On Tuesday my plan was to eat breakfast, make dinner, take care of some admin stuff (emails, responding to post comments, order new business cards, etc.), finish a blog post, and then spend the rest of the day working on an article that’s due in a month. And if I had time, work on a proposal for some real architecture work (YES!).

Well I ate breakfast and made an awesome tomato cream sauce. Then I got about five emails read before my macbook pro started glitching out. My workday was more or less over as my laptop became useless. Fortunately I only had to wait two hours to see someone at the Apple Store a mile from my house. My laptop was then whisked away to Apple’s secret repair facility and I was in laptop purgatory for three to five business days, assuming the diagnosis of a bad graphics card was correct.

By the way, this experience just reinforced my love for Glitch Art, RE: this YouTube video, this twitter account, this facebook page.

Good time to gloat about how pencils don’t crash. And paper never becomes too blurry to read or filled with static, right? But hold on there for a moment. I lost my day of work because of my inability to ignore problems. If I needed to work I could have just used another machine. I chose (or let myself) be distracted. It was my personality that ruined most of  the day’s productivity. My work wasn’t locked up or lost. It was all backed up on Carbonite. I could have started writing on my wife’s computer (which is what I did). Or our iPad. In fact I started writing this post on my Android phone while sitting in the mall waiting for my appointment at the Apple Store.

Our computer tools are now part of a vast ecosystem of options. I could partially diagnose the problem thanks to Google (also on my phone). If my computer became an expensive shiny brick I would just be inconvenienced. I could buy a new machine and download all my data. The local physicality of my data is inconsequential to its existence. I didn’t lose anything on Tuesday but time. And that lost time was mostly due to my own psychological issues. Just ask my wife. She’ll agree.

All these benefits are fairly new. Five years ago this would have been a tear soaked disaster for me. Now not so much. For some reason I’m reminded of that quote about machine guns and bows that I loved. When we think about what technology has to offer architects regarding improving our abilities, we need to think big. A computer is no longer just a replacement for a 2B pencil. It is and needs to be more. If CAD or BIM is just a digital pencil then there’s not much value add there. Keep that in mind with all the new tools at our disposal. How are they extra-dimensional? How do they go beyond digital approximations of our old analog champions?