Friday, May 8, 2009

Waste or not?

Almost everything that I do throughout the day involves a computer. From correspondence with colleagues, friends, and family, to any aspect of my work. I write computer code, I run it on various machines, I type up all of my "pen and paper" calculations so that they are neat and easily readable (and transferable if I need to send them to a collaborator). In fact, from the hours of 8:30am to 10pm, except for maybe lunch, I am in front of my computer, or it is on and ready to notify me when I receive an email.

With many respects, computers aid tremendously in my daily life. My entire field is designed around the fact that we can do calculations that are actually completely impossible without a computer. And we're not talking "would just take a really long time" without a computer. Flat out impossible. As an example, a calculation I recently performed would have taken roughly 84 years on a single desktop computer (well, if it were running Windows, it would take a factor of ten longer). That was a simple calculation, and so doing it by hand would have just been impossible.

So I am very aware of the necessity of these things that have adorned every desk in the free world now. Also, I'm aware of the fact that everyone and their mother has brought up the issue that I'll bring up, but I'll mention it anyway. Do we really waste more time trying to get our computers to work than we should? I say this only because yet again, there are major computer issues happening to me right now that are basically forcing me not to be able to do the very things I needed to do this morning. The sad thing is that I'm going to use this as an excuse to just not work on what I'm supposed to, and I'll just play around with other random things, and still call it "work."

by Topher at 10:28 AM |