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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
If you let your employer call you at home when he feels like it,
I know it's offtopic, but once a sales person once half-jokingly said that he thought I wasn't as dedicated to the job as he thought I should be. He wasn't my boss, and that comment was uncalled for.
So, a couple weeks later I was flying back from somewhere and he told me to call him when I got back to town. I took great pleasure in waking him up at 3 in the morning to tell him that I was back in town. The next day in the office he complained to me and I responded that I am devoted to my job 24 hours a day, and I assumed that he was too.
Got him!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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?
Absolutely. You should spend your money on your bed and your boots because if you're not in one you'll be in the other. And the rest on beer.