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Since this summer, I've been using a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pros. Let me just say that they're excellent headphones, and they provide better attenuation than most noise cancellation headphones without murdering the sound quality the way active noise canceling headphones do. This is a great feature when North is having a party, or just when my roommate is listening to music on his speakers. However, like all closed-back headphones, they're a bit constricting, and there are some minor audio artifacts caused by the hard backing.

So, last week, I picked up a pair of Grado SR60's. They are also excellent 'phones, especially for the price. The sensation of having fresh air on my ears is worth it alone. Of course, they're fully open-backed, so they don't provide any protection from external noise at all. But, when it's quiet enough, they're awesome.

I thought it might be useful to give some basic impressions of the two pairs of headphones in a typical usage situation. I'm in my room right now with some not-too-loud noise, and I've got both headphones plugged into my computer via my HeadRoom Total Bithead. The first source material is my FLAC rip of the Brian Wilson SMiLE album — if you haven't heard it, you should. If this had come out when it was supposed to (i.e., 40 years ago), the Beach Boys would have been a bigger name than the Beatles. After that, I've got another FLAC rip, this time of Pearl Jam's Ten, which is considerably heavier, and should provide a nice contrast. Anyhow, here's my thoughts:

• "Wonderful", Sennheiser: Great immersion. It is much easier to focus on, and thus hear, fine details in the music with these cans, since they block out so much of that pesky external noise.
• "Wonderful", Grado: These seem a bit clearer than the Sennheisers. It's a little harder to focus on the music over the background noise, since there is background noise. However, both the highs and the lows seem more defined using the Grados (note: this is with the stock "soft" foam caps. I haven't tried the "doughnut" caps yet)
• "Surf's Up", S Everything seems much stronger with the Sennheisers. It seems like they're a bit easier to drive. The background instruments really pop out, particularly the plucked instrument around 1:20 (guitar?)
• "Surf's Up", G Voices are much clearer and vibrant, more "there". I have to turn up the volume a bit to get the same amount of sound out, but I can live with that.
• "Even Flow", S Very engaging, but slightly murky at the edges — the guitar fuzz seems slightly deadened. Still groovable.
• "Even Flow", G Still noisy outside, but every note seems as raw here as it does on decent loudspeakers. Even though I'm less isolated while wearing the Grados, they seem to have more presence than the Sennheisers

I could continue all day, but I've actually got homework to do (I know, crazy). So if I were to take a bottom line, I'd say that I prefer the Grados, and if you've got a quiet enough environment to sustain open-backed headphones for much of the time, they're a great investment. However, in a college dorm, particularly on weekends, the insulation in the Sennheisers is much handier. If you have to choose, consider your environment. Or, you know, get both. :-)

Oh, and if you do end up getting either of these, I highly recommend purchasing from HeadRoom. They're not always the cheapest on the Internet, but they're honest, quick, and have the best support department in the industry. Oh, and they make great amps.

Ciao.

If you haven't seen the recent Microsoft Interoperability announcement, I suggest you read it. It's been Slashdotted, so I figure there's a decent chance that everybody on the Internet has seen it already. This is, of course, an extension of the Microsoft Office Binary Formats release of a few days ago, and I'm equally leery about it. There are some interesting comments on the Office Binary formats on the web, including these by Jeff Licquia, and those he links to by Joel Spolsky.

On the one hand, this is an amazing opportunity for F/OSS developers and pretty much everybody interested in cross-platform interoperability. There are probably quite a few OpenOffice.org developers that would have killed to get free access to the specs for MS Word and Excel files over the past few years, considering how close to impossible it must have been to reverse-engineer everything. And, if it pans out, I'm sure that this will lead to better Microsoft format compatibility in the future years. If it pans out. For one thing, the specifications are immense and ridiculously complex, and I don't know if anybody's going to bother including Lotus 1-2-3-compatible Excel format importers in OOo. The somewhat more serious concern is whether the "Microsoft Open Specification Promise" is acceptable. IANAL, but it seems that this prohibits implementers from ever filing a patent infringement suit against Microsoft for related technologies, which might be a stifler, particularly for commercial competition like Corel WordPerfect. But, hey, maybe I'm reading it wrong and it's all good. Maybe we'll see a better Wine, OOo, AbiWord, and everything else tomorrow. I just don't know.

Compiz 0.7 has been released. Any guesses on when it'll end up in the Gentoo repositories?

Why pay somebody to tell you about yourself, when you can just ask your friends to do it? That seems to be the premise of this site, which I saw on an old note of Richard Mehlinger's (yes, Facebook is weird like that). So, yeah.

Awesomeness.

Today marks my first week back in sunny California. Actually, scratch the "sunny" part — it's rained here almost every day since I arrived. It's still nice to be somewhere where the average daily temperature has more than one digit, though.

Class is exactly as I remembered it. Hours drag by, but days seem to end almost without beginning in the first place. I'm staying on top of my homework, which is a good thing. We'll see how well I can keep that up, particularly when biology and STEMS (signals and systems engineering) start to load it on.

I've also started a new job here at HMC. I've joined the Computer Science department staff, which is awesome. I've always enjoyed systems administration, and now I get to do it for a large and sophisticated network. So far I've identified and provided a solution for a misbehaving compiler problem on the CS105 machine, and helped Yaniv rewrite the kiosk to be valid (and working) HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Not a huge list of a achievements, I'll admit, but I've only been doing stuff for a few days.

Speaking of computers, I've got a new face returning to my stable of productive machines: an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. I just purchased one off of eBay to replace the one that got broken at Durfee, and so far it's working out great. I never will cease to be amazed at how incredible the handwriting recognition is, or how perfect the form-factor is for good handwriting recognition. I've got a LAN card coming in next week, so maybe I'll even be able to bring it into the 21st Century. Cool, no?

Not everything is sunny in the world of computing. A recent Gentoo change (unwisely pushed out to ~x86 and ~amd64, in my opinion) caused keyboard mappings to come from HAL, which had the end effect of completely breaking my keyboard under X. Yes, it's possible to fix with a clever combination of .fdi files and a corrected Xmodmap, but the problem should not have happened in the first place. Silly devs. If you're afflicted, this bugzilla thread should help.

Okay, enough procrastination. I suppose I'm going to go do some more work. Good bye, reader.

PS: Feel free to add a Comment, if you exist. I have strong suspicions that you do not...

So, the news stations are calling the Iowa primary. And, I guess I'm happy. On the one hand, my preferred presidential candidate, Barack Obama, is being hailed as the winner of the Democratic primary. Which is awesome. I think his progressive policies are a breath of fresh air to the White House, and I think that it's time for this country to show the world that it is big enough to elect a man to the Oval Office even if he is a minority. So woo hoo to that.

Oh the other hand, Mike Huckabee is winning the Republican nomination. This is both a blessing and a horrifying curse. The man is what I've heard termed a "religious nut job". He's clearly a Libertarian candidate, favoring removal of pretty much all taxes (a commonly-held and idiotic belief), but he still thinks he'll have money left over to poor into Iraq and rejuvenate schooling in the U.S. Oh yeah, and did I mention that he's a religious nutjob? Do the Republicans of Iowa really dislike the Separation of Church and State that much?

Okay, calming down a bit. As you can tell, I am not a fan of Mike Huckabee. I happen to like the services provided by the Federal government, and think that we have no need to go back to the conditions that we had under the Articles of Confederation. But, like I said, there is an up-side. No sane Republican (i.e., one who knows how a government runs) would actually vote for Huckabee. So if he were to win the nomination, it would be just about the best thing ever for the Democratic party. The sane Republicans (who I have to assume outnumber the insane ones) would have to either vote for an independent candidate, or vote Democrat. So, that's a good thing, I guess.

Anyhow, yeah. That's the news. See you next time, anonymous reader.

So, apparently, people actually have read this blog. I haven't the foggiest idea why somebody would want to do that, but I suppose it means that I actually ought to post here once in a while. I guess I can at least try. I'll start with the last, you know, three months.

It's been at least as crazy a semester as I thought it would be. I ended up pulling a few more academic all-nighters than is strictly good for me, but I think I survived anyway. Some surprises included Discrete being a much more challenging class than I had anticipated and ChunkyString (the CS70 reimplementation of C++'s std::string class using an efficient chunked list data structure) being somewhat anticlimactic. Barring any surprises during finals next week, I think I even managed to pass everything. Okay, that's about it for the school summary.

The downside of posting so infrequently is that so much has happened over the last three months, it seems like nothing at all has happened. <insert joke about congruence mod three months here>. So I don't really know what to write. Maybe I'll write more later if the urge strikes me. I've got some ProbStat homework to do, then a lab to hand in, then finals to study for. Adieu, anonymous reader.

Okay, so I'm a slow blogger. At this rate, I assume there isn't actually anybody reading this any more. No? Good.

So, as you might have (hypothetically) gathered from the title of this post, I'm back at HMC for another year. No, scratch that. Another crazy, insane, sleep-depped year. That's more like it. I'm taking, erm, 9 curses this semester. Plus research with Professor (D. Money) Harris. Any some grutoring (grading/tutoring, for the uninitiated) for CS5 on the side. So, yeah, it's busy. Right now I'm supposed to be doing some math homework. But, honestly, who wants to integrate electric potential fields when there are blog posts to write?

This summer was ruddy terrible. I worked at the FRCC, where the staff hates me and does their best to either (a) get me in trouble, or (b) just ignore everything I say and hide somewhere when there's work to be done. It turns out to be rather hard to get anything meaningful done if your entire staff is in some random closet in the basement. On the plus side, I did make a decent chunk of money over those two months. Considering the amount of time that I spent taking care of my ailing grandparents, I suppose I can't complain about the work. The whole barely-seeing-my-high-school-friends-because-we-all-seem-to-have-drifted-apart bit was a bit of a letdown. But, whatever. I guess I'll just stay out here next summer. No worries, right?

Damn. I can't procrastinate that physics homework much longer — I've got to leave to flex out presently. Until next time, anonymous reader.

As you may or may not have noticed, I haven't really done... well, much of anything with the website lately. I've been very busy with my real life, and haven't had the time to fiddle with the painfully ugly PHP that powers this website. If you're still interested in the continuing adventures of Roguelazer, I have a blog which I have been known to update. I also quite intend on putting new VO screenshots up sometime, and when I do, I'll make a newspost. It might be in, like, two hours. Or two years. Who knows! Anyhow, ciao.