Gnurple dot Net

From the new-gadgets department:

In today’s issue:
* New gadget
* New wheels
* Two wheels
* Two ×15 pounds, to go

(this is gonna be a LOONG blog entry, but if you get fast the pirst one, it goes by quicker. And if you get to the end, I’ll explain why the moon at the top of the page got replaced by a graph)

NEW GADGET
I’m playing with my new toy *RIGHT NOW*. I was playing with it at work, too.

I stuck it in my ear.

AZROLB SAY: WTF?

Now, before you get all “Dude, I don’t wanna know”, answer me this: what’s in *your* ear?

(OK, now say it)

I read a story that some random person posted on a forum out there on the internet about hearing. It said that if you stick things in your ear, it’s good for you.

No, wait, that’s not it. Oh, right. Signal to noise ratio. That’s important. You’ve driven in a car, right? Not your grandma’s ‘75 K-car (a nice, reliant automobile, btw) but a cool car with, you know, a stereo. A stereo with more than two speakers. One that you can turn up to eleven.

Now, you’re driving around in this car. You get on the Queensway. What do you do? You turn it up, right? ‘Cause the road noise is loud. The next thing you know, you’re getting off at your exit and you’ve gone from 110km/h to the red light at the end of the exit ramp. What do you do? You turn it down (fool, you keep it cranked! Always turn up, never turn down!).

Awhile ago I bought an MP3 player. A tiny MP3 player with a blue LED. It’s so small I can look like the incredible geek I am by wearing it around my neck. I really like listening to it as I walk from place to place. Car to work. Work to lunch. Work to car. I used to work at SiteBrand. I parked across the intersection of two four-lane highways from my office because my old boss wouldn’t give me a good parking spot despite two years of work and yet the new guy gets the good parking spot because parking is hard to find in the downtown Hull area. One thing I noticed every time I walked to the car on the way home from work is that while I normally had the volume around 20, when I crossed the intersection I had to crank it to 25. Then when I crossed and went down the hill to the quiet side street where my car was, I turned it down to around 18 or so.

Signal to noise. You see what I mean?

The problem, of course, is that the brain is adaptive. You can be sitting in your hammock and hear the call of the loon across the lake, or you can be in a bar with live music and a hundred raving partiers and your brain automatically adjusts for the huge differences in volume. You can be in a sauna chatting with friends one minute, and be in a cold lake the next, and your brain tunes your senses accordingly. Sitting inside your fridge might seem cold in the middle of summer, but when you’ve spent the winter in -20°C, you walk around in +5°C in jeans and a T-shirt (I go biking in shorts, myself).

Unfortunately, the equipment isn’t as versatile as the processor. You and your boss go to Le Audio Shoppe and buy a pair of speakers each. You put yours in your party room where you crank them all day and all night long. Your boss puts his in the elevator and plays quiet muzak all the time.

The muzak sucks, sure, but those speakers will last many times longer than yours. Hearing damage is cumulative. It’s just equipment wear.

And that’s really the meat of the matter, isn’t it? Do you want to listen to crappy muzak all your life and still be able to listen to it when you’re 80, or do you wanna be rockin’ out for 50 years and then be “Whazzat sonny? Speak up, boy!” and everybody in your family rolls their eyes at you for the rest of your life.

I say, go for the middle ground. Moderation.

But I also say, if a smart option wanders by, grab it by the neck and stuff it in your pocket. In this case, I’m talking about noise-blocking earphones. Basically, they’re earplugs with earphones built-in. Except they’re well-designed in terms of both comfort and audio quality.

I was going to write a review, but knowing this blog is gonna be loooong, I’ll save that for another post.

NEW WHEELS
I bought a new car a month or two ago.

In addition to a small discount off of the list price, and in addition to having the dealer pay a 3rd party audio company to swap the stereo from my Saturn (which turned out to be a big job, with special mounts cut for the speakers), I also negotiated for a set of summer tires.

The annoying thing about summer and winter tires is that not only do you have to pay for the tires, you also have to pay somebody to put the tires on the rims, balance them and install them on your car. Less the latter, this is not something you can do without the right equipment, either, so you’re pretty dependent on tire places for this service. (the good thing about winter tires, of course, is that they’ll save you from accidents)

So, car with winter tires on it, and a set of summer tires. Two options: 1) twice a year, pay a tire place to swap them — by the way, did I mention tire places want you to buy their tires, and so they charge you lots when you don’t want to buy anything, just to swap tires with rims? 2) Buy an extra set of rims and put the summer tires on ‘em.

So I did that. And, silly me, I found a set of used Corolla aluminium rims which are still more than twice the price of the steel ones I should’ve gotten. But they’re shiny. And now, at the end of this year, I can just jack up my car and put on the winter tires myself.

TWO WHEELS
Speaking of wheels, the snow is (mostly) gone, and it’s time to bring out the bike!

So I did.

Last year, towards the end of the year, I bought myself a new bike. My old bike (which I still have, much like I bought a new car and still have my old one) is a mountain bike. The new one is a hybrid, but it leans to the road-bike side of the spectrum. There’s more about it over here in a post from last year.

So anyways, the bike is out, locked to the front of my house and covered by a bike cover in case it rains — a bike cover which fits the new bike better than the old one, BTW, for those of you playing along at home.

So right now, I ride the bike around the neighbourhood for a couple of clicks every evening when I get home from work. The plan, once it starts being a little warmer (read: warmer than my fridge) in the morning is to bike to work. That’s 40km of biking a day, which leads directly into the next (and finally, the last!) topic du jour:

TWO ×15 POUNDS, TO GO
Last year, at my best, I weighed about 170 lbs. I’ve gone under that a couple of times, once as low as 160 lbs., but usually hovering around 170 lbs. I biked to work everyday, which back then was only 7km each way.

Then I bought a house, and so I was driving to work because I needed my after-work time to pack boxes and move boxes. Then I lived at my new house and so I drove because I needed all my after-work time to unpack and besides it was 33km to work. I biked to the nearby store for dinner when things got settled as regards the packing and stuff. And then winter came, and the biking stopped. And work at SiteBrand was a little stressful, and blah blah blah whatever other excuses I could’ve thought of would go here.

Result: I’m over 200 lbs.

So, now the bike is out and the exercise begins. Interesting thing about losing weight: positive feedback cycle. You start doing one thing that you find is making a consistent difference. So you say, “This is going well, what if…” and then you try something else, too. And that makes a difference, too. And the compound difference is pretty good. And so on goes the loop.

So now, not only am I getting a little bit of exercise every day with the little neighbourhood trips, I’m also starting a bit of a diet. The problem with willpower and positive feedback cycles is that a turnaround in the cycle can break the willpower.

So follow along with that friendly graph I’ve stuck at the top of the page. I’ve written some software that makes it trivial for me to update the graph with new measurements, so I’ll be posting new data every day for awhile. You can click the graph and get a larger version. You can click that and get a PDF, which will have the graph plus the actual data from the textfile.

I’m taking pictures along the way, too. I’m not posting them because they’re embarrasing. Maybe I’ll do a before/after if there’s a good outcome to this thing.

Anyways, some things to look forward to next time:
* Review of new earphones, including pictures
* Pictures of the Saturn and the Corolla
* Pictures of the old bike and the new bike

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