Category: Uncategorized

For Christmas, one of the things I received was a new set of headphones for my iPod. They are Klipsch S4 headphones which Consumer Reports had rated highly and reviews on Amazon seemed pretty favorable as well. There was nothing really wrong with my Sennheiser CX300 headphones I’ve had for a few years, but I felt like maybe I could do better.

Some of the reviews on Amazon said that these headphones required a “burn in” period to sound good. I had heard about that with some types of headphones, so I did some research. It’s one of those things that people don’t seem to agree on or whether it is even real. It seems like it would be pretty easy to measure the performance of headphones if you had the right equipment, but I guess a lot of headphones now actually conform to the shape of the ear and use a tight fit to produce part of the sound. So maybe it is harder than I think. Anyway, I think it is really funny that even though there isn’t much proof about burn in and what is effective, that there is a long page of instructions telling you how to do the best possible burn in of your headphones. It is posted at head-fi.org and referenced by a lot of different websites. You can actually get MP3’s with sounds recorded that are supposed to maximize burn in.

When I got the headphones, I tried them out and they didn’t sound all that great. So I left them plugged in while a playlist of normal music played at a little higher volume than I would typically listen to, but not as high as it would go. Some people recommend 40 hours of burn in, but I thought they were sounding better after only 15 minutes. I left them plugged in and would check back every now and then and over the next few hours it really did seem like the sound quality was improving. I let them run all night and then listened to them and they did sound very good, though not quite as much bass as I’m used to with the Sennheisers.

They are also very comfortable, almost like they aren’t even there. One thing is they have a Y cord instead of the asymetric cord of the Sennheisers which I had learned to like because it lets you unplug the earbuds and hang them from around your neck if you need to just take them out for a second to listen to someone or something.

Last night I was have a refreshing drink of grape juice, grapefruit juice, and water when Mom called. I was on the sofa with my drink at my side and my remote control on my lap and dogs on either side of me. So I reached in my right pocket to get the phone and the remote slides to the left and went right into my refreshing drink. There was only about an inch of juice left, but I guess that was enough because the remote didn’t work anymore. That’s bad. I got this remote to replace my previous universal remote in March 2008 and they have since stopped making them. Well, they at least they don’t make them the same way and then new ones won’t allow me to use the cable I bought to hook the remote up to my computer (I wrote about this in JP1 still kicking).

So grape juice is dripping out of the bottom of the remote and I’m trying to help Mom with her wireless network so Kelly and Gabriele can get on the internet while they are spending the night at her house. I take the batteries out in case there is some kind of short and try to continue to coax out any juice into the bathtub rather than drip purple juice on to anything else. It just keeps leaking so I figure the only thing to do is try to take it apart and get all the juice wiped up. There were a couple of screws to take out and then I used my plastic pry tools I got when I replaced the battery in my old iPod. Those things work great for unsnapping plastic devices like this. Then I had to remove 4 more little screws and the whole thing came apart into 5 pieces: the front face, the rubber mat of buttons (fortunately each button is not an individual part), a plastic board with holes where each button goes, the circuit board, and the back cover. The rubber mat of buttons was pretty dirty, so I cleaned that off and then wiped down the other parts to get all of the grape juice off. The front face is hard to clean because the buttons stick out, but without the buttons it was easy to get all the grime of the last couple of years off of it. I put it all back together, put the batteries back in (which I had charging in case they had discharged due to a short) and I got nothing. There probably aren’t too many liquids that conduct electricity better than juice. Oh well, I still have my old remote with some buttons that don’t work, so I put the batteries in it and it worked okay except I had to fast forward through commercials instead of skip ahead 30 seconds since that button doesn’t work anymore. I thought maybe if I cleaned that remote off the buttons would work again, so I took it apart the same way and cleaned it out, but those buttons still didn’t work (or didn’t seem to anyway).

At some point I decided to go back to the juiced remote, tested it, took it apart again, put it back together, tested it again, and Hey! it works! The new one is better because it has backlighting and all the buttons work, so I’m glad to have it back. And now it’s even nice and clean.

Continue reading “Remote Control Close Call”

Twenty years ago today I started work designing bridges!

Today I filled up at Kroger. I was hoping to get through the whole month of November without filling up, but it wasn’t going to happen. Anyway, I was entering the mileage in my spreadsheet and I noticed on the receipt that they charged. $2.590/gallon. I think this may be the first time ever in the US that I haven’t been charged an extra 9/10ths of a cent for a gallon of gas. Last time I filled up with gas at the same Kroger, it was $2.479/gallon.

A few years ago, HBO produced a miniseries about John Adams based on David McCullough’s biography. I remember Andrew watching a little of this when we were staying in Williamsburg. I asked him why he was watching it and he said it was interesting. Go figure. It turns out it was a perfect movie to watch in Williamsburg (though really he didn’t watch more than 30 minutes of it, I don’t think; we stayed pretty busy) not least of all because they filmed some of the movie there. It also won 13 Emmy awards, though this is a little misleading since the miniseries category isn’t nearly as competitive as, say, comedy or drama series. It stars Paul Giamatti who has played a lot of different kinds of roles, but most famously starred in Sideways where he was a whiny loser (or maybe “winey” loser, hee hee). The miniseries is on 3 disks, spanning 8 hours. It covers Adams from the Boston Massacre up until his death which took place on the country’s 50th birthday, the same day that Thomas Jefferson died.

Continue reading “John Adams”