I’m a tyrant when it comes to earphones (the small ear ones and not their larger cranial death grip cousins): I buy them, abuse them, wear them out in a few months, then feed them to squirrels. Then I kill off all their relatives and seize their estates.
Admittedly, I’m not much of an audiophile; I’m not the type who can tell the difference between MP3 and CD-quality immediately and I could care less about how heavy the bass is in simulating earthquakes. I’ve bought my share of crappy cheapo headphones (which I exchanged two-month-old broken ones for new phones at Walgreens on a regular basis as a student), but I didn’t expect much from them in the first place.
I also tried the much-praised Sony in-ear headphones that always seem to be on sale at Amazon’s. They violate your ears much like your physician during your annual checkup, but like the good doctor, it’s for a good cause, as the phones do provide much clearer sound and drown out most background noise. They also tended to explode (I’m guessing it’s the driver being overloaded or shorted) while in my ear.
But yea, for some reason or another, my earphones have a tendency to die short, unmemorable deaths. I do listen to a fair amount of music – 3 to 4 hours at work, usually on the train/bus/plane when travelling, on the computer when my roommate threatens to kick my ass – so they get worn out quickly. I’ve gone through 6 or 7 earphones in the past 2 years already, so here’s hoping that these new Shure E2g’s are as good as advertised.
Ah, a reason for this here site’s existence and evolution. According to a CNN article about a week back, web surfers judge a site’s aesthetic content in a blink of an eye, just quick enough for them to scroll to yawn or hit the back button. It’s even tougher than that 3-seconds-to-get-your-attention rule they use for television.
True, if you have no content, all you’ve done is compel a user to take long enough to sip his coffee and then close the browser in disgust. But apparently, someone who stumbles upon a site will most likely only hesitate for a split second, sans coffee, to leave it.
A sad parallel to the canonical dateless wonder, Mr. “I’ve got all the personality in the world but I fell out of the ugly tree hitting every branch on the way down” Nice Guy.
Recently I’ve been watching a lot of Asian films, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint the attributes that make them so personally endearing when compared to western cinema. The results are…inconclusive.
How are they different from western pictures? I’d like to say that their smaller budgets and more local target audiences make them rely less on canned special effects and expensive actors – but there’s been more more internationalized (e.g. westernized) big-budget movies in recent years. I’d like to say that they’re willing to try newer things, but I personally can’t strike the right chord with most indie films who do try and Asian films have become formulaeic in their own right.
Maybe it’s my Asian blood? I dunno, I still don’t get a lot of the cultural references, and some of the Japanese stuff is just crazy. For every quality film that I do get a chance to see, I probably had to endure some fifteen really bad ones.
Must be the non-Matrix-bastardized kung fu.
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It’s ironic that, for all the supposed technological superiority America holds over other nations, our American telecommunications industry seems to be made up of 80-year-olds who sit around muttering about the good old days of business. I usually wouldn’t care less about their archaic ways until I’m forced to switch cell phone carriers.
As it turns out, the cheapest way was through Chinese ninjitsu, otherwise known as using shady corporate policy loopholes to one’s advantage. My parents had a plan via Verizon Wireless, and one reseller had the means to sign me up for a new plan (with complimentary new phone), then switch me over to a family plan with my parents in a month. Since I don’t even use that many minutes on a given day, this made perfect sense and saves me $20-$25/month. ()
Just finished reading a book on site design – the one I exchanged DHTML and CSS Advanced for. Thankfully, this tome was much closer to what I wanted when I went out (on a whim, really) to conduct some book-learnin’.
Sites usually have two parts: the backend work (keeping, processing, and managing all that content) and the frontend design (all those pretty pictures, navigation, colors and text). Traditionally, software engineers dealt with the former and graphic designers dealt with the latter, with very little overlap in expertise.
Originally, I wanted to write a quick blurb about how the coming of the Internet doesn’t negate the importance of reference and learning textbooks. But then today, I had to promptly return a copy of DHTML and CSS Advanced as it merely told me 90% of what I learned via online tutorials and experimentation, and I realized that the subject matter isn’t that clear cut after all.
If you’ve never met a programmer, you might imagine that, being on the forefight of technology, he (forgive me, I only use “he” because it describes 90% of the programming population) would use a combination of online manuals/tutorials, search engines, and maybe a bit of knowledge sharing among peers to get his work done. All the code driving this site – from the backend database management to the interface and the glue that holds them together – I learned from a few select sites and the magic powers of Google. Creators and owners of these technologies have put up extensive manuals on their work for free, and anybody with a bit of free time and an inquisitive mind can be self-educated with much less effort than it used to take (e.g. via sneaking into lectures in universities you weren’t enrolled in).
