The lonely nomadic workspace versus the computer with a stable home life

Unlike this man, my computer has a desk (and a roof, and walls).  Not only a desk, but a lovely chair.  It's got a system of cable organization, and a keyboard tray with a keyboard in it.  My computer has a home.

My significant other has a computer too.  It used to live on the coffee table, and then when the video card broke, it began living on the entertainment center, with our TV being the monitor.  When he wants to work, he pulls a chair from the kitchen table toward the center of the room, and pulls out a wireless keyboard.

At first these nomadic office habits drove me crazy.  I was willing to downgrade to one bookshelf and buy a second desk.  But as my long lost friend (I promise she will blog again some day) glitter-and-spandex has made clear, working side by side is not always the best solution.  And when a cloffice just isn't viable, what's a grad student to do???

Anyhow, I have come to accept and even like the idea of an office-less workspace.  Unplggd has several bloggers who confess to working from the couch, or wherever they fancy.

Also, working from the couch invites the possession of cool foldaway laptop desks that can double as side tables, or TV dinner holders.  This one is also from Unplggd.

Or coffee tables that fold out into desks, like this one from Apartment Therapy!

The typical graduate student can't afford a separate home office, and my little desk sure does take up a lot of space in our studio.  A nice little nomadic sofa-office is sounding nicer and nicer. 

Dreams Kinda Realized: The new Coffee Table and the Craigslist Roller Coaster

So we didn't end up building our dream coffee table, but we did get an awesome new coffee table.  My super talented cousin had a homemade bench lying around that he added a deck to, and then I waxed the new pieces, and now we have a cute little interim coffee table.  Check it out.

The hard part right now is getting the wicker chest off our hands.  I've had several bites on Craigslist, but people keep standing me up!  I've even talked to people on the phone several times, where they seemed very trustworthy and friendly.  We set up times (this has happened twice so far), and I changed my schedule to make sure I was home, and they simply never showed.  No call, no nothing!  I called and left messages on both their machines, and nothing.  And now I have this guy offering to send me a money order on the chest if I "reserve" it for him, but he doesn't know when he can pick it up, which is super sketchy.  Here it is, in all of its antique, wickery loveliness.

Until we sell it, we're using it at the foot of the bed to store comforters.  We did have another Craigslist success a few days ago, however!  I posted our old Sony television for $50, and it sold immediately.  It was a quality TV, but BIG, like heavier than my whole couch, and deep enough to stick obtrusively into the middle of our tiny living area.  S.O. originally got it from a friend, who picked it up for free from his family's trailer park when the original owners upgraded to a flat screen.  And now it's our turn to upgrade!  We're going to Costco tomorrow to make the big purchase.  Until then, it's been pretty relaxing to be TV-less for a few days, even though it was over the New Year.  Who needs Dick Clark to ring in 2011 when you have homemade pizza and good company?

New Years Grad Student Resolutions

1. I will read as many papers as I can on the computer and not waste my pennies on printer ink.

2. I will not accept rough drafts no matter how big and pleading students' eyes get.

3. I will use my campus breaks to go to the gym, not to nap on my jacket on the floor of my office.

4. I will blog more.

5. I will back up everything all the time, on hardware and in the cloud, so I never lose a term paper ever again.

6. I will take time every weekend to turn off my blackberry and my laptop and spend time with human beings.

Happy New Years 2011!

Dreaming Big: New Coffee Table

S.O. and I have been vaguely discussing the idea of a new coffee table.  His problem: the antique wicker chest that we are using currently is too high, and hurts his knees when he puts his feet up.  My problem: the antique wicker chest that we are currently using is seriously not my style.

I would prefer something simple and elegant and mid-century.

Like this one, from Door Sixteen	Or this one, from CB2
Or this one, from...ummm...Google Images

But the antique wicker chest does have one big advantage over these minimalist leggy lovelies...STORAGE.  Sigh, the eternal quest for storage in the studio apartment.  We give a pile away to Goodwill at least once a month, and yet our volume of stuff just continues to grow.  My S.O.'s REI addiction is not helpful, and neither is my inability to get rid of books.  But anyhow, let's not play the blame game here. Our new coffee table needs to at least have a nice second shelf, like this Danish one.

Why are Danish things so awesome?

We're thinking that the most economical option, and the one that will best suit or various tastes will be to go DIY on this one.  My cousin, a talented carpenter on his off time, generously offered to let us use some of his extra wood.  S.O. suggested that we do something with slats, because most of the wood my cousin has is 2x4s, and apparently this might lend itself to a slatty type of table.

 S.O. is excited about this idea because it makes the table stronger.  Apparenlty bowling alleys orient the wood on the lanes sideways like this in order to protect it from the poundage of thousands of poorly thrown bowling balls.  I like this idea because it reminds me of those benches that they always have in museums, that I am totally obsessed with.  This one is actually called, "The Museum bench."

"The Museum Bench."  Super strong, like a bowling alley.  Built to sustain hundreds of butts per day.

If we built a table top like that one, we could put it on some cheap but stylish IKEA legs like these and VOILA.

We're still working on how to incorporate a little storage into the design.  It can be done.  Check this out from 54Dean.  Slats, storage, modern, leggy.  The dream.  It would take a set of tools and a level of craftsmanship far beyond what we have available to put something like this together.

The dream.

Ours will still be awesome though.  I'd like to stain it to show off the wood. I love the color of this wood on a DIY desk from Manhattan Nest.

I'm obsessed with this desk from made by Daniel, a college student who writes a blog at manhattan-nest.com

Or this bench, made from an old fence.

Anyhow, I'll keep the blog updated about our awesome future slatted coffee table.  Here's a couple of extra photos for inspiration.

Geeky Hanukkah gifts for the graduate student in your life

SUNNAN Solar Powered Lamp So your grad student can work all night, but not have high electricity bills.  From IKEA.

Game console soaps Just because they're awesome, and even graduate students take showers sometimes.  They're all vegan, and of course, Mountain Dew scented.  No joke. From ThinkGeek.

USB LED Beverage Cooler Because I don't know about you, but my off campus office is about a mile from the department fridge.  From ThinkGeek.

Etch-A-Sketch iPad Case Get this if your grad student has an iPad.  And if they don't, get them an iPad.  From Amazon, and the Apple Store.

Roll-Up Keyboard For portability!  I can never tell where I'll be working, but I can tell you one thing, carrying a full sized keyboard on the bus gets you funny looks.  From ThinkGeek.

Beer 'Nuff said.  From your local grocery store.

Our storage solutions for two people in a studio on a TA budget

We've made a lot of changes in the apartment to make cohabitation possible, and I wanted to share a few of them.  Not bad for the super tight budget dictated by a meager TA salary, if I do say so myself.

1. I got as much little stuff off of horizontal surfaces as possible. This is one of my proudest and laziest DIYs: I tucked some cork board into this red picture frame of my mom's for a snazzy earring holder! Ah, craftiness.

2. We utilized tall shelf space to to its max, instead of wasting it with short stuff. Aren't our matching Mountain Hardware phantom sleeping bags sickeningly adorable? On the top shelf are the Costco sized cleaning products.

3. We got these shelves for free on Craigslist, scrubbed them off, cut them up, and mounted them with about twenty bucks worth of Home Depot hardware. Voila!  Closet for two.

4. We stacked the books to the extreme. Yes, this Ikea shelf will probably break eventually, but whatever.

5. We got shoe racks.  Definitely worth it.

Debrief: Wearing my new fivefingers on campus

I apologize for the quality of the photo, but all I had was the bberry.

Yesterday we went on consumer overload, and spent all day at REI (used gear sale!) and Ikea.  More about some of my Ikea purchases at a later date.  We waited in line for almost 2 hours for the REI used gear sale, but I think it was worth it.  One of my most exciting purchases was a pair of fivefingers, those silly looking shoes made by Vibram that look like gloves for your feet.  Vibram makes soles for other shoe companies mostly, so it's not surprising that they would come out with a shoe that was basically just a sole.  The idea is that human feet are not designed (and when I say designed, I don't really mean designed, calm down) to wear shoes, so these allow your toes to spread, and for your walking mechanics to more closely resemble barefooted-ness.

I do a lot of walking on campus.  My classes are in a totally different area from my office, which is in a totally different area from where I teach.  The gym is yet another walk, and getting to the library or media services takes me to the other side of campus.  I also spend a lot of time in one of the science buildings, which is yet another area.  And all of these places are separated by steep, short patches of thick forest, and long stretches of cattle pasture.  Kind of a ridiculously big campus.  Walk walk walk walk.

I've been on campus since 8:30AM today, and I have another 2.5 hours to go.  So far, I am happy to report, my feet have never been happier.  And I haven't even gotten any funny looks! I was a little worried about that.

And yes, I have sleepy owls as my desktop right now.  Awwwwww...

Technology to stay organized, from a presentation I gave to first years

Two weeks ago I was asked to give a short talk to first year PhD students about the technology I use in my graduate work. I figured I might as well share what I talked about here, in case it can help anyone else.

I had a list of talking points set up in MS OneNote, which is my personal favorite note taking software.  My favorite thing about OneNote is the super easy hyperlinking.  My notes are like my own personal Wikipedia, with words and references linking to other notes and definitions, or even web pages and documents.  I use OneNote for absolutely everything, from organizing recipes, to keeping track of payments and confirmation numbers, to extensive notes on meetings, classes and colloquia.   Everything relating to school is in one notebook.  Within this notebook, there are "section groups" that organize my classes, my committees, my research, and logistical information.  Within these section groups, for example classes, you will find one section for each class I am taking (I archive classes from past quarters in another section group). In the section for a class, I keep a tab for the syllabus, a tab for notes from each week, a tab for important readings, assignments, etc.  Since you can print PDFs directly into OneNote, I even keep some of the readings stored in OneNote, so that I can mark them up with OneNote's highlighting function and type notes in the margins.  You can also clip portions of any screenshot into OneNote directly, and record audio.  Recorded audio can be transcribed within the program as well, and OneNote automatically keeps track of which audio clips go to which transcription bits.

Of course I spent most of the presentation gushing about the oncoming cloud revolution.  I talked about MS Word (or Open Office) cloud alternatives, like Adobe Buzzword or Google Docs.  The downfall of these apps, in my opinion, is the lack of formatting consistency between them and platform based word processors, and the lack of a track changes feature as advanced as Word's.  I also touched on the existence of online LaTeX editors like ScribTeX and MonkeyTeX, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in my department you uses LaTeX regularly.

For citations, I use Cite-U-Like, a totally cloud based citation manager that can export in practically any format (BibTeX, EndNote, Word...).  Zotero is great, so I hear, but you have to download software onto your computer, which goes against my commitment to the cloud.  EndNote is the standard, but it costs like ten million dollars.  Several people have offered me licenses, but they've all been for Macs.  PLUS, hello, cloud?

There are OneNote alternatives in the cloud.  There's Evernote (my favorite), Google notes (I so wish this was a better app, it could be so much better), UberNote, and SpringNote, among others.  But none of these programs have yet lived up to MS OneNote in my heart.  I'm going to have to postpone this jump to the cloud for a future date.

Finally I talked about backup.  I use Dropbox for 2 Gigs of free storage where I keep every document that I am currently working on.  Google docs is also a great way to store a few files, and MS SkyDrive, which gives you 25 gigs for free.  For the 100 gigs of other stuff (mostly music and video) that I have on my computer and external drive, I pay Mozy 5 dollars a month to back it all up to the cloud.

And that was my presentation, in a nutshell.

The professor asked me an interesting question at the end of all this.  Was there any downfall to trusting technology with all of this information?  I told him I figured the entire setup is premised on the assumption that it is okay for part of my mind to be distributed in software and documents.  I'm cool with this.  However, if you're not cool with this, I would stick with using computers for word processing and email only.  That professor can pull out entire citations (publisher, date and all) from the top of his head in daily conversation, a skill he attributes to not having EndNote installed on his computer.  In the words of the MS DOS chess teaching software I had in 1994, you make the call.

Sufficiently efficient?

I've been thinking a lot about effective reading note taking. A couple of weeks ago, I got incredibly flustered in a seminar, was unable to read my insane pages upon pages of handwritten notes [including an extended joke-as-metaphor... seriously], and totally lost my shit. After that fateful day, I've realized that I need to take incredibly clear, typed, easy to navigate notes.

So for the past couple weeks, I've been using a little template I made myself. What's it look like? Oh like so:



I only started doing this last week, so I've only used the template in action once so far [this class is only once a week for 23942034802394 hours]. However, after last week, I've found I am actually really liking it and do not want to give it up. It's simple, it's clear, and it really helps me organize my thoughts. Now, I just need to find a way to incorporate my long-winded-joke-as-metaphors into it AND make them make sense so that I don't look like a lunatic and this template would be solid gold.

I hate my school library.

Does anyone else have this problem? I was so spoiled with my undergrad library where if someone sneezed, it was scandalously loud. However, I am currently sitting in my graduate school's research library surrounded by:

1. three girls on their cell phones.
2. people playing music on their computers possibly without headphones [I did this once in my undergrad library completely by mistake and I am STILL embarrassed thinking about it].
3. Construction noise from THE CAFE THEY ARE PUTTING IN THE LIBRARY.
4. Yet I just got told off for taking a sip of water. From a water bottle. Far from any library-owned material except for a table. Surrounded by my own photocopies, not even that close to my own filthy laptop.

So that this post isn't just complaining about the library, here is a picture of one of the best I-don't-want-to-study-I-just-want-my-brain-to-come-out-of-ears movies ever: Glitter. And yes, I cry at the end every time I watch it. No big deal. Seriously though, do other people have this library dilemma? How do you cope?