LostFocus

A weblog by Dominik Schwind

I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

Week 3

By Dominik Schwind

Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you – in fact, most of the days were so uneventful that I don’t even remember them now, just a couple of days ago.

Monday, January 16th, 2012

Alfred App

I have (finally?) switched from Quicksilver to Alfred. Since I just use those as application launchers and mostly ignore their advanced features, the change was completely transparent to my daily workflow. In fact, someone could have changed them for me and I would probably have not noticed. Except that Alfred yet has to close itself at random times, something that Quicksilver was prone to do to lately.

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Moo Facebook Cards

I got my Facebook Moo cards. Fun!

Alcatraz

I have given Alcatraz a chance – it’s the new TV series by J.J. Abrams and has the pretty interesting premise that the last batch of prisoners on Alcatraz somehow vanished in 1963 and now return one by one, going back to being murderers. The first two episodes weren’t bad but nothing too special – I’ll keep watching, in the hope that the “murderer of the week” type of episodes weave a nice mythology arc.
Oh, and it has Parminder Nagra who I’ve liked since Bend it like Beckham.

Oh, and Sam Neill.

Sam Neill

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

The day Wikipedia went black.

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Or: The nerds are back in town

For the last two weeks I’ve had blissful solitude here at the office – the three guys who share the room with me were in Munich to do Munich stuff. As someone who snaps out of the zone pretty easily working two weeks without any real distraction was a pretty good thing which ended on that Friday when they came back. 1

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Ladies

I don’t know.

I bought Onigiri again and fed one to my sister, who was crashing at my place, as she tends to do when she goes to her courses in Düsseldorf.

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

The Minecraft bug bit me again, so I basically was digging around on our server all day.

  1. And as I said in my inception post a couple of weeks ago: it’s nothing personal, I just prefer to work in solitude, with random breaks of socializing (which does include proper meetings, not just watercooler stuff) in between. (See also.) ↩

White Noise

By Dominik Schwind

I think I have mentioned it before that for me it is not that easy to get into that state that we like to call “the zone” and the ambient noise in a four-person office isn’t helping. Especially with chronic carrot-eaters, mumblers, sigh-ers, table-drummers, burpers and loud-music-with-crappy-in-ear-headphone-listeners as office mates.1


All the loud dubstep doesn’t help to cover up the carrot-eating noise. Maybe some carrots need to be delivered Mr. Smith-style.
April 29, 2011 2:38 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite
@dominik
Dominik Schwind

So first I turned to music. Randomly playing my iTunes library was a complete disaster. Switching between bubblegum pop, heavy metal, elektro and 80s synth-stuff makes for an interesting listening experience, but does not help with concentrating on work. Quite the opposite, actually. Same, of course, with my last.fm mix station. For a while the dubstep-station on last.fm worked, but not really, either.


I now listen to rain and ocean sounds. NOT HELPING.
May 4, 2011 9:45 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite
@dominik
Dominik Schwind

Now I have a white noise software running that gives me ocean and rain sounds. That’s nice. It does not help. For one, it fuels my Wanderlust, which is acting up like mad lately anyway. Also, if I turn it loud enough to drown out the noises, I’ll go deaf.2 And especially the rain part makes me need to pee a lot.

Anyway, all of this complaining is not really the point I wanted to make. The sounds to cover up quite a bit of noise, they do fade into the background and I can concentrate a bit. At least until the next carrot.

The really interesting thing happens when I switch off the software though. My brain got so used to everything being muted down by rain and wave sounds, that when those are missing, everything else sound very very clear. I was surprised how hyper-aware of even small sounds you get after switching off a white noise generator. My steps even on the carpet, the sounds of the water when washing my hands, the droning of the aircon in the washroom, cars going by, the “I need lunch” sounds in my stomach, the phone ringing three doors down the hall, the breeze around the building’s edges. Everything gets REALLY intense.

Is that how taking drugs is like?

  1. I’m not really blaming them. I tap my foot, I type pretty hard, I use the scroll wheel on my mouse and I tend to hum along to the music I listen to. I am sure they’re just as annoyed by me as I am with them when it comes to office noises and that’s understandable and okay. [↩]
  2. And believe me, I did consider that as an alternative for a moment. [↩]

Arbeitsumgebung

By Dominik Schwind

Knallhart mal die Links von @fab1an nachgebloggt: Bionic Office und Alone Time. Geht beides auch in die Richtung des Artikels von Dan Benjamin, den ich ja kürzlich schon mal hatte.

Offices and The Creativity Zone

By Dominik Schwind

Dan Benjamin hat etwas über mein Lieblingsthema – The Zone – geschrieben. [via]

And although many people think of software development as a kind of science, there is a great deal of creativity involved in writing code, and it works the very same way.