CarlSeibert

Wow. I admit I haven't set foot in Palo Alto in about 20 years. But who woulda thunk it.

Happy Birthday!

And why would they have a gunfire detection system in East Palo Alto? It's not a gunfire kind of place, IIRC. Newark, sure. Some neighborhoods in Miami, OK. But East Palo Alto?

Oh. Alaskan Tacos. I'm so bummed I can't make it.

My wife caught a variant of this bit of nastiness. What was frustrating, apart from having to deal with it at all, was that none of the lists of files and keys I found on the internet fit my version of the virus. What worked for me was finding something a bit odd looking in a "run" key in the registry and working backwards from there.

I'm tempted to give Opera Mini a spin on my own phone. It seemed to do well on big, fat pages that aren't designed for mobile viewing.

Happy Birthday! and delegation = good

Cool. I installed it on my wife's BB. It's very different from Opera Mobile on my WM phone, but it looks good so far.

Plays the Music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn Stereophile went gaga over this album. They gave it 4 1/2 stars for performance and five for sound. I checked it out on Lala and it does sound worth a serious listen. Can't speak to the five stars for sound part, since I only listened to a stream on my laptop speakers. Lala has this embed code feature with which I can allegedly post a player. (crossing fingers) [snip] Naw. Guess that doesn't work in forum posts. Here's a permalink. Maybe that will work better. Lala - Where music plays

Threw a 10 foot kitchen cabinet off the loft deck of my warehouse, then went at it with Percy the sledgehammer. Am now icing my elbow. Oops.

Happy Birthday!!!!!

Opera is available for BlackBerry now?

I get the the last page from the "Last Page" link on my WM/Opera setup, but while before the upgrade a link to a subscribed thread in the User CP somehow magically took me to the the first unread (I wasn't comfortable about the magic part, but that was the functionality I wanted, so it was all good) Now, I get plopped at the first page of the thread. Given Chris' experience, it's quite strange.

Then spend some time in criminal court and they do it there, too, except it's.... real..... gulp! It's pretty sad, really. People just don't get it.

Any experience with the Stylast stylus cleaner/lube combo in that regard?

I didn't find it surprising or scary. It's just how things work. It's not a sign of weakness. We listen for meaning, not sounds. Our brains try to fill in the missing information. If two inputs are out of whack, we try to reconcile them. If you relax, give it some time and trust your instincts and common sense you'll be fine and make the right decision. There are some theatrical elements that make this gag work. One is brevity. Your brain will eventually realize the two signals are out of sync and send up a flare. For me, the illusion didn't hold up to the end of the bite. I'd never heard it before. When I realized that I could "hear" the words, I thought "Cool!", got about two lines, then the audio turned to noise. Another part of the illusion is to make it a challenge. Your brain is busy trying to find the trick. That makes you distracted, sops up your brain cycles, and basically turns off the intuitive part of your mind that's more likely to see through the illusion. That gives the performer (or con artist or whatever) a little more time before common sense ruins the illusion. Often, I can "understand" a language I can't speak in a movie with subtitles. If I'm drawn into the plot, the illusion holds. if the movie sucks, it's just a bunch of people talking in French with writing underneath. For a lot of people, speaker rigs image better in low light. For me, in bright light, with my glasses on, phantom images tend to glue themselves to the wall behind the speakers if the slightest little thing happens the break the illusion. For a lot of people, the images will stick to the speakers themselves. The bicyclists here probably know about the two blank spots that everybody has in their vision. Most people don't even know they're there. Your brain paints image over them. They're big enough to hide a car in, And if you glance over your shoulder, the image your brain paints in isn't a live picture from your other eye, but a made-up one. Slightly off-topic, but I mention it because if by chance anybody hasn't heard - forewarned beats being roadkill. I disagree big time. Ethan did say so. He also said that there was no need to use different kinds of music. Maybe in the confines of a single pseudo-objective experiment (which generally don’t work, anyway, but who’s counting). Even then, you would need to repeat the entire experiment with different recordings and different kinds of music unless you want a system that is convincing only with ‘Jazz at the Pawnshop’. But in general, no way. Especially after Ethan’s own presentation presented convincing evidence to the contrary. Think about that terrifying and tragic (but realistic) identification exercise. Identifying people is a good analog for identifying differences in sound, except that when you identify people, the results aren’t open to debate. You’re either right or you’re wrong. Moreover, it’s part of my trade. I’ve done it tens of thousands of times. If you intend to stay employable, you’d better be ready to do it correctly several thousand times in a row. I can speak with some authority here. There are basically two ways to identify somebody, and they don’t mix very well. You can do it one way or the other. Try to fudge them together and it’s just not going to work. One method is what most people would consider “real” recognition. It’s done instinctively, subconsciously. You interact with somebody over a long period of time. You collect thousands and thousands of data points. When you see a person you can recognize, your sub-conscious parses all that data somehow and you know who they are instantly. Even a fleeting glimpse of the person will do. It’s deadly accurate. The other method seems, at least subjectively, sort of "objective”. You match data points like you would if you were comparing fingerprints. You look for data points that can be expressed literally. You write them down or memorize them as literal concepts. A few gifted or highly trained people aside, your visual memory is for shit. It's only good for stuff like this for maybe a minute. Beyond that, it’s basically worthless. The problem is that you can only collect and use a handful of data points. This method is only good to differentiate people in a small pool of candidates. It fails often, and when it does work, it’s still pretty uncertain. All that said, if you don’t have the benefit of time to form sub-conscious impressions, the “objective” method is what you’re stuck with. You have to accept its limitations and that’s that. It’s a pretty blunt instrument. It will work to keep ten guys in a pick-up basketball game straight, but you would have a hard time recognizing a family member at the airport with it. Think about the demonstration. Do you think somebody who had spent a significant amount of time with the fellow who played the purse snatcher (his girlfriend, let’s say) would be fooled by the photo lineup? Of course not. Girl Friend would have recognized him instantly. No way she would have been coerced into picking him out of a lineup he wasn’t in. Put subjective perception in a short time frame, try to force some "objectivity" and throw in a little stress and this is what you get. The subjects “identified” a totally spurious person. This test “proved” there is no discernible difference between blond hair and dark brown hair.* I can just hear some blowhard on HydrogenAudio insulting the guy who claims to prefer blonds. It doesn't mean that humans can't tell the difference between blonds and brunettes, tubes or transistors, or whatever. It just means that they can't do it under those conditions. Which are pretty much what you get when you try to listen "for" something in the short term. In a situation where you don't have access to your sub conscious or common sense a difference has to be huge to rise above the noise. You can dress up your test with "scientific" trappings. Make it blind, double blind, deaf and dumb, whatever. But what you're really working with is just a subjective hunch. All the "objective" window dressing just makes it even worse by adding to the noise. If we want the certitude of "scientific", we should stick to measurements we can make with objective instruments. But a lot of times, we can't measure enough to have actionable conclusions. If we need better, we've got our own perceptions and common sense, which will work if we let them. At the end, what we have is still just an opinion of course, but hopefully, it can be reliable enough to be actionable. I guess why this has turning into an outright rant is that it workshops and speeches like this come off a little as people claiming "my mythology is better than yours" and laughing at people who are really no crazier than they are, rather than trying to take things as they are and make the best of them. Lest anybody take that as a flame on Ethan, I should point out that anybody who has run into him on one of the acoustics boards knows him to be a bright, sensible and generous fellow. </end rant> *Almost. What we saw was brown hair miss-characterized as blond or vice-versa. You'd have to run the test twice to “prove” there’s no perceptible difference. But that should be easy. Black for white, blond for brunette, male for female – from that sort of situation, those are common enough real-world errors. One of the more perplexing experiences I used to have when I worked as a news photographer was people I had never seen in my life “recognizing” me in a bar or some such and proceeding to tell me how great it was to talk to me at such and such an event that I never attended. (I guess we all look alike.) Occasionally, I knew the people my new long lost friends were confusing me with. Sometimes, it was other graying white guys, but my favorites were the fellow who had really spoken to a colleague who is about 5’5” tall – and 5' 5" wide, is bald as a cue ball, black, and Puerto Rican. Another time, my doppelganger was a young, swimsuit-edition-hot woman. If I ever reach the point when I confuse me for her, somebody please hit me with the big shovel. That demonstration, or a variant of it, by the way, is standard fare for beginning reporting classes. The results are always spectacular, and hopefully make an appropriate impression on the students.

She's dizzying. Every time I glance away, she turns around. Which play into my impression of the OP video. But that post will take a while. Back later.

I have a thing sort of like Nate's, but older, with the round fluorescent bulb, and it's great. It clamps onto the edge of the desk or drops into a 1/2 inch hole in my portable bench. I have two, actually. One, I think, came from a thrift store for $10-ish and the other is a hand-me-down from my now-deceased father-in-law. It's a decent light and now that I've had the magnifier for a while, I wouldn't be without it. Mine are more or less like this Amazon.com: Mag-Lite Silver Finish Adjustable 3 Diopter Magnifier Lamp: Electronics

Following. It seems pretty useful, actually. I made it a column in TweetDeck at work. So I'll never have to miss a FS posting that I can't afford.

Went to one place to wait in line to see security to be cleared to apply for a security credential that would allow me to stand in line to be security cleared at another place. Not NORAD, not super-max prison. This was to help my boss smuggle a twelve pack of beer to a trailer-office outside the stadium where the super bowl will be played in four days time.

Me too. If I close thew new window with the thumbnail in it, I get the floating window.

Zowie. This explains a lot. Right-click | Save Image As

I think it would be illuminating, 'cause I swear it seemed to me that Miguel's pair and Colin's pair sounded different. Although a month so elapsed between listening to one and then the other. And I think it's true that no two people hear treble stuff the same way, especially with headphones. And for damn sure we don't tend to describe what we hear quite the same way. So sample-to-sample variations in ears are probably at play here, too.

Miguel loaned me a great treasure chest of stuff, including his HE-5s and two amps, neither one of which I had ever heard. My long weekend with his headphones turned into listening to the HE-5s on five, count 'em five amps. So this post is awful long. My apologies in advance. Standard disclaimers apply - my ears, system, prejudices and choice of beverages. If I insult your favorite piece of gear remember also that there's the possibility that I'm just a complete buffoon. That said, here's what I thought: First off, the phones are drop dead gorgeous. Workmanship and the quality of the wood is even better on Miquel's pair than Colin's. I don't know if the the Hippocase they were packed in came with them or if it's Miguel's. But if it comes with the cans, kudos to Fang. That's how to package headphones! When I opened the Hippocase, the HE-5s made an R-10-like impression on Bonnie, as in "Oh my. Five thousand dollar headphones!" (It's a sad note on how broke we are after a year of recession, that there was no immediate tone of alarm in her voice. Right now, there is no such thing as $5,000 headphones. Not around here anyway.) Miguel's HE-5s sounded different to me than Colin's. Some people have mentioned disparate issues - sibilance, which I heard sometimes on Miguel's but not on Colin's, and veiling (John heard that on, I think, Wayne's pair, but Miguel's pair are transparent and nuanced in spades) I wonder if there are sample-to-sample variations. Overall, I was very impressed with the the HE-5s, either Colin's pair or Miguel's. They have gobs of resolution, are coherent and musical, and with an amp that really compliments them they could be among the very best. And at a really reasonable price. Miguel listens to a lot of jazz. So do I. I spun some jazz to understand his comments, but mostly stuck to stuff that was non-jazz for diversity of opinion's sake. There was alt-this and alt-that, some blues, some rock, some folk and just a smattering of jazz. I started with my Woo WA6SE: I immediately found fault with the sound with this combination - and then listened to it for four hours. So it must not have sucked that badly. On the Woo, the HE-5s sounded kind of discombobulated, as if the sound of not all of the same cloth. There was the rising top end that Miguel mentioned, a zingy sibilance every once in a while, and bass was light and slow, leading to an overall light-feeling tonal balance. But in the midrange and treble generally, the Woo sang. Holy crap, there was nuance and inner detail galore. The treble, while being too forward, was rendered in exquisite detail. Cymbals sounded like cymbals, not like white noise or a mobile ring-tone. On the Cowboy Junkies' 'Whites Off earth Now', the drum set was about two feet closer to the mike than it already was, but you were THERE. (Whether being three feet from a drum set is a good thing or not is open to debate, of course.) Timber of midrange-y instruments (guitars, female voice) were spot on and wonderfully differentiated. I played duet after duet. The interplay of voices was exquisite. Bass strings purred like real ones. The fundamental was goofed up, but there was a feeling of "real" that was tough to argue with. Soundstaging and imaging were superb. There was a solidity to images, their sizes, and the relationship between them that surpassed what I'm used to. There was a palpable sense of the "reality" (even if it never was) of the space that music was recorded in - as much as such a thing can be through headphones. Somehow, the things that were done superbly made up for the weirdness and there was an effective emotional connection to the music. Next up was the EF-5. First off, I tried my K-701s as some sort of baseline test. That was not exactly a match made in heaven. The combination sounded like 701s on an amp they don't like - which is a lot of them. With the HE-5s, this amp brought back the mid-bass slam and PRAT that were AWOL with the Woo. In the mids and treble, though, there wasn't enough nuance and detail to match the better bass. I didn't find the combination as emotionally involving as the the Woo. I didn't listen as long to the EF-5. My friend Alan stopped by on Saturday. He called the sound with this amp "a big, round, EL-34 sort of thing". Not words I would have used, but an interesting way of putting it. Alan didn't feel attracted to spend much time with the EF-5, either. Next up was my nameless 10 WPC push-pull speaker amp. It doesn't have a brand name, but I do have the schematic. It has a headphone output, which is just a 300 ohm resistor in series with its 8 ohm speaker output terminals. On listening, it was "So that's where the fundamentals are!" Given the power to drive them there, these cans are articulate and detailed on r-e-a-l-l-y low notes. This amp rolls off on top, so the rising treble of the HE-5s wasn't an issue for good or bad. It wasn't as dynamic-sounding as the EF-5, but it wasn't bad. There just wasn't quite enough upper midrange "verity" to get the job done emotionally, or to feel quite balanced with the bottom, for that matter. This amp has promise as a mate for the HE-5s. More appropriate input tubes and some tweaks here and there may realize it. But for now, it was mostly interesting in that it showed just how well the HE-5s can do way down low. After I had already packed up Miguel's gear to return to him, I unpacked the HE-5s and gave the speaker amp another, longer, listen. This time, I was more impressed by this combination. Eventually, I came around to the conclusion that all that was wrong was that this amp/headphone combination just rolled off too much top end. Get the top couple octaves back in reasonable balance and this pair could go the distance. Hmmm. Then came the Graham Slee Solo. I wasn't familiar with this little amp at all. Miguel warned me that it takes the best part of a day to warm up, so I plugged it in and left it on overnight before I touched it. With the Musical Fidelity still waiting in the wings, the Graham Slee instantly became the star of the show to that point. This little amp kept enough of the EF-5's bass punch and brought the midrange goods to make that emotional connection. You will not get through James McMurty's "Ruby and Carlos" without crying with the HE-5s through this amp. If you do that and get all gooey, spin Dave's True Story's "Stormy" and get in touch with your inner sociopath. You'll feel better. This emotional connection stuff can work in different and mysterious ways. There was oodles of resolution - real, not etch-a-sketch. Soundstaging was good, but not as great as it was through the Woo. It didn't have the stunning resolution in the treble of the Woo and it doesn't have the extension and nuance in the bass of the speaker amp, but it struck a balance that's musically "right". Quite right indeed. I'd be listening to this for a few more hours. My MF X-Can V3 turned out to be a non-starter with these phones. It was less of the same. Not quite as good in the bass as the EF-5 and nowhere near the resolution of either the Woo or the Graham Slee. The Musical Fidelity was left out in the cold. Then it was time to just listen for fun after all this serious business. I went back to my own cans on my own rig. For a song or two. Then I plugged in Miguel's HE-5s again and listened to them for another couple hours. These are real, real nice cans. Apart from the slightly hot treble (that may not affect every sample), they can, when the mood and the amp moves them, do everything superbly. They are real quick. They're transparent and coherent. With the right super-duper amp, I'll bet they'll be able to do everything right all at the same time and be a true statement headphone. And like I said, I'm being kind of hard on the amps. They didn't exactly suck on my amp. In a lot of ways, they shamed my current headphones. If either/any of my amps had hit it off with the HE-5s as well as the Graham Slee Solo did, I'd be ordering a pair tomorrow. But alas, it was not love at first plug-in for either of them. Cue the violins. I'll hold off on new phones until I've got the ExStata built and see what the stat world holds. By then maybe Fang will have the next iteration out and maybe they'll be a bit more amp-agnostic.

Since when was that old enough to require preservation? Happy slightly belated Birthday Dom!