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Making Your Bedroom a Sanctum from Technology?
"The lucky few of us who've managed to not remain single can have one recalcitrant database or webserver strain a relationship to the extreme when it misbehaves multiple nights in a row. I personally have developed severe sleep disorders over the past half decade due to the little issues that always seem to happen just after that much needed REM sleep kicks in. I certainly can't fathom the patience my signifigant other has for sharing the disturbances.
I woke a few months back with a laptop near the pillow, flat screen still powered on the tv tray and an equal distribution of cats and wireless devices at my feet. I had a headache from various system fans, drives spinning, and the 'dings' of incoming mail. Enough was enough. I decided I wanted to make the bedroom as much of a sanctum as possible. The other 85% of the house can have wires, TiVos in various states, and homemade networked kitchen appliances; the place of rest should be geared to that purpose if I'm to be an efficient geek."
I, my friend, would strongly advise you to follow this thread very, very carefully. It may help you to avoid some serious problems in the future.
I am not joking.
don't want things in your bedroom? don't put them there. who cares.
nearly all technology shares a common feature. an off switch. learn how that works and quit whining.
what a ridiculous story.
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It isn't that hard to make the decision to leave a computer out of your friggin bedroom, unless you live in a dorm room, an efficiency or studio apartment, or something along those lines.
I don't understand what makes this question at all interesting.
You don't like computers in your bedroom?
Neither do we.
So we didn't put any in there.
Hope that helps.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
The poster is clearly looking for technological fixes (speakers, lighting, etc.) to a non-technological problem.
Here are my recommendations:
- Get rid of all the technology in the room that doesn't contribute to your life. Take out the laptops, the terminals, the cellphones. (Find a place nearby your door to charge the cellphones and PDAs and whatever. Not the bedroom door, the door to the Big Blue Room.)
- Take out all the phones in the bedroom. Unless you are on-call, you don't need a phone there.
- Get good, heavy drapes for the windows. Block out light and sound for a good night's sleep. If you work a night shift, upgrade all the way to blackout curtains.
- Keep it quiet. You probably have music available all the rest of the day. Make this room different from the others.
- Change the lighting. You need a good lamp for reading, which should be directional enough that you don't disturb your bed partner. (Get a separate lamp for said partner.) Make your general light adjustable, so that you can turn it up to full illumination for cleaning, and down to a soft glow for other activities. Nothing should blink, nothing should be fluorescent. (Exception: the compact-fluorescent spiral bulbs can be bought with solar color temperatures. These make excellent reading lights with a proper shade.)
- Get more exercise. Nothing will do as much for a good night's sleep as regular exercise -- you won't need as much sleep, either. Don't exercise right before going to sleep, though -- you'll wake up sore.
- Learn what your body wants. I, for example, have a real problem if I eat within two hours of going to bed. So I don't. Maybe you need more water before sleep, maybe you need less. Experiment and find out what works.
Seriously, if you do it right, you won't think about the furniture, the job, the music, etc. And you won't hear the phone ringing. And you won't have any trouble sleeping, either. Hell, you won't notice if the building burns down!
If you aren't getting regular sex, that's the problem. If you are, you aren't paying enough attention to doing it right.
You'll know you are doing it right when you find yourself incapable of coherent thought for at least 15 minutes after you're done.
Don't put a TV or stereo in the bedroom. Don't read in the bedroom. Again, you're only distracting yourself from falling asleep. I know you're using them to try to fall asleep
Um, for a lot of people falling asleep isn't the problem. Waking up is. Having the lights slowly come up and the stereo come on quietly and get louder can be a lot easier on the body than having an alarm clock start blaring out a buzzer.
And on weekends, waking up and reading lazily in bed is one of life's great pleasures.
The #1 way to deal with insomnia is to get more excercise (not right before bed, but earlier that day/evening). #2 is to take a hot shower about a half hour before bedtime.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
In all simplicity, when I was finishing my secondary education I had a desk in my bedroom with a desktop computer on it -- and I got NO study done whatsoever. So I pulled the plug, put it in the store room and ended up getting decent grades. I find technology in the bedroom completely detracts from my relaxation. I read more now, and the only thing in my room is a mobile phone which I turn off when I want. A lot of people it seems have trouble turning their phone off (my younger brother will wake up at 4 in the morning to answer a call :)).
So I definitely need to separate the technology (now a laptop computer on the desk in the spare bedroom) from my bedroom.
It's not always an issue of a server being down. Sometimes, it's an issue of two failed switches, code chages, or a piece of hardware that is inconsistently failing.
Google's customer services are searches. Their application is relatively static and simple. (They have 1 application). Google's business is their webservers.
In other businesses there may be 100's of externally facing applications, and even more internal applications. Code is constantly changing, and there is always activity somewhere. I bet Google doesn't have 3 backup internal mail servers. However, if the mail stops working, the mail admin is getting up at 3 am to fix it.
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