Prodigal student
Went back to SHP yesterday to say hi and give Pat my iPod stuff. It was fun seeing the teachers again. What I thought was really weird was how comfortable the campus felt. I liked the feeling of owning a place, of having been somewhere so long that you feel like it’s fundamentally yours. It’s a really comforting feeling.
After hanging around SHP for a while and talking to Quinton a lot, I had to zip down to Palo Alto for an eye exam. I got there right on time, luckily, even though I didn’t actually know what street the office was on. I knew what the street looked like and what buildings it was around, but I didn’t know the actual name of the street. I miraculously found a parking spot in the parking structure across the street and managed to show up on time.
Sadly, my prescription has changed. My left eye has degraded another .5 points and is now at -3.00; my right eye has remained relatively the same and is holding at -3.75. We’re ordering new lenses and whatnot.
In other news, I’ve been looking at in-ear headphones and passive noise-cancellation. I want to find a nice pair of headphones that have good sound quality and are comfortable. That seems to be somewhat of a difficult proposition. There are a lot of offerings out there, and the main gripes people seem to have with any given set is that the provided silicone tips don’t fit their ear canals very well and so do not form an efficient seal. The logical solution to this would be custom plugs, but getting those is pricey. So, I’m not really sure what to think. Most of the good, entry-level models run at around $100. I’m not sure if I’m willing to spend that much money on headphones.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, there are these really fancy headphones from Ultimate Ears that are both extremely comfortable and offer great sound quality. The trade-off is that you have to pay almost $1k to get them. The entire headphone body is molded to custom fit your ears using molds of your ear canals taken by audiologists. The drivers for the headphones are built into the custom bodies and attached to a cord that loops over the top of your ear, thus eliminating the pesky occurance of microphonics, when vibrations in the cord conduct themselves into the resonating chamber of the headphones and disturb you. Testimony suggests that these are the best phones in the market. Of course, they should be, seeing as Ultimate Ears originally intended them for professional musicians/sound technicians who need precise replication of sound and maximum isolation for long periods of time.
So, custom headphones are likely out. I’m looking at other generic models. What I want is a pair of headphones that are small and don’t stick out of my head and don’t cause a lot of pressure on my ear canal. It’s really hard for me to tell how big a pair of headphones are from pictures alone. And then, I’m not sure how much I’d like the in-ear aspect. I think I’d get used to it, but there’s no way of knowing.
