{"id":1322,"date":"2013-09-27T23:01:04","date_gmt":"2013-09-28T04:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/?p=1322"},"modified":"2014-01-24T16:01:50","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T21:01:50","slug":"getting-stuff-done-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/?p=1322","title":{"rendered":"Getting Stuff Done Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who hasn’t seen the Lifehacker article about coffee shop background noise being good for productivity<\/a> yet? Just about everyone has, or so it seems, anyway.<\/p>\n

In that vein, I have been looking for some background noise to have going so that I would stay awake and productive without having to drink 8 cups of coffee.<\/p>\n

I found a website called SoundDrown<\/a> where you can listen to a recorded coffee shop loop over and over. It was okay, but not quite interesting enough for me.<\/p>\n

I’m still looking for something suitably interesting. For now, I’m going to stick with Music For Programming<\/a>, but I’ve listened to their mixes so many times I’ve lost count. They are awesome “Getting Stuff Done” mixes, though.<\/p>\n

If I fire up International Departures<\/a>, I’ll just stop working all together.<\/p>\n

Miku’s Coming… <\/h3>\n

I got notified by Tenso<\/a> yesterday that my Vocaloid 3 bundle has shown up at their offices. Great.<\/p>\n

I had to provide proof of my US address, and that turned out to be a slight pain in the neck, because I forgot that my passport doesn’t have my address on it. That’s what I get for doing this stuff at 6 a.m. with no coffee in me yet.<\/p>\n

I heard back from them at around midnight telling me that I needed to send something better, and I sent them a scan of my driver’s license. I just heard back this morning that everything is A-OK, so I’m looking forward to getting my stuff from them sometime next week.<\/p>\n

The fees from Tenso are surprisingly low. The total cost of everything is 1990 yen, and that’s pretty cheap for getting something express mailed from Japan. That includes about 980 yen in handling fees, but to be fair, if I asked a friend to send stuff on for me, I would buy that friend a beer, anyway, and I doubt that that friend could get such a good deal on shipping.<\/p>\n

If the package arrives in good shape, I’ll probably start using them more often, because Amazon is crazy expensive for shipping. Also, I can buy used books if I have them shipped inside Japan and save more money that way.<\/p>\n

Building a New Computer<\/h3>\n

Finally, my old computer is dying a horrible, slow death from overheating too much. I keep getting BSODs due to overheating, and I have finally reached the “Screw it” point where I picked out some parts for a new rig. This time I’m going for an SSD main hard drive to run Win7 and all of my programs from, an Intel i7-4770 CPU, 16GB of RAM (for now), and a nice white Corsair case. For the mobo, I’m going with one of the ASUS TUF motherboards, to see how it does with dust, and an Arctic CPU cooler.<\/p>\n

My old case was a ThermalTake LanParty, and as a mATX form factor case, it was great for small gaming rigs that could be really portable. But as a small form factor case, taking it apart and putting it back together was murder on my fingers. Also, graphics cards, HDDs, and PSUs all had to fit together like a puzzle, and the cabling would always get in the way.<\/p>\n

And of course having all the parts on top of each other killed the airflow and heat dissipation. I’m kind of surprised it lasted as long as it did.<\/p>\n

I’ll have to put it all together this weekend and get it up and running.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The hunt for good ambient sounds\/music never seems to end. I heard from Tenso that my Vocaloid software showed up safely. I may use them more often for shipping stuff from Japan. Also, my desktop is dying, so it’s time to build a new one: one with the best airflow ever. (And an SSD!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,664,120],"tags":[757,756,755,587,741,753,758,903,754,759,745],"class_list":["post-1322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan-trip","category-music","category-technology","tag-amazon","tag-ambient-noise","tag-coffee-shop-noise","tag-computers","tag-hatsune-miku","tag-international-departures","tag-kindle","tag-music","tag-musicforprogramming","tag-paperwhite","tag-tenso","category-3-id","category-664-id","category-120-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1322"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}