The Tao of Walking Ridge

My new Lenovo PC has such a great sounding sound card, that I decided to upgrade what I used to listen to it.  The PC speakers are OK, but not really music quality.  I must have a half dozen sets of buds and headphones around.  One set of headphones is a pair of Sony MDR-7502 Professional.  I also have IPod ear buds, which I was quite impressed with when I first got my IPod.

At a major retailer I found a display and put on the Bose around hear (full) headphones.  Not the noise cancelling headphones, just regular headphones.  Wow.  The clarity was really amazing.  Now other brands may have been great too, but only the Bose were there for demos.  I liked the around ear better than the on ear.  It was a little less expensive (all VERY relative) but less compact.

The ear buds were not available for demo for obvious reasons.  I went home, checked out my Sony headphones and found that, indeed, the clarity of stuff made in this decade is better.  Heading to a Bose store I found earbuds that you can demo!  I stared at them for a bit, and the fellow said “we do clean them after anyone tries them out.”

A little detail.  Nice.

I tried the ear buds, and indeed their sound was great.  Unlike other buds I’ve used, you don’t have to put them far in to have them stay in place.  They rest easily just inside the ear.  And a neck cord holds the weight of the cord, rather than your ears.

A little detail.  Nice.

Many buds are marketed as “extra bass”.  I prefer a flatter more natural reproduction.  I prefer clarity over volume.  So when you turn the volume down and still hear the fingers slide in the guitar strings in the music, that’s inspiring stuff.  Bose even specifically says to turn off bass boost settings on your music player.  They designed it to sound natural, and I think they got it right.

The connector is not inline, which would be pulled at an angle in the side of my PC.  And it isn’t a right angle, it is at a perfect angle.

A little detail.  Nice.

The cord is just longer than arms reach.  Just right.

These buds were about $100.  There are others in that price range.  I tried Shures some time ago, and they sounded good but were not as comfortable as these Bose.  Great sound and clarity is expected in this price range, but I was also impressed with these small details.  I forget I have these buds in your ears.  The music sounds natural and balanced song to song, I have no impulse to add bass to one song and remove it from the next.  I’m sure I’ve wasted more on cheap buds.  These are an investment in listening to your music collection again for the first time.

You don’t see many yellow birds in Michigan.  I don’t ever recall seeing one before.  I don’t mean a bit yellow, I mean bright safety yellow with just a touch of dark.  I went into the next room for my camera and was two seconds late.  The bird flew around the corner.  I saw it from another window, but was again just slow with my camera.  Eventually it flew away, but I left my camera on the dining room table.

The next day I see a fairly large white bird on my railing.  A pigeon perhaps?  I don’t recall ever seeing one of these in Michigan before either.  But today, I had my camera handy and was able to capture it.

Easy to use applciations to do video editing are hard to find.  Full function packages are hard to learn.  And many video editors I’ve used are very slow to load (in Windows).  There are four alternatives in the software repository of Ubuntu.  I wanted to see how quickly I could edit a short video created with my Canon G9.  The .avi created by the G9 would not play in my media player in Windows.  But two of the editors I looked at opened the file.  One was very simple, but I struggled getting to to do what I wanted.

Then I opened PiTiVi and saw a screen that said “drag clip here”.  Once I did that it said “drag clips to timeline”.  I did, and quickly was able to edit and “render” a compressed video.  There are plugins to expand functionality.  But trimming a video in a matter of minutes was quite impressive.  That’s not to say that the editors did not hang or sometimes did unexpected things, but I hadn’t paid $100 for the them either!  Overall, Linux ran snappier than editors in Windows and when it did hang up cntl-alt-backspace rebooted the system and returned to the desktop in about 10 seconds.  Cool.

The muse is finally getting the computer tools arranged well enough to start using them creatively.  The Lenovo does a great job with music.  I’ve discovered a couple of things about digital music file formats.

Ogg is a patent free, open source audio compression format.  MP3, though ubiquitous, technically has some patent issues.  Thus Ubuntu does not come with MP3 encoding in the default install, though Puppy Linux does.  I have to admire this position on the part of Ubuntu.  They are committed to open source and do not compromise.  You can download “restricted” mp3 codecs with legal disclaimers.  So I looked into the ogg format, just to stay open source.  I also checked out FLAC.
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I was working with a manager one day years ago and he said “You mean that’s all I’ve got to do, is throw money at the problem”.  I don’t like overdoing this approach, but I do remind myself that sometimes it is a preferable approach.  In otherwords, it is my OCD antidote.
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Some phrases become so used they lose precise meaning.  Take “customer focused”.  Every company will say they are, but allow me to give some impressions of my recent computer purchase/return decisions, which show me that clearly Lenovo and Linux are more customer focused.
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One of the great things about Linux is the freedom of choice.  At first, I liked Evolution, in particular, that the icon was placed up in the toolbar on Ubuntu.  But, quickly I learned to drag any program I wanted up there.  Further, Thunderbird had a nice setup layout and default to one server for all sent mail.  I have several emails, but am working to converge to one.  So I like this.  This is more personal preference rather than good vs bad.  But the beauty of Linux is the choices.  There are other email clients, but these two seem to be common.  For me, Thunderbird is quick to set up and snappy.