office

Soundproofing is... kind of an art. It's not as simple as buying something and slapping on your walls. And the word 'soundproofing' is a bit of a loaded term.

You could mean deadening sound, so you can record podcasts with that signature radio sound. Or you could mean isolating a room from outside noise, which is an entirely different process. Or you could work on reducing resonance, echo, or just certain frequencies.

In my case, I wanted to build kind of a 'sound cocoon' in the middle of this space, so I could record any time, day or night, even if my AC is running.

Note: This blog post has an accompanying video: I replaced my office lights for better video quality.

Earlier this year, I started recording more videos and doing live streams in my office. Originally I just used a webcam, a Logitech C920.

This is a frame of video from that webcam. It's adequate, but not too flattering, and you can see there's a lot of contrast where one side of my face is bright and blown out, and the other side is 'muddy' or 'flat'.

Sorry for the radio silence over the past couple months—I've been quite busy! In addition to finishing up my responsibilities at my old job (I'm going to start my new job at Acquia in just a week!), I've had a bunch of crazy, fun, and interesting things happen lately:

From Seth Godin:

Factories used to be arranged in a straight line. That's because there was one steam engine, and it turned a shaft. All the machines were set up along the shaft, with a belt giving each of them power. The office needed to be right next to this building, so management could monitor what was going on.

Read on...

I worked from home one day. That day I accomplished about 3x as many tasks as a normal day at the office. Why is this? This post offers a pretty good summary: Why You Can't Work at Work.