Well, Blogger is acting up and won't let me post a title. I've been plagued with computer issues lately, especially at work. My computer's been super super slow lately, so I got the nicest guy from IT to have a look at my machine. Just a few clicks and the problem was found: I only had half a meg of RAM available.
"Augh!" Donnie exclaimed. "Windows likes about 30% of your hard drive free for running programs, and you've got like 1% free."
"Oh," I said, deeply and with great intellect.
"Question," he said. "Do you have an iPod or iTunes on your machine?"
"...yyeeahh, how come?"
"Do you store the music on your hard drive?"
"...yyeeahh?"
"There's your problem, then," said Donnie. A few more clicks and Donnie illustrated the issue for me. "Your iTunes is taking up 18 gigs of memory...18 gigs that your computer needs to run things smoothly."

So, i finally bought an external hard drive onto which all my music has been moved. Donnie ran a defragmentation program (usually called defragging) on my machine when I left for the day, so between these two things my machine should run like a champ tomorrow morning. That should be a relief: my AutoCAD and Adobe Reader have been chugging along at glacial speed for the past few months. It was my music slowing it down all along.

From the time we start architecture school, we listen to music while drawing in Studio. And with good reason: one works in Studio with a certain amount of solitude during class hours (usually a 3-4 hour long class that meets three days a week) and especially so after hours. Also, Studio classes are often held in big open rooms with more than one class in them, and sometimes you've just got to shut out the noise. After five or six years of thinking about spaces and churning out drawings to the sound of The Cure or Sarah McLachlan or Depeche Mode or Rollins Band (all good choices for the Pixie), it's hard to enter the work world and think about space or churn out drawings without that same stimuli. There are a very few architecture firms that don't allow music, but the vast majority of firms allow their staff to listen to headphones. It's a good policy, really, in terms of productivity, and especially in open offices like DA's. I can hear people laughing 120 feet away n the Landscape Department, and I know they can hear my witch's cackle, so it's nice to have a way to block that out.

With the hard drive, I can still have my music while not impeding my computer's progress. I need tunes and speed to get work done. And coffee. Yeah, coffee too.