the Augean office

Disabled

Today I am undertaking one of the labors of Hercules, which is to clean my office.

When we moved, I spent a couple of weeks operating off my laptop in various places: my parents’ house, my brother’s house, my own empty townhouse, waiting for our belongings to arrive. Finally they did, and I set up my office, and all seemed to be well.

But my desktop developed a chronic inability to hold a connection to our wireless network, which is a non-trivial problem for me; so much of what I do requires me to be looking things up on the internet, not to mention all the e-mail and such. (Plus we keep our music on a media server, so without wireless, I can’t listen to anything without stupid and suboptimal workarounds involving my iPod and portable speakers.) As a result, I increasingly found myself working on my laptop downstairs. This is both ergonimcally unsound and a recipe for disaster in my office, as I kept chucking stuff in here and never really dealing with it. Three months after opening the first box in this room, it had gone from ideal to uninhabitable.

Which has had a seriously detrimental effect on my ability to get work done. Last month I was within a sneeze of buying a new computer — as the root problem of this all was the wireless issue — but I decided to postpone such a big purchase for a while, and instead to shift over to Puck, my faithful little Vaio, as my main computer. The goal is to have this place cleaned up in the next three days, so that I can start out 2009 with a nice, habitable office, a computer that works as it should, and all the other things that encourage productivity.

Wish me luck. We’re not quite at the level of “the Ark of the Covenant could be in here somewhere” clutter, but it’s close. It’s long past time to get this shit sorted out, and get me back to something resembling stability.

0 Responses to “the Augean office”

  1. astres

    I had that problem with my upstairs desktop as well. For me, it was because my wireless antennae was so close to a wall and it didn’t have very good connectivity because of that (plus Canadian winters and poor insulation….).

    Maybe try moving the desktop tower away from the wall a bit?

    • Marie Brennan

      It isn’t by a wall; I have my desk in the middle of the room. And the problem’s been getting steadily worse, too — at first it would just cut out once in a while, but as of the last time I tried to use it, I could barely maintain connectivity long enough to do a simple task.

      The computer’s six years old anyway. It’s about time to replace it with something a bit fresher.

      • astres

        I gave up on my desktop. I now just use my macbook air but I think I need something with a little more processor power. I foresee a mac pro in my future *meditates* Graduation gift maybe?

        • Marie Brennan

          I make my techno-geek husband cry with my lack of concern for processor power and the like. 98% of what I do is internet, word processing, and listening to music; the remaining 2% is some low-key sound and image editing, and the occasional playing of computer games from ten years ago. From the point of view of that last, the older and slower the computer, the better! But in general, not so much with the caring about power.

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