I look forward to the day when workplace noise is treated like second-hand smoke.
The Quiet Ones
221–230 of 397 posts
Re: The Quiet Ones
#222I lived in the "quiet" floor in my dorm in college. No greater farce has ever been endured. I really wish noise-cancelling headphones existed then.
Enh; I have the best, Bose QC-15s, and they don't do much.
Re: The Quiet Ones
#223They say a single noise bothers people more in the country than the same noise does in the city. Perhaps the same is true on the train. It seems like stress I don't need.
Re: The Quiet Ones
#224On a related topic: if you are a developer and are forced to deeply concentrate in public places, after three years of doing that daily I arrived at a system that could keep me coding. 1. Figure out what earplugs work well. Working well means good sound suppression but also means earplugs that you can have in your ear comfortably for long stretches. I can sleep the entire night in the ones I settled on (I buy them bu…
The best thing I've bought in the last few years has been a pair of etymotic earbuds with "custom fit" earbuds:
http://www.etymotic.com/customfit/index.html
~$200 total, $100 for the basic earbuds and another $100 to get the earbuds "custom fit."
When they're off, they offer almost as good noise suppression as earplugs. When they are on, I can listen to music with great fidelity. I mostly listen to classical and rock.
Most importantly, they are extremely comfortable. I bought them when I was flying cross-country every week, and I wanted to have something that wouldn't hurt my ears after a few hours.
Re: The Quiet Ones
#225One thing I have noticed, about myself and others, is that people are more oblivious to noise and how much they generate when they are in a group. It seems that a group doing most things makes many think its just fine.
Re: The Quiet Ones
#226My life has been a search for quiet for as long as I can remember. I think the fundamental problem with noisy people is not that they're inconsiderate, but that they don't have any train of thought to interrupt, and they thus don't realize the havoc they're wreaking. When I was living in Providence, working on On Lisp , I told my loud but well-meaning neighbors that I was writing a hard computer book, and that made t…
My trick is to use http://rainymood.com - the background noise of a storm is surprisingly peaceful.
Re: The Quiet Ones
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep late hours in part because, once everyone else goes to bed -- not just housemates but my entire town -- everything becomes still and quiet, and in that stillness I'm finally able to think more deeply, more clearly, about anything. You've probably already had your fill of argument for the day, but I think that assuming that noisy people don't have a train of thought to interrupt is a little bit uncharitable. (I…
My mother is a pretty deep thinker and she requires constant TV chatter simply because she has tinnitus and can't stand the sound of it. But I think she's an exception.
Have you introduced her to brown noise? I typically use it for blocking out background sounds when I'm tired of listening to music, but it might work well for tinnitus too.
Re: The Quiet Ones
#228That's funny, the sentence at the end, before the pictogram, has the following censored expletive in invisible text: #@$%&!
Re: The Quiet Ones
#229My life has been a search for quiet for as long as I can remember. I think the fundamental problem with noisy people is not that they're inconsiderate, but that they don't have any train of thought to interrupt, and they thus don't realize the havoc they're wreaking. When I was living in Providence, working on On Lisp , I told my loud but well-meaning neighbors that I was writing a hard computer book, and that made t…
> I think the fundamental problem with noisy people is (...) that they don't have any train of thought to interrupt
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying: are you saying that noisy people don't think (or are stupid)?
I'm a "quiet one" too, but I think noisy people are the opposite of "thinkless"; they appear to be afraid of their own mind and what it could tell them about the insignificance of the world in general and their life in particular (anyone's life).
What they want is distraction; they use noise as a lid over an even more tumultuous and noisy torrent of depressing thoughts.
Re: The Quiet Ones
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to know how loudly you need to type to exceed the ambient noise on an Amtrak car, of all places.
I've not ridden Amtrak, just Caltrain, but as regards UK trains the answer is that background noise doesn't matter. People generally talk loud enough to happily hear each other over any background noise. They tend not to notice, either. As such, when businesspeople consider the quiet car somewhere for meetings because everywhere else has noise, everyone in the car hears exactly what they are discussing.
I'm on the bus at the moment on the way to work, I use a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge in my personal time, it's a decent machine and was within my budget at the time I bought it, but I agree, the keyboard can be extremely loud in quiet areas, but that's one of the reasons I like it.
My iMac at work has a nearly silent keyboard and it drives me up the walls, being so used to developing in my spare time on a loud machine.