Our phone and internet connection has finally made it into the new place - now there's catching up galore for me to do.
It really is amazing how the non-accessibility of things (including basic things like dictionaries and online dictionaries) can hamper the workflow. And I was astonished at how much I rely on the internet for my daily work. I already knew that searches and online resources are a large help for me, but total lack of the internet has shown me to what extent.
And now I'm not entirely sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. The good part of it is that since I rely so much on the Internet, I can work almost anywhere provided I have my computer and the internet (and can concentrate, of course). Questions about HTML? There are plenty of wonderful sites. A quick check of the vegetation and blooming period of madder? Wikipedia is a good starting point (though I'll make sure to whip out a proper book about plants or dye plants the moment I want to cite this, and double-check). Phone number or contact data missing? The internet knows them (almost) all. Trouble finding a word? I have learned that for me, typing into an online dictionary interface is so much faster than leafing through an actual book dictionary - so I heavily rely on LEO (praise be heaped on LEO!), Heinzelnisse and a small stack of other dictionaries. I even make a point not to buy cookbooks, because in any cookbook there are about ten recipies that sound really interesting and an unspecified, but much larger number that are not interesting. And searching for "recipe" and single ingredients will turn up enough recipes and variations to find something to cook. (I have a little stack of cookbooks that I don't want to miss and use frequently, though - I'm not so firm when it comes to not buying books.)
The bad part? Not having online connection really thwarts my style of work - and that sort of bugs me, because I rather like to be independent. And should the Net ever go down and stay down, I will have to re-learn working without it. (And I'll probably buy even more books then.)
Thursday 10 December 2009
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4 comments:
Welcome back. I'm internet-addicted too. Sometimes I speak to people that only turn on the computer once a week. That startles me every time. I only turn it of once a week, it sometimes seems.
Harma
good to see you around again. Does the internet look different from wher eyou live now as opposed ot the old place? ;-)
Thanks Harma and Roeland! Yes, it seems that I turn it off quite rarely as well. I do enjoy being without the 'net on holidays, but only if I could plan for that - and definitely not when I would rather work.
And no, the internet doesn't look different here - at least not the bits I've checked already, I let you know if something changed once I've seen it all ; )
Welcome back! I'm also a bit of an addict, and have to remind myself when emails go unanswered, that not everyone checks their email 5x per day. It's actually become less about me checking my email than a tic; I do it in between thoughts while I work, like a breather.
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