Computers are SLOW

Monday nothing all too exciting happened, so I hereby reserve the right to skip on to Tuesday. (Yeah, Monday is what the "this is the purpose of journaling" bs was about. I'll write about what exactly I reflected on later maybes, but I want to sort some things out first. (: I'm holding you in suspense!)

Anyway, I've done some thinking about what I said about computers and internet before, and it hasn't remotely been a problem since then. I still sit in front of a computer the whole day, but I haven't tried to use them for things other than work. I haven't even really thought about it. Yes, at home I still can't get anything done until I've gone through a certain routine, but that's home and it's different I guess. I imagine that I have free time at home. Is that true? Well, I could stand to go to bed earlier.

I think just writing all that out helped straighten things out in my mind or something. The problem was not that I had nothing to do (I'm good at finding things to do) but that I didn't want to do what I was doing combined with the fact that I felt like what I was doing shouldn't have taken nearly so much time. Surely, somehow, time was being wasted.

Today Ashley (marketing) needed help researching contacts for a list of restaurants and she told me to go find and watch a video by Artzine at WOSU on ProMusica's work with Peter Shickelie and CCAD on this performance of a piece based off James Thurber's dogs and CCAD's animation of the drawings to fit the music. The point was to have me take a break because she realized that I'd been spending so much time doing that kind of work and felt bad. But I realized something. I have not yet thoroughly appreciated the true slowness of ProMusica's computers. This was a four minute video. I opened it and could at first only view 5 seconds and had to wait for the rest to load. So I worked on the restaurant contacts. I accidentally closed the window with the video and decided to let it load and use a different computer because to that point everything had been crawling.

Thirty minutes later, I came back and the video still had twenty, maybe thirty seconds left to load. I decided it would probably be done by the time I got to that part of the video if I started to play it. I got through everything but the last ten seconds. The computer still wasn't done.

So I am blessed with patience in that I don't mind waiting for computers to crawl along. But that is what was taking so much time when I was finding contacts and making calls. I found that it took me about the same amount of time to get through the contacts without calling as it had when I was making calls. It's just that before when that seemed outrageous I blamed it on myself somehow procrastinating and avoiding the task. Not to say I didn't at all—many of these restaurants had irritatingly flashy websites and probably took longer to load than many others I've been to lately. But in general, the problem was that I was on edge and was finding things to scare myself with.

A new problem I've observed is that there are snacky things lying around the office that I have been invited to help myself to if I wish. Well, this is another great way to avoid doing something for at least a couple seconds… except not really. The reasons why that could get problematic should be fairly obvious. Then there's just the part where if you walk by a box of cookies, and they're there and you can take one… it's very inviting. I'm pretty sure I have enough will-power to deal with this one though.