Posts tagged review
Review: Bose QuietComfort 15 Noise Canceling Headphones — your own personal cone of silence
May 1st
Some of you may remember the infamous Cone of Silence from the Get Smart comedy series made in the 1960s. In the show, the cone of silence was meant to provide a, well, cone of silence around two people who wanted to have a private conversation, like when discussing top secret information, so that no one outside the cone could hear them. The cone never worked correctly in the show, which is part of why it was a funny prop.
I’ve often wanted, or rather maybe needed is the better word, my own personal cone of silence. Since I, in part, make my living by writing, e.g., computer code as well as prose, having my own personal cone of silence around me so that I can read and write without having my thoughts constantly interrupted is critical to being productive. Moreover, sometimes, like when on flying in a plane or staying in a noisy hotel, I just want to tune out my environment. And finally, when mowing the lawn, I’d like to continue listening to my audio books or music without damaging my hearing.
Those were my criteria, and after using the Bose QuietComfort 15 Noise Cancelling Headphones,
The headphones work best at filtering out, say, engine-type noise. I can listen to my audio books while mowing the grass on the tractor without having to adjust the volume. In other words, I use the same volume setting while mowing the grass to listen to my audio books as when listening to them inside the house. That’s pretty effective, to me.
The headphones do also suppress higher-pitched noises, like dogs barking or humans talking, but the headphones do not completely make those noises completely silent. Those noises are muffled, as if they were happening in another room.
As for comfort–I’ve worn these headphones for hours at a time and they did not bother me at all. I did notice that when I was outside mowing the grass, in the sun, that my ears did feel warm, but this was a minor inconvenience compared to the noise cancellation benefits.
The headphones come with a handy carrying case along with an audio cable to connect the headphones to audio devices as well as an airplane audio adapter plug. Also, they fold flat for easy packing. And note that there is some mechanical noise suppression from just wearing the headphones, but the noise cancelling function is battery operated–one AAA battery (included) gives you about 35 hours of noise cancelling quiet.
Are they worth the price? To me, yes. The hours of productivity they have allowed so far are already worth more than the purchase price. So I guess it comes down to how much you value your time, what types of environments you can be productive in, and if you’ve always dreamed of having your own personal cone of silence.
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Review: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Apr 8th
I started reading The Road
Cormac McCarthy has a real skill at describing nature, especially desolate nature. And so this book, which is set in the US after some horrible armageddon, an apocalypse, is full of rich, but bleak, details on what life and nature might be like if some horrible catastrophe wipes out the entire country.
I won’t spoil the ending, but the main of the book is about a father and son who struggle to survive and travel along the roads towards some possible salvation or sanctuary after some horrible attack or accident occurs. Man has turned cannibal after the accident since almost all life has been killed, and so every single step is a struggle, every single step is one step closer to possible death, through violence or starvation.
This is not a chirpy, happy-go-lucky book. But if you want a serious look at the human will to survive, then this is exactly what you need.
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Review: In the Land of Believers, by Gina Welch
Mar 30th
The recent health care “debate” had both the blue team AND the red team stooping to lows of hysteria and vitriol, getting Americans riled up rather than taking advantage of an opportunity for understanding and education. So it is refreshing to see someone take the latter path, rather than the former, for a change.
Gina Welch, raised in a secular household in California, moved to Virginia to attend graduate school. Once here, she found herself in a rather different culture than what she was used to in California. She got interested in investigating the core of the differences in these belief/cultural/spiritual systems, and committed years of her life to this effort.
In her new book, In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church
Why Thomas Road Baptist Church?
Regionally, church membership was in the thousands and growing and Liberty University was fast becoming what the founder had hoped it would be: a Brigham Young University for Evangelicals.
The founder, of course, being Jerry Falwell.
Note, however, that the matter of Gina joining Thomas Road Baptist Church was not a trivial step. Says Gina:
I am a secular Jew raised by a single mother in Berkeley…. I cuss, I drink, and I am not a virgin.
She realizes that the people she wants to learn about would not be forthcoming if they knew she was writing a book about them, so she invents a story about herself. This deception allows her to join the church and make friends there, but comes back to haunt her in the end.
The book is mostly about her experiences in joining the church and developing relationships with people. But while in the church she witnesses several key events in the history of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, including the transition from the original church site to the new site (formerly the Ericsson cell phone plant) as well as the death of Jerry Falwell.
Also, in her journey she herself becomes changed, and discovers flaws in the caricatures the media paints of “Christian America”. There are actually real people behind those images:
And yet…against logic, as a liberal secular Jew, born to a Communist father, raised in Berkeley, educated in the Ivy League—I had been charmed by Jerry Falwell.
Gina takes a fair look at the church and its members, and, I think, all sides—the pro, the con, and the indifferent—can learn something from her experiences.
In the end, Gina has to deal with the deceptions she has committed, as well as the friendships she has created.
The result, I think, is a valuable insight into a segment of society where, currently, at the interface with the rest of the world, there is some distrust and misunderstanding.
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Review: Grendel, by John Gardner
Mar 30th
Though you should be familiar with Beowulf, the 8th century Anglo-Saxon heroic epic that has influenced Western thought and storytelling for centuries, you’ve probably never read John Gardner’s Grendel
This version is wonderful, not only because of the characterizations of Beowulf and the Dragon, but also because we view the Scyldings, Hrothgar’s Mead Hall, their wars, and even Beowulf himself, from an outsider’s perspective. Grendel struggles to find his place in the universe, and ultimately realizes that his only friends, really, are the men of the Mead Hall he torments and eats.
At times sad, depressing, funny, and heartwarming, you can’t help but fall in love with Grendel as you listen to his musings on the meaning of life and watch, regaled, his adventures unfold. From Grendel, you will gain deeper insight into the original Beowulf poem. And then you will read Grendel
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Review: Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
Mar 12th
The Age of Innocence
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Review: All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
Feb 28th
All the Pretty Horses
The story focuses on the young John Grady Cole, who sets off on an adventure, on horseback, into Mexico with his childhood friend Lacey Rawlins. Along the way the encounter this kid, Jimmy Blevins, riding a beautiful horse. The resulting incidents lead the trio into deeper trials of their character and courage as they face the worst in humanity, love, and the land itself.
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Review: Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Feb 26th
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Well done.
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Review: The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis
Feb 19th
I really enjoyed The Green Man
Of course no one believes him, since he’s probably drunk, under stress, or on medication, and it seems the more he tries to get people to believe him, the worse his predicament gets. But as he comes closer to discovering the origins of the name of his pub, The Green Man, the horror starts to take charge over comedy.
The ending is delightful, English, and quite satisfying
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Review: The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
Feb 17th
The Haunting of Hill House
The story centers around a particular house, Hill House, that has a reputation for being haunted. A professor of paranormal psychology wants to conduct an experiment there, and so invites three other people to spend some time there with him so they can record their experiences. Though they all seem to experience strange events that cannot really be explained, one of the party, Eleanor, seems to attract the supernatural manifestations more than the others, eventually leading to a horrible disaster.
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At the End of the 00s, A Personal Lookback
Dec 31st
Traditionally, the end of the year is a time for reflection about what you’ve accomplished during the past year and a chance to set goals for the coming year. I don’t often post end-of-year reviews, but since today, December 31, 2009, marks the end of not only the year 2009, but also the end of the first 10 years of the 2000s — the end of the 00s — I wanted to at least say something.
On a larger scale, the last 10 years essentially started with the tragedy of 9/11 and ended with a recession. That’s a little depressing, but the positive side is that the next decade can’t help but be better. I hope.
So on a personal level, here are a few highlights from the past 10 years:
Old Friends New Friends
The “coming of age” of social media brought many opportunities for folks to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. I have really enjoyed getting in touch with people via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few. I’ve even met people via my website, which is a really neat experience. I believe that the internet and network technologies allow people to become closer to each other, to share common interests, and to learn new perspectives and ideas. There are still some kinks left to work out, such as issues of copyright law with new digital products, or the lack of broadband penetration in the US, but in this past decade we really saw people coming around to appreciating the internet and using it to enrich their lives. Certainly I’ve enjoyed the ride so far.
Travel
I love to travel (but not to go through airports), and over the last 10 years I went to some neat places, including Milan, several towns and villages in southern England, Toronto, Iceland, and Amsterdam. I also got to take my first cruise, to the Caribbean. Within the states, notable visits include Los Angeles, New York, and Hawaii. In hindsight I guess that’s not a lot of travel if you spread it out over 10 years, but it was a lot of fun.
Going for the Brass Ring
After about 10 years of engineering work in industry, I decided to go back to school to complete a PhD. Of course, as many pointed out at the time, this was a rather foolish and difficult undertaking, for many reasons. Faculty jobs are very hard to get, especially if you only want a job in a specific geographic region. In fact, according to a recent Wall Street journal article, in 1960 about 75% of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors, but today only about 27% are. Colleges and universities are opting to hire gaggles of adjunct professors rather than one or two tenured faculty members.
“When a tenure-track position is empty,” says Gwendolyn Bradley, director of communications at the American Association of University Professors, “institutions are choosing to hire three part-timers to save money.”
Another issue is that the pay in academia is way below industry pay scales, even for tenure-track positions. And given the faculty job requirements of teaching, service, and research, the $/hour tradeoff is even worse.
Moreover, folks warned me about the “half-life” of knowledge, especially regarding mathematics, that I would encounter since I had been out of school for so many years. Indeed, most grad students I ended up going to school with had no gap between their undergraduate and graduate courses — they only had to look at their last semester’s notes on “p-values” and “eigen-decomposition” in order to solve the homework problems, whereas I had to try to remember things from 10-years prior and that I had never had a reason to use during my industry work. The reality of “use it or lose it” made re-learning things everyone else took for granted a little challenging and a necessity for me.
The why-am-I-doing-this difficulties were compounded because I was, in part, funding my grad school effort by keeping my industry job — i.e., working and going to school at the same time — while also dealing with a 300-mile (yes, you read that right) commute. The grad students I was in class with, for the most part, did not also have a family, did not also have an industry job, and just had to commute from an apartment or dorm across campus. Needless to say, this made me question my decision to go back to school every single day it took me to complete my degree. I will note, however, that finally getting that PhD was one of the most satisfying goals I’ve ever achieved.
Health and Fitness
Note that the above ordeal left me quite depleted, stressed, and unhealthy. Add this to the fact that this past decade saw me leave my bullet-proof years in terms of health and fitness. Rather, I seem to have moved into the “ouch, oh, I guess things can break” phase of my life. Thus, I realized that I needed to take a more agressive approach to my health and fitness levels. After a lot of research, I’ve found the best way to stay in shape is through the vigorous application of kettlebells. I supplement my kettlebell usage with the TRX, running, and body-weight exercises, but really, you don’t need anything more than a cannonball with a handle.
On to the Next Decade
What will the next decade bring? I’ve got some ideas for what I want to do, and they center on the maxims of 1.) never stop challenging yourself, 2.) always value family and friends, and 3.) be productive.
So, stay tuned…
