Infinite State

I finally broke down and ordered the Bose Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones and have been trying them out for the past week. I’m really disappointed. And at $299 I’m pretty angry too. Of course, they are not returnable. They sound great when you play music through them, and they do an amazing job of cancelling out the high-pitched hums and whines of computer equipment, etc. But you still hear people talking and other reasonably quiet noise around you. Misleading marketing, at a minimum.

My advice for noise cancellation? Find a quieter room and save your money.

It seems to me that every few months I have a huge stack of tech magazines ready to come crashing down: IEEE Software, IEEE Computer, InfoWorld, JDJ, DDJ, and some others that I didn’t ask for but keep showing up. As I look at them I keep thinking I can’t toss them since I might need that info at some point — but then I have to admit that in the past ten (or twenty) years I can’t really recall going back to ever find old articles in those things. IEEE’s library offers full-text search, clunky as it is, and most of the mass-coder mags (like JDJ) seem to be fully available online. And the truth is, their quality has taken a dive or else my critical threshold has risen. As a quick test, I found an article of interest about the development of a useful-looking Java testing suite composed of OSS projects, called TestMaker. I entered this string into Google: “open source java test automation scalability performance”, which is what I’d probably use looking for that kind of information…and it was the second hit.

So I’m tossing that stack out. But maybe I’ll hold onto the IEEE Softwares for another year…

Just a quick followup to say that the replacement unit Jabra sent works much better than the BT100, although I find I need to charge the unit up after a day of being on even if I didn’t use it much. You can tell because the audio tones it generates (such as for a ring) begin to slow down and sound distorted. Since the regular headset that came with the T610 became unreliable, I only use the Bluetooth headset and for the most part it’s working for me again.

A friend recently asked me what laptop he should get. I have a few of them gathering dust (ThinkPad X20, ThinkPad R32) but I told him he should get himself a ThinkPad with a new warranty on it because that’s important (and IBM has good service generally). I wouldn’t really look at anything other than a ThinkPad because the ergonomics are so much better. Except I don’t use them anymore…

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