Skullcandy Headphones

Every once in a great while I get to buy something new. It does not happen often, and it is not usually on the scale of the HDTV that I want, but sometimes making a really good choice on a smaller purchase is even better.

I have been working on several music projects for the last couple of years and am constantly listening to music and evaluating its quality. My experience with the Apple headphones that are included with the iPod have been disappointing. Don't get me wrong I am as much or more of an Apple fanboi as the next twenty-something, but the included headphones have been a sore point for many others and really the worst part of the entire iPhone/iPod experience.

This past year I was able to get an iPod Touch. It has been fantastic but I kept on fighting again with the really poor quality headphones. For me part of the listening



experience is being able to hear bass. In the earbuds the upper registers are tinny and the lower registers are pretty much non existent in my experience. When I would listen at home I could use my big over ear cans (and the experience is amazing) but for listening in the car or when walking through a store no one wants to be that guy.

I finally broke (one of the buds randomly stopped giving out sound) my first pair after about 2 months of use back in February. Because it was so new, the guy at the Apple store slipped me a new pair and it was all good. Then I broke a second pair (those legitimately cracked because I let the earbuds swing down to the ground while I was picking up Greyson and walking) about 2 months ago and I realized that I needed

something better sounding and more durable.

A friend of mine from work pointed me in the direction of skullcandy. I had heard of the company because of their partnership with major music artists on some ridiculous headphones but had never looked into anything else the company makes.

That was a mistake. I was able to get a pair of inexpensive, in-ear headphones that fit so well they are almost noise cancelling. The sound is fantastic. I can hear bass. I can hear background conversations between band members before songs start all without turning the volume up past half even in a noisy environment.

I would like to use this opportunity to ask Steve Jobs: Why can you not bundle the Skullcandy Inked line of headphones in with iPods? They only cost $20 at Best Buy. They sound fantastic and they don't look weird or anything.

For the rest of you, if you listen to music on a regular basis or even casually, I fully recommend these headphones. Listening with them on is like getting to listen to all of your music for the first time again, rediscovering whole portions that you were not even aware existed. Let me know what you think or if you have other affordable alternatives that you have come across. @danieldezago.

Decisions

So the theme copy situation from the other day has been resolved to my liking. I decided that I really like this theme and to make a new header that would be consistent across all of my other websites. Also, I redirected www.danieldezago.com to point to my .mac website rather than directly to my wordpress blog.

It actually works out pretty well overall I think. I have a new design, the blog is visible in an abridged format on my .mac site, and if anyone actually reads this and clicks a link for the article, the header is consistent from one site to the other so it blends it better.

New Theme Maybe

So this is not in the list of updates that I said I was going to write. I was reading Mark Artrip's blog and really like how he restyled the look. Very nice. That of course inspired me to take a look at the different themes available and see if there were any that jumped out at me.

Of course now that I picked a new one, I realize that I totally copied his theme. So right now I am not sure if I can keep it which would really be a shame, the side column and different sections look so much more clean and neat than my last theme. Maybe if I come up with a header that is in a different enough style then it will not be so obvious. In the mean time feel free to weigh in on this important issue. Until I decide I am going to leave my blog lame and headerless.

If you don't have a wordpress account to leave comments, go ahead and send a tweet to @danieldezago or leave a message on Facebook, it all goes to the same place.

Long Lost Update

I have been swamped. Sure that may sound like an excuse for not updating this blog but seriously, I have had so much going on that I have been just twittering for the last four months or so. And now that I bring it up, I have been wondering if there is a point to having a blog any more. In the world of constant updates and keeping in touch passively like I know I do, who takes the time to read something more than 140 characters?

Having reflected on that I have decided that there is most certainly a place for a blog. Not everything in life can or should be reduced to mini-updates or shortened URLs with hashmarks and @replies. On that note here are the posts that I am planning on writing over the next several weeks in no particular order:

• howto: decorate a nursery really cheap


• howto: refinish wood furniture


• howto: make backwashing your pool easier


• friends: why everyone should have some


• greyson dezago


• life change: different video games


• books I have read lately

I think that will do it for now. There may be posts that come out that are not on this list but these are the things that I have been meaning to write and have not. Now they are on a to-do list that I can promptly get around to ignoring.

Daily Fodder 003

Episode 3 of the relaunched Daily Fodder.

• Birds in his pants


• $30,000 bat house


• Man sues for right to wear skirts


• College students are wusses


• Holy awesome battle Batman!


• Dying woman takes pets with her


• Don't use a crossbow to threaten police


• Celebration gone awry


• Taser your kid at work day


• Giant venomous spiders invade Australia

As an aside, I will be trying to put titles in each of the parts where there is a different story so that it is easier to follow which links go with what.

Daily Fodder 002

Second installment of the new Daily Fodder. Links to all of the stories are below.

• Musician fined for feeding squirrel


• Spending the loot


• London Evening Standard says sorry for sucking


• Hiding in the womens bathroom


• Spiderman, Tinky Winky and Oompa-Loompa brawl


• Crazy Old Man


• French prison guards fight with French police

Daily Fodder 001

I am going to get back in to the daily fodder routine. It is pretty easy now to record myself as I drive home and then upload it to YouTube. Really with a couple of clicks I can have a daily vlog. Here is the first entry. Not true fodder content yet just an introduction.

Twitterific vs TweetDeck vs Tweetie

I am going to start a series of posts that follow my own process of optimizing my online profile. Like most of you I have a whole bunch of profiles in a whole bunch of places and it can seem annoying or tedious to keep up with them all. What I have done in the past is just work on each one in spurts which yields a pretty inconsistent experience. So what I am going to do is highlight the different tools that I use to make that happen.

I am going to start off with a side by side comparison of some of the major players in the Twitter client world. I know several people who use TweetDeck and I know that Twitterific has been around forever. Tweetie is a really new entry but has gotten a lot of press so I thought I would cover it as well. There are certainly others, and if there is one that you would like compared I will give it a shot next go round.

[vimeo 4447894]

Music Review: 808's & Heartbreak

I have a friend who is a big Kanye West fan. So it was with him in mind that I started listening to Kanye's latest album a couple of weeks ago.

I want it to be know that despite my strong dislike of Kanye as a person, I think he does have talent in spades. I really wanted to like this album or at least a couple of songs from it. So I listened to this album all the way through six times before I decided that it had great potential and was a cool project but I just did not like it.

The songs themselves are great with catchy lyrics and beats. There were actually a few, Paranoid and Love Lockdown that made it into my 4* play list so the whole album was not a wash in that regard. It is a pretty big change as far as style from other albums of Kanye's that I have listened to and to his credit I think that the content of the album was great and that is what got me to listen to it so many times before I made up my mind.

Really what tipped the scales agains the album making it into my good list was that voice effect that has become more and more popular in recent years. I think it can be great as an embellishment but really there was not a pure word uttered until sometime in the seventh song. Now if it was anyone but Kanye I would have said they were covering up for their inability to sing, but since I know that he has ability, I just do not understand the point of it being so prevalent throughout the album.

Overall there are some things that I think would have made this idea better. First I think that it should have been released as an EP. There are enough good songs on here to warrant a release of some kind, but in my view not quite enough to have a solid full album. Sure there have been some hits off of it but those could have been hits off an EP just the same and he still would have been able to have his "personal" project. Also, I wish that he had done the writing and the beats but maybe gotten someone like Justin Timberlake to sing some of the tracks. Like I said before I liked the lyrics and beats of several of the tracks but an outstanding singer would have taken those to the next level.

Pros: Good lyrics to the songs, catchy beats, Kanye West.

Cons: Overuse of vocal effects gets annoying, no huge standout tracks, Kanye West.

Summary: Listen to it a few times, take the tracks you like and pitch the rest.

Swine Flu: Really?

I want to start off by saying that I am not necessarily an excitable person. If something that sounds huge and sweeping is announced, I am generally going to be sceptical until I can find a reason to buy in.
Recently there has been a lot on the news about swine flu and how it has killed something like 158 people in Mexico, some more people in OH and other places in the midwest where they handle pigs. I am not trying to be calouse here or anything there are real people that have died and that is sad.
However, there are a few other things that I would like to point out. All that I ask is that you read through this list then you can go back to watching Fox New tell everyone that the sky is falling and swine flu is going to be the next major global pandemic. Below are some citations about Swine Influenza from Wikipedia:

The CDC reports that the symptoms and transmission of the swine flu from human to human is much like that of seasonal flu. Common symptoms include fever, lethargy, lack of appetite and coughing, while runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea have also been reported.^[26] It is believed to be spread between humans through coughing or sneezing of infected people and touching something with the virus on it and then touching their own nose or mouth.^[27] Swine flu cannot be spread by pork products, since the virus is not transmitted through food.^[27] The swine flu in humans is most contagious during the first five days of the illness although some people, most commonly children, can remain contagious for up to ten days. Diagnosis can be made by sending a specimen, collected during the first five days, to the CDC for analysis.^[28]

The swine flu is susceptible to four drugs licensed in the United States, amantadine, rimantadine, oseltamivir and zanamivir; however, for the 2009 outbreak it is recommended it be treated under medical advice only with oseltamivir and zanamivir to avoid drug resistance.^[29] The vaccine for the human seasonal H1N1 flu does not protect against the swine H1N1 flu, as they are antigenically very different.

So what does all that mean? Basically if you work with pigs (aside from the office jokes you could make) and think you might have the flu, you could have a different form of the flu that actually does already have a treatment. However drugs cost money so what can you do to protect yourself from inevitible infection? Read below:

Recommendations to prevent spread of the virus among humans include using standard infection control against influenza. This includes frequent washing of hands with soap and water or with alcohol-based hand sanitizers, especially after being out in public.^[35] Vaccines against the H1N1 strain in the 2009 human outbreak are being developed and could be ready as early as June 2009.^[36]

Experts agree that hand-washing can help prevent viral infections, a surprisingly effective way to prevent all sorts of diseases, including ordinary influenza and the new swine flu virus. Influenza can spread in coughs or sneezes, but an increasing body of evidence shows little particles of virus can linger on tabletops, telephones and other surfaces and be transferred via the fingers to the mouth, nose or eyes. Alcohol-based gel or foam hand sanitizers work well to destroy viruses and bacteria. Anyone with flu-like symptoms such as a sudden fever, cough or muscle aches should stay away from work or public transportation and should see a doctor to be tested.

So Dan, all I have to do is wash my hands? Yep. Pretty much.

Now that we have some information out there about how much easier it is to not get swine flue than it is to get it, let me share some death statistics. There were almost three times more vehicular fatalities in construction zones in the entire year of 2007 than have died from swine flu. Talking again about Mexico and the 158 people that died there because of swine flu, it is kind of an insignificant number compared with the 8,463 that were executed in Mexico's drug war last year. I know that their war has gotten press time as well but I would say disproportionately. Do you see stories for the drug war 5356% more often? Or maybe you are going to say, well Mexico's drug war doesn't affect anyone that I know like swine flu could. You are possibly right, but if you are going to care about one statistic in Mexico you can follow a sequence of events and probably find a way that drug executions affect you.

Again, I am not sitting here trivializing the deaths of anyone I am just stating that from a standpoint of what should get covered and what is blown way out of proportion in order to sell more sensationalist stories they could have picked something with a little more clout. Bottom line: wash your hands. If you deal with pigs or poultry wash them again, problem solved. Now if only Fox News could find something worth reporting on.

What I am saying is this:

Flu spreads around the world in seasonal epidemics, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands annually — millions in pandemic years.

We do not do play by play for regular flu which is way more lethal, so get on with life and report on something worth reporting.

Upcoming posts

So I looked and it has been a long time since I posted. Not that I have been sitting around, I have been really busy. So with that in mind I have been writing drafts of some posts that I will me releasing on your collective unconsciousness.
Look for probably 4 or 5 posts this week ranging from how to make backwashing your pool easier to a review of Kanye's last album that I finally listened to.
Anyway. I am at church directing now so this will be all for now.

Pet Peeves: Language

No, this is not a post about swearing or cursing and it pervasiveness in our modern society. Although that could be a worthy subject on its own, I will leave it to someone else another time. This post is about people who think they are using "sophisticated" words or words that have more nuanced meaning but use them incorrectly.

Now I have probably been brought up with a skewed view of how to speak. My family is diverse in its understanding of classical languages, sentence structure and proper use of vocabulary. We actually used to have dinner conversation regarding parts of speech and the proper tense of words. I think that because I am aware that most people were not blessed with that kind of regular analysis of written and spoken word, I am able to let things slide the majority of the time. Every once in a while (maybe more to my wife to her great annoyance) I will throw out a correction on their use of a word if the meaning is truly different than what I think the person was trying to say. Usually, that person will respond with a gracious "Oh yeah, that is what I meant." or something along those lines. However what really irks me is when that person rejects the suggestion when they are obviously without a shadow of a doubt wrong, or if that was indeed the word they meant, they are misusing it.

The situation was this. I was talking about websites with someone (who also happens to be a public speaker) and they were saying that their website was good for a while but it had gotten worse as time went on and their redesigns now were going backwards in quality specifically he referenced "It used to be like 1997 and now it is more like 1992." The word he kept on using was digressed and I let it go the first time but then after the second time I said "Do you mean regressed?" and he said "No I mean digressed." I let it go because I really do not know him that well yet and I did not want to have a discussion about it without some way to show him without a shadow of a doubt that he was wrong but it has bothered me since Thursday. For those of you who think that they mean the same thing and did not click on the link, regress specifically references the decrease or going backwards of quality of a specific thing, while digress is specifically used when talking about writing or speaking that has gone of topic. Digressions happen all the time in my high school small group and regression is what is happening to our command of the English language.

So does this all make me a jerk that it bothered me? I don't think so I am just trying to help someone speak their own language corrctly. It is how I am wired. I strive for excellence and accuracy as much as possible whenever possible and I guess it bothers me when someone else does not. If you cannot say what you mean to say then why are you talking? Maybe that is why I don't say much unless I am sure of what I want to say. But I digress.

Java: Portrait of a Dog

Those of you who watch family guy will recognize that title as the episode where Brian runs away from home because of an incident at a dog show and then eventually comes back after going on trial. Well this is kind of like that. Except instead of running away then being hauled away by the police and coming back at the end of a trial, Java ran away and was hit by a car going 50mph on a main road. Ok so those two are not like each other but I wanted to use the title.

We got a call on Sunday while we were wrapping things up at church and the guy on the other end just asked me if our dog was named Java because she had just gotten hit by a car. He said that he would stay with her until we showed up which was about ten minutes later. By the time we got there there were two more cars pulled over to the side of the road (it is a grid street six lanes plus the turn lanes, Higley and Germann for those of you who live in Phoenix) and several other people gathered around her down in the bike trail that is off the side of the road.

The account that the guy who called was that he was the car behind the car of the woman who actually hit Java and that she was hit so hard that she flipped and rolled over five or six times before finally coming to a stop. When the guy got out to see if Java was alright she got up and took off running. He chased her and so did a passing guy on a bike for about a mile before she finally started sucumming to her injuries and layed down which is when they got my phone number off of her tags. They were all so nice, giving her some first aid as best as they could from a first aid kit, waiting until we got there and even calling back later in the evening to see how she was doing.

We got there and it was pretty obvious that she was in bad shape, she was bleeding out of her nose and mouth a little bit but there was nothing really obviously wrong with her. But she was not moving and her breathing was labored and her heart was racing. I picked her up and brought her over to our car and we took her to the emergency vet (on a side note emergency vets charge twice as much for the extra one day a week they are open) where they immediately took her in and said she was in critical condition and the doctor was "not optimistic" about her chances to live.

I am not a "animal lover." I make fun of those people who make dentist appointments for their dogs and put hats on them the same as you do. However, I am also not so cold hearted that I can just watch an animal that I have spent time training and that follows my every movement just bleed out and die on the side of the road. Well it turns out that according to the doctor she had some cuts on her liver and spleen and her abdominal cavity was filling with blood. We were allowed to go back and see her and it was pretty bad. She was all wrapped in compression bandages with a mask just letting in extra oxygen and the heart monitor showed her sustained heart rate at over 200bmp. Pretty much the doctor said that even if we gave them permission to do surgery or put her on a ventilator it was not likely to do any good.

So we decided that as long as we did our due diligence our conciences would be clear. We authorized compression and fluids and some pain medication and then finally left the vet waiting for a call to give us an update. That was at around 3:30pm.

We got a call at 7:30 or so that evening saying that Java had actually turned a corner and her heart rate finally was dropping back down to normal. By the next morning when we called, the vet said Java had been sitting up on her own looking around and was even walking and peeing (apparently the bladder getting crushed is the fatal part of getting hit by a car the majority of the time).

So we picked her up on Monday morning and she has been getting gradually better all week. She has been on some pain medication that we have for her and she has been out of it pretty much until yesterday afternoon. When I got home yesterday it was really kind of the first time that she acted more like she used to, coming over to the door when she heard the garage door open and wagging her tail a bunch when I let her in, chasing her toy that I threw for her.

It is good to have a dog that is such a beast. She does (not sure when this will start again) nothing but run laps in the back yard all day long. Most of the time Erin and I have just laughed at her being stupid and hyper, but I think that her overly strong heart and extremely toned muscles not only kept her heart going for four hours at 200bmp but also kept her from getting any breaks or fractures in her whole body.

So there you have it. Our dog lived through being hit by a car. She may be a bit crazy but it was kind of tough to think about not hearing her tag jingling when she would come running to my call.

iBook G4

Little bit of background. Erin's photography business is doing well enough that we finally needed her to upgrade from her trusty iBook G4 that we bought during college for writing papers. It just is not up to the task of Photoshop actions or managing large iPhoto libraries of RAW images. So what to do.
My brother Nate and his wife Erica are in a situation where Erica was is in need of a laptop and neither of them uses the G5 tower that has been just sitting in their living room. So what to do. We traded almost straight up. Part of the arrangement is that I needed to upgrade the laptop and put leopard on it so that is what I have been summoning the courage to do.
Now I think that I could have figured it all out and it would have worked fine, but i did wimp out and looked up a guide online. The guide at ifixit.com was amazing and I took it all apart and put it back together in a little less than 2 hours. Now that little laptop has an extra 256mb of memory and a 160GB hard drive for any kind of media library that Erica might want to have.

iTunes

I have been working on a giant music project partly for myself and partly for a good friend of mine. There have been countless hours getting correct album art and lyrics and ordering things correctly.

Saturday afternoon I thought that it was all gone. When I went to open my library to listen to some music, it would have the little progress bar saying checking library, then the correct menu bar on top would show up but the window of the application would never come up. All of the options in the actual menus were grayed out and I had no choice but to start a new library and try and import the library data that i could. It brought in some of the play lists, but none of the ratings or play counts and since I have a whole bunch of smart lists dependent on those things I still feel like I lost a lot. The last thing that you want to have to see on your screen if you have a decent music and video library is a screen that looks like this.
The good news is that I do have all of the data back and in the case of my giant project, it is forcing me to go back and fix some mistakes and make everything a bit more comprehensive and consistent. Just as a reminder to you all there is a backup option for your library in iTunes and there is also a way to export your library data which is what I should have done on a more regular basis. So bittersweet. I have all my stuff but not all the data.

Updates:

These are things that have been going on that each will get their own update soon, so hang tight.

Our dog Java was hit by a car going 50 mph.
My iTunes library somehow corrupted and I lost all of my playlists and ratings along with some album art and lyrics.
I started a second job.
I finished refinishing a dresser for the nursery.
I started doing another DVD for some video clients.
I started back on my no sugar and no caffeine diet.

I think that is it for the moment but since I am at work and not home yet these and other important updates will have to wait until at least later tonight.

Working Alot

So after working from home for my finance job for almost two months, I added a second job so that we could have a chance to do more than tread water financially. Getting out of bed yesterday morning @ 6 was one of the most difficult things I have had to do in a long time. It is so cold and dark!
However, really my problem now is going to be finding time to meet all of my committments. I am still leading a small group for high school boys, participating in a small group with my friends, helping on the weekend directing at church, staining furniture for the nursery, doing video work and all kinds of stuff.
So what am I saying? I guess I am just tired and sitting here in a training that I am required to be at and I would rather be doing anything else.

Yesterday

No this is not a post about the Beatles song, although I have been learning some interesting Beatles stuff since I have been working on my giant music project that I will describe when it is done.

Yesterday Erin and I had the day off and we worked on house stuff. Now that might not sound so bad, but I put on two coats of stain on the dresser and the desk that I am refinishing. The dresser is turning out pretty good, I will have some before and after pictures so that you all can see the results.

Now normally, I just like to do one project at a time and then use the down time to play some video games or something. Well not yesterday. We have a new computer on the way, courtesy of a swapping deal with Nate & Erica so in an effort to make room for the G5 I tore apart my office (which is actually now shared with Erin) to rewire everything from the ground up and to reorganize papers. So far so good. I think it has turned out pretty well but it is a work in progress. I have only maxed out one of my four power strips...

Got things done

So I got most of that stuff dome yesterday. Spent some of the best $20 ever on a sprayer for my weed issues and it was borderline miraculous how easy it was to spray our whole property. It would have taken probably 4-5 hours before but it only took 50 minutes.

What to do Today

So the last two days while I have been working I have been doing some major defragmenting of my various hard drives. It was pretty bad especially on my main internal laptop drive. Now I know some of you out there may say "I don't need to defragment a drive because I have a Mac." well that may feel true because you don't need to do it as much, it is still something that should be done. I looked and looked and finally came across a great software called iDefrag. It worked great and was very thorough. There are several different options as far as its defragmenting algorithm so give it a shot and try out their demo.
But really, I have a variety of things that are on my list today. I need to spray our weeds at least in the front yard, return some movies to Blockbuster, price out a replacement section of hose for our pool vacuum, apply another coat of stain on the dresser that I am refinishing for the nursery, and direct the weekend service at church.
Of those three really the last one is the only one I want to do but such is life and responsibility, especially when your wife is pregnant and cannot do anything that has smells. Maybe I will post later and give an update on how everything went.

Music:Listening

Here is a screen shot of some of the music that I have listened to in the last 24 hours. I am part of Last.fm and have the application that captures what you listen to on your iPod and iTunes. There has to be some way for it to show it like an RSS feed but for now I am just going to put a picture.



Feel free to mock me. I will defend myself by saying that as I compile the list of every song that has ever been #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, there are some pretty stupid songs. However, nothing says shuffle like having Bette Midler singing "Wind Beneath My Wings" followed up by "Check Up On It" by Beyonce ft Slim Thug. Yeah it has happened.
For those of you keeping track, I am about halfway through getting all of the correct album art. It is a very tedious process since I am including the cover from the album and also from the single.

my blog sucks

that headline pretty much says it all. The header is old. My different pages like my wish list are out of date and there is really nothing that would keep anyone coming back for anything.
So I think that I am going to give this thing an overhaul. First I am going to put posting on my daily to do list, even if I just post that there was nothing to post about it would be something. Look for changes in the future.

At Long Last

So finally after all this time I am going to bring my college videos to those of you who want to see them. Some of you may wonder why of has taken so long and to be honest mostly it was die to not having an 8mm camera with FireWire output. But really a lot if it was lack of motivation.
Now that we have a baby on the way it has become time to clean stuff put and that for me means at least consolidating three shoe boxes of 8mm and mini dv tapes into hopefully a half a stack of DVDs.
What does this mean you can look forward to? Well without looking at the label the first tape involves milk, food coloring and puking. I will leave it up to you to get excited about that or not, but you should.

New year

About five or six years ago apple came out with a product called the iPod. It played some music and it was cool and I really wanted one.
Here we are in 2009 a bunch of years later and I finally am the proud owner of a 32gb iPod touch. In fact I am writing this post from my iPod how sweet is that?
There are so many cool apps that I have been looking at that I really hardly know what to do with myself. Ate there any of you that have an iPod touch or iPhone with some killer app you couldn't love without? Tell me about them and I will start posting about the ones I find. Start by checking out this Wordpress app for free.