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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 have a Nokia 6210 cell phone which has these nifty "profiles" and "caller groups". I've set two profiles to my phone: "spare time" and "work hours". In the "spare time" mode no signal is given if the call is coming from the office or the caller is one of my co-workers. Also, the phone is silenced so if someone not-work-related person calls, the phone just beeps and vibrates.
The "work hours" profile on the other hand has a ring tone and all other annoying panic-causing effects turned on and all calls are accepted.
With this simple trick I can truly turn off my work and relax and enjoy me spare time.
I don't find technology stressful, i love things beeping and flashing as me. My bedroom is my office, so i can keep an eye on things 24/7, i have them setup to "beep" if somthing goes wrong. I used to have a seperate bedroom, but i actually found that quite stressful, wondering what was happening in the office. On many occasions i'd leap out of bed and run in here thinking that i heard somthing.
The only thing i've done towards relaxing is getting a WiFi laptop, so i can sit under a tree in the backyard and code :)
I'm addicted to my work, lucky me :)
What I'm looking for are ways other nerds in the community have made their bedrooms into a place where they can release tension of the day and improve their overall quality of life?
/., so maybe I should suggest a hooker.
/. I mean a hooker who works the Renaissance Festival as a "tavern harlot".
Well, I'd suggest getting a girlfriend. They can be very helpful about the "release tension" thing, and a significant minority can even improve your "overall quality of life."
Oh wait, this is
Oh wait. This is
And comes equiped with a WiFi port, and runs linux, speaks awk, looks like Natalie Portman with a a pantsuit full of hot grits, and who and will do anything for a buck --
unless it's with Bill Gates --
in Soviet Russia.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
A while back, I had a problem with a persistent faint buzzing in my room, which I could hear only at night.
It turned out to be coil whine from my monitor's power supply. Even when switched "off", it was never completely off -- the power button was only a soft power off, like an ATX supply. The reason I only heard it at night was that during the day it was drowned out by ambient noise. Once identified, it was easily solved by moving the power strip into a convenient location, so I could cut the power completely.
Move to my old neighborhood If you want to get away from all anything Electronic, Hitech or basically anything that uses electricity.
All you have to do is unlock your doors when you go to sleep.
Then when you wake up in the morning, you won't have any of those pesky electronic devices in your house anymore....(As well as cash, credit cards or food)
SuperGlueBooger
Our bedroom has only one electronic device - a clock radio. There is no telephone, the cell stays in the kitchen, absolutely no computers, TVs, at all. I made the cable hookup a dead line. (It helps the signal to the cable modem too)
...of course, when the servers are on fire it can be sort of a problem... but that's what watchdogs and managed hosting companies are for. :)
I work from home, I get calls at all hours about work. However, the nearest phone to my bedroom is a good distance. So far in fact, that I cannot get to it before voice mail does. If I do hear it, I don't even bother.
It was not always this way. When living space was at a premium I had my box in the bedroom for a short while. Fortunately, the wife put an end to it VERY quickly.
Your house is your kingdom and your bedroom your sanctuary. It's very comforting to lay my head down and hear absolutely nothing. No phone. No CPU fans. No churning disks. I really can get away there.
---
Live in Wichita? Code perl? Want a job? Let me know.
Fuzzy handcuffs and a 4 poster bed! A girl came into my room the other day... She's becoming a geek but the first thing she noticed when she walked into my room wasn't the awsome computer setup I have, it was the 4 post bed. She laid down and said, "You could have some fun with this." and then went on to ask about hand-cuffs.
Kinda on topic ....Kinda not...but what the Hey
:)
1. when you invite them over and promise to make dinner...don't fall asleep and then complain when they wake you up
2. don't invite them over, and then ditch them to go Play Games in the Computer labs.
3. buy a bed. Girls don't like sleeping on the floor.
4. when they sit at your computer DON'T Grab the mouse and keyboard.
5. when they say "come to bed honney"... that means its time to stop playing video games.
note: these all come from personal experiance..
ohhh...p.s. Tell them you love them a lot
I Love you Darling!
--meh--
If you need a great machine that doesn't make a sound you don't want, get a Mac. The large dual processor desktop models may not be exactly what you're looking for but any of the portable line or the new iMacs are absolutely noiseless. My rev A PB TiBook only turns it's fan on if I have it sitting on fabric or something else that keeps the heat in. Sitting on a simple low writing desk it is 99% absolutely quiet. Even the hard drive is barely more than a whisper when reading large files.
Same is true of the iMac. No fan noise, no drive noise... just ambient music and screensavers when not in use for 'computing', perfect for the bedroom or any other small living space (ask any Tokyo native).
If you have one of these models and they are creating too much noise, you have a bad drive. IBM travelstars from 2 years ago had bad spindles... get a new fluid dynamic bearing model from IBM or Toshiba and you'll again have no noise. CD-ROM, etc could add some noise if old, or try a cleaning CD to get rid of any grit that may be causing problems.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
i can't help you there (http://www.parseerror.com/images/room6.jpg)
My bedroom has a bed. (and some closets for clothes)
Apart from that I make sure all buzzing, flashing beeping and vibrating work related gizmo's come equiped with a special feature I call a "power switch"
I typically use this feature when I go home from work.
Alternatively, if your boss is a penny saving monster and refuses to pay for this feature you could just forget to take all gizmo's home.
Of course you should always make it clear to your boss that all gizmo's you paid for yourself are off limits for him.
is the only way I can get to sleep at night.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Personally, I don't think you should ban technology because it is technology. You should, instead, ally yourself with your technologies. (And that may mean using more technology. Or using your existing technology smarter.) The most annoying technology in my house? Probably the most basic one. The telephone.
It rings a lot and half the time I don't want to answer it. But I've got to check the Caller ID to see if I want to answer it or not. How do I ally myself with this technology? Answer: technology. A talking caller-id box, for example, would save me the trouble of rushing to a caller-id box to figure out that I do or don't want to rush to the phone. Have it announce over the whole-house intercom during waking hours if that is pleasurable. If you've had enough of the phone for the day, unplug it at the network interface box outside your house. It is amazing the peace it can buy.
WiFi is a nice way for me to have my technology when and where I want it. Instead of having to go to the computer to look something up, I can figure out the answer to a question in the living room. Or I can log onto a server from the bedroom. It has freed me from 'you must be in the office to reference the WWW or log into work'.
Probably the most useful and enabling device in the house, second to the general purpose PC, is the TiVo. I can't think of why I'd want to ban it from the bedroom. It is an enabling device that allows us to watch television on our own terms. Unless you don't believe in television in the bedroom.
Really, you have to look at your technology as devices that serve you. If they don't serve you, change them so where they do. If your company gives you a pager that you hate lugging around, swap it for a Timex pager-watch. If you can't change them, then I can see your approach of RIF'ing them.
As far as the bedroom, the only technology that I have found to be disruptive in there is the pager. But that is exact purpose of the pager, to be disruptive. So I can hardly complain about something serving its useful function.
When I got my most recent job in IT, and was handed a phone, I decided I didn't want to be a slave, even if I was expected to answer the phone/pager. So I turned it off when I got home in the afternoon, and turned it on when I left home in the morning for work.
After a couple of 'emergencies' (don't get me started - one person's emergency is usually another's lack of planning) took place and I was unreachable, I was called into my boss' office. A little white lie later, and we decided that my house was in a 'dead zone' between cell towers, and since the company didn't want to buy me a new house, I was suddenly passed over when it came time to 'carry the phone/pager.'
Problem solved. I never had to deal with late night emergencies, and I never had to give more hours to my job than were nessessary. It is nice to have my evenings free for my family and myself.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
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
Whilst trying to quieten things down, I found that it's not the fan noise which is disturbing. In fact, they sell white noise generators to help people with insomnia, and white noise easily fades into the background.
What made the biggest difference was damping the vibration. I did this by placing strips of thick, firm-ish packing foam under the feet of everything.
The difference was amazing. With the 'humming' component removed the sound fades into the background like a dream.
I suppose the next phase would be to construct an enclosure with sound damping material and baffled air vents.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Oh...I thought you said a Sanctum FOR Technology...nevermind.
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
i only have an efficiency (one room) apartment, you insensitive clod!
(well, i guess you could count the bathroom and kitchen as seperate rooms but you probably don't want to sleep in the tub or oven, do you?)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
If your job is so fucked up that you actually need to be paged at all hours of the day and night, you'll never have peace.
Fix the problems or fix your problem and get a new job. If you are getting paged more than 3 times a week off hours, hire an overnight operator or technician.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
In our shop, we are on call for 100's of webservers. We aren't responsible for all of them during the day, but 1 lucky guy a week gets to stay awake for the whole group of servers. I imagine that's the way it works in a lot of places. Plus, at any given time there are 1000's of code updates occurring acrossed multiple machines in the middle of the night. Not to mention other maintenance that the oncall may not be called in on until someone created a problem and their maintenance window is quickly coming to a close. Or, perhaps it's a database that isn't responding but the owners of the db can't figure out why, but it's 3 am and you got paged for the website that uses the db not responding.
So until you work somewhere that has more than 2 servers doing file and print sharing for a daytime staff of 12, don't tell me or others they are bad admins for a server not working _multiple_nights in a row. You haven't walked a mile in their shoes. I can safely assume from your ignorant comment that you've never worked with real servers before.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
Complete your work at work
Get a new job (maybe a better one???)Stop whining.....
See?? easy.....we are from the government - we are here to help...
So what did I do? I went out and got a down mattress pad, down comforter, a bunch of down pillos, and some kick-ass bed sheets. Now, when I sleep in my bed, I'm surround everywhere by warm fluf. On top of my extra firm matress, it feels like heaven.
We spend most of our lives either at work or laying in bed, so why not put a littl effort into having a nice bed?
Keeping
You must have backup. If you don't have someone else to do this, and you have a shop buging you extreemly regularly you need to get them to hire a partner.
Phrase it something like this: I am the only person who understands how these systems run. I'm the only person who can fix them when this breaks. If I get hit by a bus, you're in a world of hurt. If I don't start getting more sleep, I'm going to burnout, and you're in a world of hurt. I work 70 hours a week regularly, and the backlog keeps piling up. I need someone to help me.
Then (well, after 2-3 months training the person), you can take weeks off from pager duty. There's a reason doctors have on call rotations. You should too.
One of the things that I've done is set expectations at my place of work. 90% of the time, my pager is available to them when they need me. That other 10% is well communicated in advance, and my boss knows that my pager will be on my bedstand, but I'll be in another state.
(Oh, and reguarding the person who saw 'recurring nights of database server issues' as a sign of stupidity, they might be right, they might be wrong. We've had a sun e4800 go really flakely on us recently. It took WEEKS of long nights (since the box was production, and we couldn't take it down in the day) to get the hardware on that box stable (it would work fine for 3 days or so, then flake out hard). Sun wouldn't give us a new box (with at least an understandable reason), and keep insisting on replacing individual pieces. And it certainly wasn't our doing. It turned out to be a bug deep in the IO chassie's firmware.)
Zapman
Tinfoil Wallpaper.
I've heard from a lot of people, and my conclusion is, the best set of furniture to put in a bedroom is -- a bed.
No, don't mod this as funny. I'm serious.
The way human psychology works, you want to have a place where you do nothing else but go to sleep. Any other distractions, and you're creating a basis for insomnia. I can understand the need to save space, so perhaps add some clothes storage so you can get dressed there, but even that is a distraction. If possible, you should do that in another room. The bedroom can be just large enough for the bed, and a little stand for an alarm clock, and that's all.
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; don't. If you want to watch TV or read, do it in another room.
You can accomplish all of the above that way.
11*43+456^2
A lamp on the nightstand and the room light are about the only pieces of technology in my bedroom. On the nightstand with the lamp is a candle lantern. My dresser and closet have only clothes. Over the window I have blackout blinds. I have a lithograph of this 19th century Japanese painting of a cat on the wall over the dresser.
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 leave a phone on in your bedroom. Easy. My work only has my cell number, and I turn that off at night and whenever else I don't want to be disturbed.
If you took a job where you have on-call hours, you can't really think of those as _your_ time, though--they're partially your company's time. Hopefully you factor that into your salary considerations when you took the job. My dad's a doctor and I saw first hand what on-call means when I was growing up; I decided it's not worth it to me to be on-call, and I've stuck by that in all of my past job hunts.
As far as keeping technology out of the bedroom, that's trivial; you just have to not want it there, it doesn't show up on its own. There are a couple of tech things that I quite like, though:
a) soft-on alarm systems--my lights and music slowly come on in the morning, lights dimming up over a half hour with the music starting soft for the second half and gradually coming up louder. It's a lot easier to wake up that way.
b) a decent stereo system both for mood music and for waking up to
As far as non-tech essentials:
a) good shades, I live in the city and keeping out light is a big deal
b) good pillows, including a good choice for sitting and reading in bed
c) varied lighting choices (bright indirect full-spectrum bulbs, a good bedside lamp for reading, and candles or oil lamps)
d) reading material of a non-work nature
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
In our shop, we are on call for 100's of webservers. We aren't responsible for all of them during the day, but 1 lucky guy a week gets to stay awake for the whole group of servers. I imagine that's the way it works in a lot of places.
Take a page out of google's book. By the time you have 100s of servers, with proper redundancy it doesn't really matter if one (or several) of them is down. Google's to the point where once a week they reboot the failed machines and replace the ones that don't come back up. You might need to do it daily.
Only if there's a good _business_ reason for you to be called in/working late should you do it. "The machine is down" is not a business problem; "the site is down and we're losing customers" is. Work things out so the first doesn't imply the second and you'll get a lot more sleep.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Bourbon
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I live in a house with three others, so the only alternative to this was to stick my computers out in the loft, which was getting pretty toasty with all of our equipment.
I've got a bedroom with an attached bathroom; it so happens that adjacent to one of my walls is one of the closets in the bathroom.
First, I placed everything capable of generating noise (CPU, TiVo, etc.) in the closet. Then I bought a pair of 25' VGA cables and an extension for my USB hub, and replaced all of my peripherals with USB equivalents.
The end result is I still have my computer in my bedroom, but all of the noise generating components live in a closet which I can close the door to whenever I head to bed, resulting in pretty much a silent bedroom (with the exception of a bit of noise leaking in from the aforementioned loft...).
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
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.
Wouldn't that make your bedroom the...um, one with the bed?
-twb
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.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
If you eliminate all the electronic stuff, won't the wife be annoyed at the loss of her extensive vibrator collection?
My bedroom has my Athlon 1600+ in it, which makes a lot of noise, but contrary to popular belief, you can actually TURN OFF a computer. I just use the shut down command in KDE, wait for it to finish halting, then i go to my power strip on the other side of my table, and turn it off with my big toe. Suddenly, the only thing in my room that's electronic is a gigantic digital alarm clock. It's really cool actually...the only thing that's NOT cool is being the farthest room from the air conditioner AND the furnace. I'm constantly at one temperature extreme or the other. I'm pretty sure I could solve the wintertime problem by keeping the computer on, but I just can't stand having those fans running all the time. It gets so annoying that I can't sleep...
Ok, you guys can wake up. I'm done rambling.