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.

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.

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.

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.

• Birds in his pants
• $30,000 bat house
• Man sues for right to wear skirts
• College students are wusses
• Holy awesome battle Batman!
• Dying woman takes pets with her
• Don’t use a crossbow to threaten police
• Celebration gone awry
• Taser your kid at work day
• Giant venomous spiders invade Australia

As an aside, I will be trying to put titles in each of the parts where there is a different story so that it is easier to follow which links go with what.

• Musician fined for feeding squirrel
• Spending the loot
• London Evening Standard says sorry for sucking
• Hiding in the womens bathroom
• Spiderman, Tinky Winky and Oompa-Loompa brawl
• Crazy Old Man
• French prison guards fight with French police

I am going to start off with a side by side comparison of some of the major players in the Twitter client world. I know several people who use TweetDeck and I know that Twitterific has been around forever. Tweetie is a really new entry but has gotten a lot of press so I thought I would cover it as well. There are certainly others, and if there is one that you would like compared I will give it a shot next go round.

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.