Procrastinating again
At the moment, I should be working on the paper for last week's class, not to mention the paper for this week's class. Oh well.

Pet peeve of the Year
It seems far enough along into the year to have a pet peeve of the year. I doubt anything, within the last month and a half of the year could be quite as aggravating (other than perhaps Christmas marketting, but unfortunately, that's an annual frustration). I'm not a big fan of euphemisms, in fact I think they're downright dishonest. Why invent a new word to make you feel better just when the existing terminology doesn't meet your tastes? Here's the old word, you can figure out what the annoying new word is:

Main Entry: dan·dy
Pronunciation: 'dan-dE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural dandies
Etymology: probably short for jack-a-dandy, from jack + a (of) + dandy (origin unknown)
Date: circa 1780
1 : a man who gives exaggerated attention to personal appearance
2 : something excellent in its class
- dan·dy·ish /-dE-ish/ adjective
- dan·dy·ish·ly adverb

Download Free Music Legally!
I like the idea of downloading music. There's no real reason I should need to go to the store to buy a metallic piece of plastic when what I really want is the abstract data on the CD. I also have nothing against paying for music if it's reasonably priced. So I've been trying out Apple's iTunes.

I've been pretty much instantly hooked. I'll readily admit it's not quite perfect - you can't listen and try out discs like you can at HMV - but it's pretty well polished. You enter your credit card data once, after that it's just a few clicks to browse available albums (decent selection, though not as good as HMV). It's just a two mouse clicks to download either an entire album or a single song. Downloads were pretty spiffy, and track order is preserved. It took a few minutes to download an entire album. It took another few clicks and a few more minutes to burn the album to CD.

I haven't tried copying the audio files around. The downloaded files are DRM protected, supposedly limiting you to playing the files on 3 PCs. I haven't run into instances where this has gotten to be a problem, but if I ever get an mp3 player I'm sure I'll have to find some way around it. At the moment, my main concern is to not bankrupt myself given the ease to buy music now.

The perils of impulse buying
So the headphones of my aging discman have been in some stage of dying for some time now. Either there's something loose or there's some excessive capacitance somewhere because anything with a reasonable amount of bass - basically any music at all - causes a very annoying static-y type noise.

I normally don't use the discman often. Practically the only time I do use it is on plane trips, and I have been on a good number this year. I stopped off at Fry's the morning before a flight to find some earbut style headphones. The cheapest ones were $7.99. I figured I could afford a little more than that, I did want some decent sounding buds. I browsed the shelves and my eyes resed on Sony's MDR-NC11 Noise Canceling Fontopia Ear-Bud Headphones. Huge whooshing sounds coming out of my wallet, but unfortunately I liked them too much to return them.

I'll be the first to admit they're wildly overpriced. However, after using them I do find them very useful. The best feature of these headphones are the in-ear design. Unlike most earbuds I've used, these ones actually seal your ear and act as earplugs, blocking out most, but not all outside noise. The headphones come with 3 sizes of earplugs, with the medium size as the default. Initially I thought the headphones didn't do much, since the medium size didn't form much of a seal in my ears. The large size fit quite well, with a little adjustment the seal is good while remaining comfortable. Since maybe 80% of the quieting effect is due to the physical blockage rather than the noise-cancelling circutry, I would say the MDR-EX71SL headphones, that have the same earplug but no noise-cancelling circuit is a much better deal.

Out of the box I realized the headphones need an AAA battery to work. You can use them as regular headphones without, but then that'd be a waste, and the big plastic box that holds the circutry would also be really annoying. Luckily I happened to have some spare AAAs lying around at work. The noise-canceling effect works rather well for low frequency hums. A significant portion of the hum on a plane goes away, making plane rides significantly more comfortable. Normally, I have my discman turned way up on the plane (I'm sure this is a BAD thing for my ears). With the headphones, the volume was turned down significantly. The circuitry does amplify the music, but subjectively, it did feel quieter and more comfortable. However, most of the computer fan noise at work wasn't filtered out. I'm guessing it's too high frequency.

Overall there's too many minuses to make these worthwhile. The headphones stick out of your ears pretty far because of the microphones for the noise cancelling functionality. It means you can't sleep on your ears. Also when your ears are plugged up, you can hear minute noises transmitted physically by the headphone wires, ie moving around. For everyday use, it just doesn't cancel out enough noise to be worthwhile. However, on my last flight, with the headphones on, the baby crying at the front of the plane practically disappeared, and the engine hum faded significantly. I got a *lot* more rest than normal. I'm keeping them.