Every once in a great while I get to buy something new. It does not happen often, and it is not usually on the scale of the HDTV that I want, but sometimes making a really good choice on a smaller purchase is even better.
I have been working on several music projects for the last couple of years and am constantly listening to music and evaluating its quality. My experience with the Apple headphones that are included with the iPod have been disappointing. Don’t get me wrong I am as much or more of an Apple fanboi as the next twenty-something, but the included headphones have been a sore point for many others and really the worst part of the entire iPhone/iPod experience.
This past year I was able to get an iPod Touch. It has been fantastic but I kept on fighting again with the really poor quality headphones. For me part of the listening
experience is being able to hear bass. In the earbuds the upper registers are tinny and the lower registers are pretty much non existent in my experience. When I would listen at home I could use my big over ear cans (and the experience is amazing) but for listening in the car or when walking through a store no one wants to be that guy.
I finally broke (one of the buds randomly stopped giving out sound) my first pair after about 2 months of use back in February. Because it was so new, the guy at the Apple store slipped me a new pair and it was all good. Then I broke a second pair (those legitimately cracked because I let the earbuds swing down to the ground while I was picking up Greyson and walking) about 2 months ago and I realized that I needed
something better sounding and more durable.
A friend of mine from work pointed me in the direction of skullcandy. I had heard of the company because of their partnership with major music artists on some ridiculous headphones but had never looked into anything else the company makes.
That was a mistake. I was able to get a pair of inexpensive, in-ear headphones that fit so well they are almost noise cancelling. The sound is fantastic. I can hear bass. I can hear background conversations between band members before songs start all without turning the volume up past half even in a noisy environment.
I would like to use this opportunity to ask Steve Jobs: Why can you not bundle the Skullcandy Inked line of headphones in with iPods? They only cost $20 at Best Buy. They sound fantastic and they don’t look weird or anything.
For the rest of you, if you listen to music on a regular basis or even casually, I fully recommend these headphones. Listening with them on is like getting to listen to all of your music for the first time again, rediscovering whole portions that you were not even aware existed. Let me know what you think or if you have other affordable alternatives that you have come across. @danieldezago.
So the theme copy situation from the other day has been resolved to my liking. I decided that I really like this theme and to make a new header that would be consistent across all of my other websites. Also, I redirected www.danieldezago.com to point to my .mac website rather than directly to my wordpress blog.
It actually works out pretty well overall I think. I have a new design, the blog is visible in an abridged format on my .mac site, and if anyone actually reads this and clicks a link for the article, the header is consistent from one site to the other so it blends it better.
So this is not in the list of updates that I said I was going to write. I was reading Mark Artrip’s blog and really like how he restyled the look. Very nice. That of course inspired me to take a look at the different themes available and see if there were any that jumped out at me.
Of course now that I picked a new one, I realize that I totally copied his theme. So right now I am not sure if I can keep it which would really be a shame, the side column and different sections look so much more clean and neat than my last theme. Maybe if I come up with a header that is in a different enough style then it will not be so obvious. In the mean time feel free to weigh in on this important issue. Until I decide I am going to leave my blog lame and headerless.
If you don’t have a wordpress account to leave comments, go ahead and send a tweet to @danieldezago or leave a message on Facebook, it all goes to the same place.
I have been swamped. Sure that may sound like an excuse for not updating this blog but seriously, I have had so much going on that I have been just twittering for the last four months or so. And now that I bring it up, I have been wondering if there is a point to having a blog any more. In the world of constant updates and keeping in touch passively like I know I do, who takes the time to read something more than 140 characters?
Having reflected on that I have decided that there is most certainly a place for a blog. Not everything in life can or should be reduced to mini-updates or shortened URLs with hashmarks and @replies. On that note here are the posts that I am planning on writing over the next several weeks in no particular order:
- howto: decorate a nursery really cheap
- howto: refinish wood furniture
- howto: make backwashing your pool easier
- friends: why everyone should have some
- greyson dezago
- life change: different video games
- books I have read lately
I think that will do it for now. There may be posts that come out that are not on this list but these are the things that I have been meaning to write and have not. Now they are on a to-do list that I can promptly get around to ignoring.
Second installment of the new Daily Fodder. Links to all of the stories are below.
I am going to get back in to the daily fodder routine. It is pretty easy now to record myself as I drive home and then upload it to YouTube. Really with a couple of clicks I can have a daily vlog. Here is the first entry. Not true fodder content yet just an introduction.
I have a friend who is a big Kanye West fan. So it was with him in mind that I started listening to Kanye’s latest album a couple of weeks ago.
I want it to be know that despite my strong dislike of Kanye as a person, I think he does have talent in spades. I really wanted to like this album or at least a couple of songs from it. So I listened to this album all the way through six times before I decided that it had great potential and was a cool project but I just did not like it.
The songs themselves are great with catchy lyrics and beats. There were actually a few, Paranoid and Love Lockdown that made it into my 4* play list so the whole album was not a wash in that regard. It is a pretty big change as far as style from other albums of Kanye’s that I have listened to and to his credit I think that the content of the album was great and that is what got me to listen to it so many times before I made up my mind.
Really what tipped the scales agains the album making it into my good list was that voice effect that has become more and more popular in recent years. I think it can be great as an embellishment but really there was not a pure word uttered until sometime in the seventh song. Now if it was anyone but Kanye I would have said they were covering up for their inability to sing, but since I know that he has ability, I just do not understand the point of it being so prevalent throughout the album.
Overall there are some things that I think would have made this idea better. First I think that it should have been released as an EP. There are enough good songs on here to warrant a release of some kind, but in my view not quite enough to have a solid full album. Sure there have been some hits off of it but those could have been hits off an EP just the same and he still would have been able to have his “personal” project. Also, I wish that he had done the writing and the beats but maybe gotten someone like Justin Timberlake to sing some of the tracks. Like I said before I liked the lyrics and beats of several of the tracks but an outstanding singer would have taken those to the next level.
Pros: Good lyrics to the songs, catchy beats, Kanye West.
Cons: Overuse of vocal effects gets annoying, no huge standout tracks, Kanye West.
Summary: Listen to it a few times, take the tracks you like and pitch the rest.
I want to start off by saying that I am not necessarily an excitable person. If something that sounds huge and sweeping is announced, I am generally going to be sceptical until I can find a reason to buy in.
Recently there has been a lot on the news about swine flu and how it has killed something like 158 people in Mexico, some more people in OH and other places in the midwest where they handle pigs. I am not trying to be calouse here or anything there are real people that have died and that is sad.
However, there are a few other things that I would like to point out. All that I ask is that you read through this list then you can go back to watching Fox New tell everyone that the sky is falling and swine flu is going to be the next major global pandemic. Below are some citations about Swine Influenza from Wikipedia:
The CDC reports that the symptoms and transmission of the swine flu from human to human is much like that of seasonal flu. Common symptoms include fever, lethargy, lack of appetite and coughing, while runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea have also been reported.[26] It is believed to be spread between humans through coughing or sneezing of infected people and touching something with the virus on it and then touching their own nose or mouth.[27] Swine flu cannot be spread by pork products, since the virus is not transmitted through food.[27] The swine flu in humans is most contagious during the first five days of the illness although some people, most commonly children, can remain contagious for up to ten days. Diagnosis can be made by sending a specimen, collected during the first five days, to the CDC for analysis.[28]
The swine flu is susceptible to four drugs licensed in the United States, amantadine, rimantadine, oseltamivir and zanamivir; however, for the 2009 outbreak it is recommended it be treated under medical advice only with oseltamivir and zanamivir to avoid drug resistance.[29] The vaccine for the human seasonal H1N1 flu does not protect against the swine H1N1 flu, as they are antigenically very different.
So what does all that mean? Basically if you work with pigs (aside from the office jokes you could make) and think you might have the flu, you could have a different form of the flu that actually does already have a treatment. However drugs cost money so what can you do to protect yourself from inevitible infection? Read below:
Recommendations to prevent spread of the virus among humans include using standard infection control against influenza. This includes frequent washing of hands with soap and water or with alcohol-based hand sanitizers, especially after being out in public.[35] Vaccines against the H1N1 strain in the 2009 human outbreak are being developed and could be ready as early as June 2009.[36]
Experts agree that hand-washing can help prevent viral infections, a surprisingly effective way to prevent all sorts of diseases, including ordinary influenza and the new swine flu virus. Influenza can spread in coughs or sneezes, but an increasing body of evidence shows little particles of virus can linger on tabletops, telephones and other surfaces and be transferred via the fingers to the mouth, nose or eyes. Alcohol-based gel or foam hand sanitizers work well to destroy viruses and bacteria. Anyone with flu-like symptoms such as a sudden fever, cough or muscle aches should stay away from work or public transportation and should see a doctor to be tested.
So Dan, all I have to do is wash my hands? Yep. Pretty much.
Now that we have some information out there about how much easier it is to not get swine flue than it is to get it, let me share some death statistics. There were almost three times more vehicular fatalities in construction zones in the entire year of 2007 than have died from swine flu. Talking again about Mexico and the 158 people that died there because of swine flu, it is kind of an insignificant number compared with the 8,463 that were executed in Mexico’s drug war last year. I know that their war has gotten press time as well but I would say disproportionately. Do you see stories for the drug war 5356% more often? Or maybe you are going to say, well Mexico’s drug war doesn’t affect anyone that I know like swine flu could. You are possibly right, but if you are going to care about one statistic in Mexico you can follow a sequence of events and probably find a way that drug executions affect you.
Again, I am not sitting here trivializing the deaths of anyone I am just stating that from a standpoint of what should get covered and what is blown way out of proportion in order to sell more sensationalist stories they could have picked something with a little more clout. Bottom line: wash your hands. If you deal with pigs or poultry wash them again, problem solved. Now if only Fox News could find something worth reporting on.
What I am saying is this:
Flu spreads around the world in seasonal epidemics, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands annually — millions in pandemic years.
We do not do play by play for regular flu which is way more lethal, so get on with life and report on something worth reporting.
