The Sound of Productivity can be Annoying
My wife and I are celebrating.
After 4 long years of dialup at home, we finally signed up for high speed Internet at home via WildBlue satellite.
How’s the service?
Well, before we’d get like 2 or 3, maybe 5 or 6 KB/s on a download.
Now we’re getting 60.
Compared to the 600 we get on the DSL at the church, it’s slow, but it’s still 10x faster than dialup, and 10x is more than enough to go from “intolerable” to “enjoyable.”
The latency (delay between “Take me to this site” and “Here’s the site!”) is a bit annoying, but nothing compared to the infuriating boredom which ensues from dialup.
As a friend put it: “Welcome to 1998.”
He’s not really wrong. In 1997 we signed up for @Home, which was one of the first cable modem companies in NJ. It was glorious, hampered only by the fact that my then-speed-demon machine was a P-133Mhz with 128MB of RAM. In its day it a Ford Mustang of the Information Superhighway (especially when you consider it replaced a 25Mhz machine with 32MB of RAM!) but today it definitely looks like a Pinto.
So I’m sitting on the bed with my laptop, and Tracey is working on the Desktop. We’ve been here for several hours — in fact I don’t remember the last time Tracey was up this late.
A few minutes ago she turned around and said “What’s that noise?”
We then had the to-be-expected conversation of me asking What Noise? followed by her trying to imitate the sound and then me mocking her. She claimed the sound was coming from my computer. I told her it was all in her head.
I thought it was over until a few minutes later she said, “Right there! That noise! What was that?!?!”
“Oh” I thought, realizing exactly what it was (and that her impression of it wasn’t all that bad, I just no longer “heard” it because I was used to it:
(Click below to play)
It’s the sound TextExpander plays by default when you use a shortcut.
For a more harmonious life, you may want to disable it here:
But I keep it on for the occasional time when I accidentally type a shortcut where I don’t intend for it to be!
I’m considering making it her ringtone on my phone.