in all .. its a match in heaven.