No, not those kind of cans, but the kind you can wrap around your head.  Okay still, I'm talking about headphones.  Since starting at my awesome new job, there have been some freedoms that I have been accustomed to that are no longer there.  One of them has been the ability to stream audio.  That's all fine and dandy as I have an iPod Touch that I bought because I had to give up my iPhone from the old job.  So, what's a somewhat young and enterprising programmer supposed to do?  Upgrade the ear buds to a portable audiophile rig.  Here's what I did.

Alright so I figured that if I was going to be locked into rocking my headphone, then it would be a great opportunity to upgrade my ears.  Way back in the day I bought me a pair of Stanton Dj Pro 2000s and it served its purpose for such a long time.  The problem was that the band that held the earphones together cracked and today I have a glued up version of the awesome headphones of yesterday.  Even better still I originally bought it at about 20 bucks off because the store I got it at didn't have the ones I wanted in stock and gave me this upgrade at the price of mis-stocked headphones.  I needed to get the same kind of great deal.

Fast forward to a month ago.  I was awashed in my newfound job and realized it was time to upgrade.  When I got home, I researched the blazes out of entry level audiophile headphones.  I didn't want to go full out and drop over 4 figures on a pair of headphones.  All I needed was something better and richer than the ear buds I was rotating through like disposable contact lenses.  The great people at HeadRoom Audio built a list of the top 10 headphones of this year and it boiled down to two headphones.  First the Sennheiser HD 518 and some Audio Technica headphones.  My lovely girlfriend notched a wireless set of cans for me from Sennheiser for Xmas a year or two ago so that was the deciding factor.

The Sennheiser HD 518 touts being the audiophile's entry level dream.  That's exactly what I wanted.  I've been bouncing off of ear buds for a couple of years now.  First because the Stantons were too much to handle and secondly because having some circumaural cans on at the gym stands out to the point of awkwardness.  I slapped these guys on and tranced out the Daft Punk Tron: Legacy soundtrack.  Instantly I found what I was missing with second hand and first hand Apple ear buds.  I got the feeling that the mids, lows, and highs washed out better and were richer than any ear bud could come close to comparing.  That's expected though, they are higher quality.

I was told that there is a burn in period of about 100 hours for the headphones until it fully realizes its soundtential.  Even with that knowledge it was not enough for me.  The problem I had, and admittedly HeadRoom Audio pointed out, was that for portable audio, the headphones were just not enough.  I had an awesome pair of headphones that could handle way more than the power the iPod Touch was pouring out.  That's a major problem.  I mean, if I jacked in directly to the computer with my amazingly awesome long cord, then I could have the power to provide the headphones with a range to deliver quality sounds to my ears.  I need the same kind of power but in a portable format.

Enter the Fiio E11.  Head-fi.org, as well as other websites, pointed out that headphone amplifiers can be that bridge between lame sound and great sound for the swanky headphones purchased.  I was hesitant at first because most amplifiers were bulky, expensive, and too much for what I needed.  That was until I found out that Fiio was putting out an amplifier that is portable and powerful.  The E11 runs off a USB chargeable Li-On battery and drives a louder sound with adjustable EQ and Gain settings.  Long story short, the E11 was the perfect complement to my Sennheiser HD 518, after getting the cheapo Fiio iOs to audio port bridge connector.

So that's my rig.  I have the bridge connector outputting my music and podcasts to the E11 and then the sound rolls on through to my 518s.  The sound is at least 10 times better than what I had before with ear buds.  There are a couple of problems, though.  First off, I dumbed off and did not find out tha the 518s are not isolated to outside sound.  What I mean to say is that if I pump it real loud, everyone in the office will hear it.  That wasn't exactly what I was going for.  That said, the sound is richer no matter the volume so overall it is a better experience.  The only other problem is the setup and teardown time it takes to slap that stuff to my iPod Touch.  It's a first world problem so it's no big deal at all.

I encourage everyone out there to upgrade their listening experience. When researching this topic, I came across many options that increasingly wanted to take more out of my pocket.  At the end of the day, you just need to spring a little bit more on a pair of headphones.  In my case, I needed an amplifier that was portable and could pump enough juice to make the headphones worthwhile.  Just like I did, you too can get a rig that upgrades your experience  without having to drop over $200.  Seriously, Beats By Dre and the like use name recognition for price than anything else.

Alrighty, I'm finally back home and recovering after a marathon of tech and music that was SXSW. I'm sitting down sipping some hot tea and getting ready for a night time cold and flu Alka Seltzer bath. That's right, I brought home lots of tech info and a cold from beautiful Austin, Texas. Hey, if you are gonna do it, you gotta go hard or not at all. At any rate I have one more day of summaries to dispatch before I start something new this year. I will go over each talk I went to into a little more depth, more for the benefit of myself more than anything else, as well as give proper respect to the .

The final day saw me head to Ballroom C in the Austin Convention Center for Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information. This was more of a personal joy than most anything else. I use Google Reader on a daily basis and run through an insane amount of information. Any kind of help is much appreciated. I got here when the lady discussed using Yahoo! Pipes, BackType, and Twitter to jumble around real-time information and tune it to your personal preferences. This is gonna be a fun one to go back over and implement.

I do some side work here and there (http://hoketronics.com), and because of this I decided that I owed that side a bit of love by going to Freelancers: You're Five Products Away From Freedom. The guy who gave the talk is one of the Five Tech Guys in Kilts and also wrote a CodeIgniter book. While geared toward freelancers, I see benefit across the board from this talk. His main idea was that there are tools that cut across so quick to publish and take payments for any type of product, that any idea of fix someone comes up with can be monetized almost instantly. Great stuff there.

My day job does work geared more toward the government side of things. With How Governments are Changing Where Big Ideas Happen, I got a small taste of how governments lure tech companies. Representatives from Louisiana, Europe, Shanghai, and even Austin talked about methods their local governments use to lure talent to their area. It was a refreshing view to see that the public sector is starting to catch up and compete with the private sector in these areas. One thing I didn't know, Facebook opened up their first office outside of California in Austin, Texas.

After snacking some lunch and raking in the schwag from trade show floor, I dipped into the Reid Hoffman Presentation titled, "Data as Web 3.0." Reid was the driving force behind LinkedIn and his discussion revolved around the next iteration of the Internet. With describing Web 1.0 as searching data and retrieving it as well as Web 2.0 as introducing social aspects of relations, Reid presented his thoughts on Web 3.0. He claims that the next step is the processing and making sense out of the huge amounts of data spewed out from the marriage of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. He then ran down his top 10 list for entrepreneurs. Again, all great stuff.

Finally, since I missed all of the keynotes this year, I decided to attend the closing speech by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. Bruce was the man behind the cyberpunk culture and he gave a great punkish talk to close out the Interactive portion of the conference. Between his musings, ramblings, and one liners, Bruce laid out his biggest problem today. Progress is moving fast and it's up to the youth and it's ability with tech to start taking the lead. I'll never forget him telling the Baby Boomers to stop trying to hold on and get out of the way.

All and all day 5 filled the few gaps left in my puzzle board of needs for SXSW Interactive. I filled it plenty with some hardcore code and design sessions earlier. Now I had some business and a little more government items to pluck right in. Finally, Bruce Sterling was the last inspirational piece to make my puzzle complete. With almost a week out of SXSWi 2011, I'm still feeling complete and basking in the glow.

My lovely girlfriend went over her year end review last month and what perked my attention up was a to do list for the entire year.  I never though about doing that, even though I'm clinging on to some form of GTD.  That moment inspired me to create my own year to do list and let me just tell you, I filled that sucker out.  I've already got a good head start on one of the items.  I'm well on my way to creating my very first VST plugin.

What's VST?  It's short for Virtual Studio Technology and it was the brainchild of pro audio software stalwart Steinberg.  It's goal was to enable an interchangeable way for audio processing to be applied to different software hosts.  Think of a VST like what Java is to operating system platform.  VST and its SDK is a ubiquitous way for audio software developers to build applications and have them work across different pro audio software applications.

The SDK itself uses C++, but there are various language implementations out there across the web, including Java and Python.  But being the enterprising fella that I am, I decided that I needed to go over C++ again.  My first real exposure to C++ was in high school of all places.  After my short stint there I didn't really touch it as college focused on Java instead.  It's been fun, needless to say, re-learning C++.  Cplusplus.com has been fantastic in that respect.

So I'm in the midst of knocking out a VST and will hopefully have something turned out by the end of the month.  I haven't decided yet how much coverage I'll give on it here or over on my music blog, Helping Zero Knives Enter You.  The other conundrum so far is finding the right development environment for VST building.  There's plenty of tutorials out there, although somewhat disjointed, that between them require at least 5 different IDEs as well as the good ole command line.  I'm going to pick the one that works with and go with it.

So that's on my plate for now.  I'm really pumped about having a bigger, or 20,000 ft level for all you GTDers out there, in place.  There's more coming down the pike and I'm definitely gonna talk about it here.  In the meantime, please check out some of the sites above, they are tons of fun.

So I updated the blog software today and I'm like, "Why not write something?" so here we go.  I've been thinking about dogs for a while now because, well, a dog has entered my life recently.  No, not my girlfriend you bastards, but her dog.  I, like many of you out there, suffer from allergies and it especially flares up around pets.  Growing up was a litany of cats with a few dogs sprinkled here and there.  It wasn't until college that I finally freed myself, as well as my nasal passages, from pets.

Fast forward about 2 years ago.  I met the love of my life and everything was perfect, except that she had a dog.  My fears related toward the best solution I had for dealing with allergies:  avoiding pets at all costs.  But this time I had more at stake.  So I bit the bullet and tried to make work.  Welp, we're still together and I'm not sneezing as much so it looks to be working out just great.  But that's not what I'm getting at.

Being so removed from pets, I've never had the chance to observe them with my fully developed cranium.  In some respects, it gives me an advantage to see how pets operate from a different point of view.  One of the things I noticed through the almost two years I've spent watching the dog is this:  dogs are the most persistent creatures on earth.

I've handled dog behavior in good ways and in bad ways.  I'm not perfect and maybe I could've handle some situations better, but the outcome never fails with the dog.  No matter how I deal with what it's done, it always keeps coming back for what it wants.  Sure there may be some period of avoidance, but it either has a terrible memory or it just never holds a grudge.  Whatever it is, it keeps its main goal of food, petting, and attention at hand and will just keep on trying to get the most of it.

From what I can gather, the domestication of dogs created some behaviors that make them react in ways that massage the emotion of its owner.  Like its ears bending back and somehow attaining the perfect sad droopy face, dogs figured out when they are being scolded and counter with the right combo of moves to paralyze the owner with a remorseful facade.  Once its over they seem to forget the whole thing and keep on keeping on.

I sense it.  I get it.  And I also respect it.

People tend to be just a little more complicated.  I know within myself I can let one little thing meander down the road to pure rage or depression.  Usually when that happens I get derailed off the track to where I want to be in life.  Whether it's for the day or something bigger for the month, sometimes I can let stuff get to me and change my behavior with actions and/or people.  So when I see the dog bounce right back up after I scolded it looking for a biscuit or a scratch behind the head, I have to pause for a moment.

The way the dog acts makes me strive more to bang out what exactly it is I want and to keep pushing toward it, no matter what happens.  It might also mean for me to go a little too far in pursuit because as someone else smarter than me said, "It's easier to ask for forgiveness then it is to get permission."  I never thought I would get advice from a dog, but here it is.  Rest assured, I won't be drinking water from a bowl or cleaning myself with my tongue anytime soon.

Now that I've fully recovered from SXSW, it's high time I start cleaning up.  The schwag mountain spilled over and caused some damage but I got it under control.  So now it's time to spring clean my workflow and social media usage.  I subscribe to this, follow that, or just end up trying to fill up big holes in my life with tiny sand distractions that it gets way too overwhelming, as I'm sure others can identify.  Once I realize that, then I know it's time to pare down my workflow and regroup.  It's not a perfect system, but when it comes time for a change I'm ready to make it.  So how am I doing this?  Glad you asked.

First off, Twitter, it's time I change my relationship with you.  You see, I enjoy trying to follow as many tweeps as I can to match some of the other D-Grade web celebs follow counts, but it's just not working out.  What happens is a undending stream of garbage and links to articles I already read.  True, you've had lists for a while but I'm sorry I didn't pay attention to you earlier.  That's okay.  I think the change will be made for the better for both of us.  That way, when we have conversations with each other, it can be meaningful.  Here's what's I'm doing.

The dribble will be cut out.  I'm going to use a couple of handy tools like JustUnfollow and Mr. Tweet to cut out the bad and bring in the good.  Most of the time when I tweet, I get no retweets, replies, or direct messages.  Now, part of that is my fault, but another part is the list of followers I have don't match my core values.  So while Tim Bray might stay, Verified Alf is outta here.  Also, if a tweep blasts out multiple links in spurts, I'm unfollowing them and I may even block them.  I will be ruthless so if you get unfollowed don't take it personally.  If you get blocked, then please take it personally.  Especially if you are an SEO Expert or social media marketer.

Because I fell so behind using lists, I will play some catch up to make them more important.  This will be built on the fly and will break out to a set of maybe 10 or 15.  That's about all I can handle.  Then I can check up on certain lists and be able to interject and interact with greater precision.

All of this in the name of meaningful usage.  Most people when they talk about Twitter, they get some kind of value of messaging people.  I don't nearly get as much bounce back as they do.  Even my girlfriend who recently converted is getting better usage than me.  So, I will cut down and build some lists that I can follow easier which will enable me to tweet more effectively.  Included in that effectiveness will be more personalized messages from my link tweets.

On to Google Reader.  Whatever gets missed in Twitter ends up in the RSS catcher.  So whenever I read blogs or hear suggestions of sites from others, I end up subscribing to more and more RSS feeds.  Fortunately with Reader's Trends section, I can see what I use on a more frequent basis and cut back on the feeds that I barely touch.  This again hits at matching my feeds to my core values.  It's easy to lose focus when I spread myself around so I need to keep myself in focus and in check.  It happens to all of us so it's always great to go back every once in a while and clean things up.

Next up, the desktop.  My laptop rocks the house.  It's a beefy Sony Vaio that already paid for itself many times over.  I can run so many things at once, it's a multitasker's dream.  The problem is that I usually have Pidgin and Tweetdeck up going and flowing.  It's incredibly easy to glance left or right on my screen to see what's coming and get distracted.  So what I will be doing is turning them off.  For some it's easy, but I have always had my instant messenger open in more than one location at all times since college.  That's 10 years.  So it will be a huge change.  I'm thinking that when it's time for a break, the starting and stopping of these programs will be a great physical switch.

It's amazingly easy to get distracted and let projects clutter up your mental space.  At least once a year, we need to clean it all up.  Much like our physical space, the junk in your mental space will make it harder to move around quickly and get projects done.  I encourage people to try these methods out to help clean up all mental junk.

A couple of different developments cropped up in the last couple of months that's pulled me away from the blog.  One of them was a job change.  The company I'm working on a contract to hire basis is great and I've had the opportunity to learn many things in my short time there.  I do PHP programming and I had the opportunity to freshen up on PHPDoc.  PHPDoc is a documentation standard much like JavaDoc where you can comment code and drop in identifiers to help with the status of a certain function or class.  One of the identifiers is '@todo.'  After working with the history of the '@' symbol and how it relates in context, especially with GTD,  I came to realize how much this 5 character identifier has affected my life.

The '@todo' identifier states one thing clearly:  The following information is what's left or what's next to do.  It can be compared to the @NextAction context in GTD.  Once that action is completed, there may be another one next and subsequently a '@todo' identifier with that information will be listed.  The difference between that and GTD is that it's left in the code.  But, with a good IDE or a simple awk command, you can compile the list of @todo's for a project thus returning it to a GTD like state.

I'm the kind of person who's insane attention to detail will leave me always uncovering a rock or looking at a problem from all perspectives.  Some people call this being a pefectionist.  One of the major problems with being a perefectionist is that they will refine and tweak themselves into never getting anything done.  Analysis through paralysis is a common phrase for the problem.   And yes, I have that problem.

As some of you may know, a couple of years ago I hit rock bottom in paralysis and have somehow climbed my way step by step by implementing the GTD mehtod (as well as making other life changes).  The perfectionist in me still lives.  The initial mind dump and inbox organization took me about 3 days.  One of the hardest things to do while implementing the methodology was not being sure I was doing it right.  The common voice of the perfectionist.

So I'm slowly learning ot become an almost-perfectionist.  I still do my tweaks and twinges, but set a time limit before sending the product off.  Whenever I do so, there's that voice that doubts whether or not I've done right.  Even when I use a time limit, it reaches out and pulls me down to make sure I double check and triple check everything.  It's going to be with me forever.

Last month, an 'ah-ha' moment came.  And no I'm not talking about jumping up and singing 'Take on Me.'   What I'm talking about is when I started brushing up on PHPDoc, I realized that the '@todo' was the trademark for the perfectionist.  I can roll some code out but appease the perefectionist in me with the simple 5 letter incantonation.  The code is out and I can always come back to it to tweak and twinge.

I've accepted the fact that I will never be happy with my work.  I've also accepted that I will always find something wrong with it and attempt to fix it on the spot.  But with the '@todo' action I can drop the noted fix and move on.  I feel much more relieved and am producing more now that I've left @todo's not only in my code, but also in my other projects, my friends, my family, and my life.

Needless to say, the holidays brought me some changes this year on both the personal and professional side.  A couple of years ago I implemented the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology to help account for changes in my life and to influence the direction it was going.  I recently had the opportunity to start a fresh GTD setup at the office.  Here are the steps:

1. Download Thunderbird 3 Beta 1



2. Setup the mail account.  Mine was an IMAP implementation so access to it via a webmail interface was kept in place.



3. Download and install Lightning Daily Updater.  The current stable version is for Thunderbird version 2.  This Add On for Thunderbird grabs the nightly, version 3 compatible calendar extension.
4. Be sure to enable the Google Calendar Provider in the options for the updater.  This was used to sync up office specific events to my main Google Calendar.



5. Run the updater and install both Lightning and the GCal provider



6. Add 3 local calendars for the main GTD contexts: @NextActions, @SomedayMaybe, @WaitingFor
7. Setup main calendar to sync with external Google calendar, using the private XML url from your calendar's settings.



8. Setup the projects context as Categories in the Lightning Preferences

This is a little bit different than what I had before.  I'm taking the calendar/task approach much differently.  Before I used Horde's implementation of their organizational modules to manage an action and an action that was time sensitive.  With Thunderbird and Lightning, the idea of a task is strongly coupled with a calendar item.  So I had to create the separate local calendars to give a place for tasks to land.  This turns out great because now I can create new contexts in the future as separate calendar types.

So far the implementation is going well.  I more times than not funnel all tasks Thunderbird's way but have caught myself once or twice avoiding the email client.  The next step for me is to explore what the benefit for me in syncrhonizing this setup with my Gmail/RememeberTheMilk system for my main GTD implementation.  It's still a little early, but if I feel the need to jump ship, I'll let you know.

Update 6/5/09: Changed the download link for Thunderbid beta.