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alexandraerinOkay, so, for a long time this journal has basically been the place where I post things about work and productivity. I don't really have a personal blog at the moment. Personal stuff goes in random places, or more often, it just doesn't go anywhere.
But it wasn't a conscious decision to divorce this blog from anything having to do with my life in ways that don't obviously and directly touch on my writing, and I've made some attempts in the past to rectify that. This one is going to be fairly straightforward. I'm just going to make an effort to make a personal blog post every time I make a daily report.
So, I realized over this weekend that I have almost no music on my netbook, the new one I got earlier this year. I had downloaded what I considered to be my essential work/relaxation tracks to it and that's it. And I have quite a lot of music that's scattered among my computers, including some that's probably only on my old, ailing netbook that this one replaced.
To fix this, I'm taking advantage of Dropbox's superior syncing capabilities to create a master directory that has all of my music, hopefully with as little duplication as possible... I mean, if I copy the music library on this computer and the music library on my downstairs desktop computer into the same folder in Dropbox, it should recognize the duplicates and be like, "Oh, this file is already there, no need to download it.", right? That's my theory and so far, so good.
When I'm finished, I'm going to be setting the music library on each computer to only include the Dropbox music folder and make it the default location for downloading music from Amazon and ripping music from CDs. I won't actually delete the original source folders unless I run out of harddrive space (which is something that has never happened to me since my first 1 GB drive).
Right now my main desktop is uploading its music directory to Dropbox and this little netbook is downloading them as they're added. It's going to take a couple of days because I don't really want more than one computer uploading to Dropbox at a time, just to stop things from getting confused, but it doesn't take any attention from me once I've got things started... I already changed the notification area settings on this computer so I'd stop getting little balloons popping up telling me n files have been added to my Dropbox folder while I'm trying to do stuff. I am the original boiling-pot-watcher so until I took that step I kept checking to see what files have been added, try to look for any unwanted duplication, etc. Now it's all happening in the background and I can happily ignore it.
While I said this is for stuff that doesn't directly impact my writing... now that I have a lot more music to choose from (and am more aware of what music I actually have in my library than I have been for years), I can't help thinking... well, I can listen to the same track over and over again and not feel bored or get sick of it.
But not being bored is not the same thing as being stimulated. When I was writing Star Harbor Nights on the regular, most of the characters had favorite bands/musical influences and I could listen to them to get in touch with them. I could also use music to hack my mood or adjust my energy level.
In my report for today I looked back at my work life when I was doing data entry... my creative life was also affected by the way I listened to music then on my MP3 player while I worked. I could browse music and create playlists on the fly, but because it was kludgier than doing it on the computer and because I couldn't spend ten or fifteen minutes fiddling with an electronic device no matter how productive I was I relied on large playlists and shuffle more than I otherwise do.
It's still better for me to have a repetitive/non-distracting soundtrack for when I'm actually writing, I think, but it's good to have more varied influences for the rest of my day.
But it wasn't a conscious decision to divorce this blog from anything having to do with my life in ways that don't obviously and directly touch on my writing, and I've made some attempts in the past to rectify that. This one is going to be fairly straightforward. I'm just going to make an effort to make a personal blog post every time I make a daily report.
So, I realized over this weekend that I have almost no music on my netbook, the new one I got earlier this year. I had downloaded what I considered to be my essential work/relaxation tracks to it and that's it. And I have quite a lot of music that's scattered among my computers, including some that's probably only on my old, ailing netbook that this one replaced.
To fix this, I'm taking advantage of Dropbox's superior syncing capabilities to create a master directory that has all of my music, hopefully with as little duplication as possible... I mean, if I copy the music library on this computer and the music library on my downstairs desktop computer into the same folder in Dropbox, it should recognize the duplicates and be like, "Oh, this file is already there, no need to download it.", right? That's my theory and so far, so good.
When I'm finished, I'm going to be setting the music library on each computer to only include the Dropbox music folder and make it the default location for downloading music from Amazon and ripping music from CDs. I won't actually delete the original source folders unless I run out of harddrive space (which is something that has never happened to me since my first 1 GB drive).
Right now my main desktop is uploading its music directory to Dropbox and this little netbook is downloading them as they're added. It's going to take a couple of days because I don't really want more than one computer uploading to Dropbox at a time, just to stop things from getting confused, but it doesn't take any attention from me once I've got things started... I already changed the notification area settings on this computer so I'd stop getting little balloons popping up telling me n files have been added to my Dropbox folder while I'm trying to do stuff. I am the original boiling-pot-watcher so until I took that step I kept checking to see what files have been added, try to look for any unwanted duplication, etc. Now it's all happening in the background and I can happily ignore it.
While I said this is for stuff that doesn't directly impact my writing... now that I have a lot more music to choose from (and am more aware of what music I actually have in my library than I have been for years), I can't help thinking... well, I can listen to the same track over and over again and not feel bored or get sick of it.
But not being bored is not the same thing as being stimulated. When I was writing Star Harbor Nights on the regular, most of the characters had favorite bands/musical influences and I could listen to them to get in touch with them. I could also use music to hack my mood or adjust my energy level.
In my report for today I looked back at my work life when I was doing data entry... my creative life was also affected by the way I listened to music then on my MP3 player while I worked. I could browse music and create playlists on the fly, but because it was kludgier than doing it on the computer and because I couldn't spend ten or fifteen minutes fiddling with an electronic device no matter how productive I was I relied on large playlists and shuffle more than I otherwise do.
It's still better for me to have a repetitive/non-distracting soundtrack for when I'm actually writing, I think, but it's good to have more varied influences for the rest of my day.