Assume the following: You are an audiophile. You can’t enjoy music in any situation unless it is at “audiophile-acceptable quality.” You have money to burn, and yes, that’s in “today’s economy.” Now consider the following account, by Mark Jaquith:
Canal phones offer much better sound than their “in ear†cousins, but in order to hear the full range of the sound (especially the bass), they must be inserted properly. This is definitely a subjective thing (ergo the different insertion tips), and something that takes practice and intimate knowledge of they layout of your ears. The phones come with a handy insertion guide, and Etymotic has a video on their site with even more detail.
Here’s what I’ve learned. First, make sure your ears are clean and dry! This is a great excuse to start being an adult about ear cleanliness. For the flanged tips, it helps to slightly moisten the flange prior to insertion. Don’t get it too wet! While a drop of water may help the tip slide into your ear canal, too much will make it easily slip back out. Use as little water as possible. To insert, slightly open your jaw, and pull on your ear, to straighten and open your ear canal. Which way you pull your ear will depend on which way your canal goes or bends. For me, I grab in the back, slightly above the lobe, and pull down and back. [...]
Seriously? Finagle your ear to accommodate canal buds? In order to listen to music at Godly quality while flying or waiting at the doc’s office? It might be worth the trouble, until you get a case of otitis externa. I still go by the old adage, Don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear.
January 27 2009, 17:00 | Filed under: Tech | 3 Comments |
We’ve all come across this kind of online feature before: “top 25″ this, “top ten” that, of any subject from skin care products to methods of murder. Most models follow two paradigms for presenting a feature like this. The first is your usual long article, with a jump or pagination, featuring more than one entry per page. A good example will be IHT’s 25 Examples of Good Urban Design (found from: OTB). The other method is to present one entry per method: whether it’s a page or Flash or AJAX slideshow. Some slideshows would be prefaced by short prose before sending the reader through an arduous journey of clicking through page after page of entries, with a photo and two or three sentences for each. Forbes’ The 25 Most Influential Liberals In The U.S. Media would be a representative example. I call this second method the Coffeetable Presentation, because it mimics the content-light nature of coffeetable books. Each chapter in such a book is introduced with a single-page, sparsely written introduction followed by high-quality color photos with tiny, short, but ultimately irrelevant and vapid captions.
Let’s take #25 of the Forbes list, Michael Pollan. The caption:
Writer and journalism professor, University of California, Berkeley
The author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Pollan has had more influence than any other contemporary writer on mainstream American thinking about what we eat. His manifesto–”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”–should now be in political vogue. (Obama likes arugula.)
There is no exposition whatsoever about Pollan’s infuence over mainstream American thinking about what we eat. I can argue that Rachel Ray’s ubiquitous cheekbones on a large number of processed food products (delish!) would have a greater “influence over mainstream American thinking abotu what we eat.” I can spend some time explaining why I think so. What does not fly is that it is because I said so. I don’t have numbers, so I can’t say how commonplace the appeal to authority has become in online writing. I can only say that among feature writers in Larger Media it is one of the most glaring errors they commit.
Let’s take in good faith the need for an appeal to authority in a caption. Perhaps there are word counts to not exceed, right? My great problem with Coffeetable Presentations stems from the inability to request a full list of the featured items. I will not groan over such a presentation if there is such a link that says “see the full list,” or even in the coarsely worded “click here to see all entries.” But too often in my experience, no such link exists.
It prevents fast scanning of the content, subjects the reader to wait times for each request, and makes it difficult to jump from one point of info to the other. I wonder, to what end is all this mousing about clicking, and the only reason that makes sense is that it allows the content provider more opportunities to serve out ads. Some might think that’s as good a reason as any, but I don’t think so.
January 26 2009, 13:22 | Filed under: CSS and Design,In print | 2 Comments |
The Obama reaffirms his victory in response to opposition suggestions on how to handle national matters.
What he needs next is a framed poster of the 2008 electoral map, along with a vote tally. Something like this:
A reminder to Republicans who want something out of The Obama.
Then all he has to do anytime someone disagrees with him is to point at the poster.
January 23 2009, 15:34 | Filed under: Politics | No Comments |
Thanks to Ian’s Shoelace Site and his entry on the lacing technique, I’ve rescued two pairs of shoes from being nigh unusable due to corrugation. A link on the shoelace site leads to the inventor’s webpage; it turns out the lacing is patented. How about that?
January 22 2009, 0:10 | Filed under: General | No Comments |
There. I took the chance with less than 24 hours to go, to declare that as of press time, January 19th, 2009 at 7PM, Barack Obama is not my President. Neither is he anyone’s because he hasn’t been sworn in yet.
Inspired by XRLQ, whose post includes something I do want to touch on. He says:
“I say, it’s the duty of every American conservative to say, loudly, proudly, early and often, “Barack Obama is not my President,” for as long as that is still true (if you’re not a U.S. citizen, it will always be true, so feel free to continue saying it after he’s been inaugurated, at which point he will indeed be my President but not yours). What say you?”
I say that if you are a willing denizen of this Union and choose to stay within its influence you are duty-bound to obey its laws, respect its flag, meet your responsibilities and enjoy the worthy privilege of being a denizen of the United States. For the sake of cultural lubrication—in order to not look like an ass to the rest of Americans with whom you choose to surround yourself—your President is the Chief Executive of the country your residence: the one in the White House.
UPDATE: Jan 20, 2009. It’s 9:48PM. He is my President now.
January 19 2009, 19:00 | Filed under: Politics | No Comments |
For a man who had history foisted upon him, who set aside party and principle in the name of results (yes, I know, it’s really a “yuck” quality of his), and yes, despite all the criticism from every political party imaginable, I want to at least say “thank you” to the outgoing President of the USA.
He did the best he could, he made some good choices, a lot of mediocre ones and a quite a few really bad ones, but he did what he knew and felt to be right. His presidency was marked with self-deprecating humor, and humanity.
I’m over 2006, and the many mistakes that he made. I’m over the damage that he may have done to the Republican Party, as if members of the Party had no hand in their own demise. He will be one of the most remembered Presidents, and while he may seem infamous now, I think that time will weather the sharp edges.
January 19 2009, 17:15 | Filed under: Politics | No Comments |
I was doing some random reading on Wikipedia and the subject of survivalism when I came across an entry for Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall. The Cliff’s Notes version of course would leave out nuances that would otherwise be detected in a reading of the book, but it raised an interesting question for me. The Fithp were appalled at the human use of nuclear weaponry due to the detrimental effects it has on the environment. At the end of the novel, facing the death of most of its population the Fithp surrender as subjugated members of the human herd. While it leaves the reader to conclude what the human reaction was to the surrender, it seems to follow that the surrender would have left their interstellar technology in the hands of humanity.
Herein lies the rub: if I were a leader of an alien race faced with defeat and the mass murder of my people, if I were so appalled at the humans’ use of nukes to win a battle, why in the Sam Hill would I surrender my technology to these humans, possibly unleashing a plague upon the rest of the universe? Would I want my race to go down in history as that which unleashed humanity upon everyone else?
January 17 2009, 21:15 | Filed under: In print | No Comments |
Without it, no narrative in any medium of any will carry color. Every viewer or reader determines the limits of that suspension, but it’s always there. Even when reading historical accounts or watching documentaries, I see the need for it.
I tend to be a generally skeptical guy, but I’m not the type to deconstruct what I know to be fiction. This is why I enjoy watching well-written procedural dramas on TV like House, The Closer and Criminal Minds. I also enjoy watching SciFi shows, not because I take in each and every unbelievable circumstance, but because they are, ultimately, plot points.
There is a subset of viewers and readers who actually find pleasure in breaking down a narrative into its most unbelievable elements. I am not one of them.
January 16 2009, 14:42 | Filed under: Culture | No Comments |
Take any dynamic—or relationship—between two people, or two groups of people. Now, give this dynamic enough time for both parties to discover a fair and relatively full disclosure of each other. I have come to the conclusion that whatever the consquences of that dynamic—good or bad, triumphant or tragic, whatever they may be—after a certain point in time, both parties are responsible for those consequences.
Take note, I did not say “deserve;” at worst, “beget” would be my harshest assessment.
It may seem cruel or unfair for me to say that the battered wife of so many years is responsible for the bruises on her body or the insanity that she may descend into, but at one point in her life this person has come to the realization that nothing will change in her partner and that the choice—the opportunity to choose—has come and will be made. Even if that choice was to stay in that relationship. What happens to her next is a result of her choice to stay. The animal with whom she has chosen to stay also has had the opportunity to make the choice.
It is a cold, hard calculus that applies to almost any situation in life and taking the initiative to make a change in any relationship is a responsibility of either person.
January 14 2009, 20:40 | Filed under: Culture | No Comments |
I turn twenty-nine this year, and as quickly as 2008 flew by, I know this year will, too. I have no progeny, and as of now I have not what is typically called a career. Then again how is a career defined? A post by John A. Cohen has me thinking about how it is perceived and defined by others. In his post he reveals his choice to enter law school despite being an “artist at heart,” to summarize. I think I’ve encountered enough vapid pop-culture psychobabble to differentiate a job from a career. The bit about a job being something that merely pays the bills and provides no fulfillment, tends to stand out. It is oversimplistic, though. The people, legendary but not mythical, that we hear about working two jobs to support their children, for example, may gain fulfillment from the fact that the children they brought into the world are fed and surviving. For some, survival is fulfillment. For others, those who have gone past survival, fulfillment means something else.
I do not have the heart of an artist, and my skills are above-average at best when it comes to my craft. I am a fiery debater and a passionate arguer, but I am a logician and a scientist from as long as I can remember. I find beauty in an elegantly simple explanation for an observation. As for passion, I have always been wary of the its very nature. While it drives us to do intensity, it can consume us as well.
I have done much pondering about what I want to do, or try to do. Right now I work in medical equipment sales, a job that allows me to afford my lifestyle, and pay off the debt that I incurred during my idiot phase. I am aware of my contribution to society as a result of my work for this company. The gadgets I offer save lives and prevent health crises. The nature of sales as an interpersonal dynamic between buyer and seller is quite close to that of teacher and student. The key in growing a business is establishing a lasting relationship with a buyer, which is the case especially in a manufacturing business. The problem face by retailers (resellers) like myself is that customer loyalty is a more challenging goal.
I mention this because higher education as a career choice has increased its appeal. It reflects my personal strengths and abilities, and I am able to meet the needs of personal advancement and the very human need to make a mark on society. Higher ed usually requires research, and, with a few changes in lifestyle, it is also an economical choice. Best of all, I like it.
January 5 2009, 16:38 | Filed under: Living fine | No Comments |
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