I broke down and bought some new earbuds today to replace the ragged fifteen-year-old Awias I had. Best Buy had what I needed: a new pair of Sony MDR-EX51LP earbuds. They’ve just become my best headphones in the house.

The biggest thing for me is sound quality (naturally). A great deal of headphones at the store had frequency responses of 20 Hz to 20KHz, which in book is too narrow. Sure, you can listen to music in that range, but it’ll have all the charm of hold music. The Sony’s rock in that they cover a greater range of lower frequencies, in addition to some more high frequencies (which is a nice plus, but not critical for me). Total range: 6 Hz to 23KHz. They bested my trusty (and quite rusty) JVC headphones, hands down.

The headphone models at the store could do a bit better, but not by much. A pair of Aiwa headphones on the shelf boasted 5 Hz to 25 KHz. I decided it wasn’t worth paying the dork price of wearing coconuts on my head just to squeeze in a little more music. I’m enough of a dork as it is, thank you very much.

Comfort is another big plus to these earbuds. The Awia’s I’ve put up with had foam covers which quickly got lost, making the earbuds a bit tiring on my ears after a while. These Sonys have rubber cups which fit very snugly in my ear. They shut out outside noise in a way the Aiwas never could.

Now I’m rocking out with my Zaurus kicking my Ogg Vorbis-encoded music collection straight into my head. Yeah, I know I’m a dweeb, but at least now I have an excuse for silently grinning and staring into space.

I found this to be amusing. I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but when the storms started piling up, I did wonder if there was some sort of cosmic connection.

My back pain is completely gone this morning. It’s so weird how for two days straight it hurt to move my head, but now its totally gone. I think I must have pinched a nerve or something.

I was really bummed yesterday because it was painful to sing. Normally, it’s only painful for the people around me.

I was sitting at my desk tonight doing some research for an article I’m writing for the neighborhood newsletter about the rail line next to our neighborhood. The Seaboard Air Line has a colorful history, once bringing passengers and cargo through the heart of the South. As I looked at the multitude of pages on the history of this line, I heard a quite unusual sound. A CSX train’s horn was blowing in the distance.

We get trains here all the time, but typically they are daytime-only. One will pass around 9 AM, another around noon, and one passes by around dinnertime. They don’t even faze us anymore. But tonight’s was special. It was the first train to ever pass our house at night.

I picked up my radio, tuned to the road channel of the train, grabbed my flashlight and stood out on the porch as the rumbling got louder. The locomotive’s horn was blaring far more frequently than usual, owing to its late schedule. It seemed to take forever for it to approach.

The rumbling got louder and I could now see the train’s light flashing through the woods. It was moving at the maximum speed, about twice as fast as daytime trains. The lights showing the train numbers was all I could see of this massive steel beast. Twenty cars went rumbling past, a mere thirty feet from my backyard. My ears told me the cars were empty, my hearing somehow tuned to the multitude of passing sounds.

This phantom night train rumbled past, its insistent horn piercing the night on the way to downtown Raleigh or beyond. I feel its visit during my writing delivered a message to me.

Two hundred years since their invention, trains still carry magic whereever they go. They’ve got me under their spell.

Last week, a software glitch caused the loss of the air traffic control communications system for the western United States. Not only did it crash, it stayed down for three whole hours! Two planes came within two miles of colliding during the outage.

This system was originally running on Unix, but a recent so-called “upgrade” switched the platform to Windows 2000 AS. According to links on Doc Searls’ IT Garage, the bug is one well known to Windows users: the 49.7-days-and-hang bug.

If confiscating pocket knives from little old ladies doesn’t bolster your confidence in air safety, how do you feel knowing Microsoft is keeping the skies safe?

While I admire the reasons for this new rule, I don’t see it working out. Most of the military would get locked up.

Looks like Hurricane Jeanne is through doing doughnuts in the Atlantic and is now heading towards North Carolina.

Is hurricane season over yet?????

I hauled my extra-heavy laptop bag into work yesterday and suffered some minor back pain all day yesterday. Had some trouble sleeping this morning, too. I’m sure it will disappear once I do some stretching to work it out.

Laptop bags are evil. I’m buying a bag with wheels this afternoon. Enough is enough.

I’m working a new contract now, at a local datacenter. It should be a good exchange of knowledge. I can add a lot to their knowledge and vice-versa. They’re good people, so it’s fun, too.

Also had lunch with an old coworker and friend of mine. He remembered working with me for a brief three months ten years ago and thought to “Google” for me to see what I was up to. It looks like I may be doing work for his company if everything works out.

I also hear from my old Oculan buddies from time to time, and seem to always miss out on whatever outing brings them together. I’ve got to do a better job of keeping in touch.