random neuron misfires

After watching most of the episodes of American Inventor on ABC, and having my wife tell me several times that I should have been on that show, I’ve found myself pondering the reality of that.

I’ve easily “invented” hundreds of things over the years in my life to make life easier, solve silly engineering problems in other products, and in general just “fixed that which is broken” by coming up with a better solution.

But are these “good ideas” or are they “inventions”. Wikipedia defines invention as:

“…an object, process, or technique which displays an element of novelty. An invention may sometimes be based on earlier breakthroughs, collaborations or ideas, and the process of invention requires at least the awareness that an existing concept or method can be modified or transformed into a new invention…“

Can I be an inventor? Are the things I’ve “invented” to solve problems in my life and the lives of others really “inventions”? Are they “good ideas”? Sure, they’re both. I’ve come up with many things that eventually came out on the market on their own, years before they were released. Could I have captured the market and made some money on these inventions? Absolutely. (Of course, I firmly object to patents, but that’s another matter entirely =)

Last night, Janusz Liberkowski won the first American Inventor award with his “spherical safety seat“, a means to safe the lives of infants involved in automobile accidents. Doug Hall was his mentor on this task, and throughout the competition, it seemed clear that he had the most novel of all of the inventions there.

I really did think Francisco Patino (original ABC Inventor Profile page archived here) was going to take the win last night, based purely on the potential market dollars for his invention. The bicycle market is a $2B industry, its massive. He received the lowest number of votes. I found that surprising.

I also thought that Ed Hall‘s WordAce game was a great invention. It too had a large market. When you look at these three inventions, WordAce really has the biggest amount of potential penetration. Kids of all genders, races and ages can use it, even those who are too old for a car seat or those who can’t even ride a bike (handicapped?). Adults could use it, schools could use it as a learning and teaching aid. It had extrmely broad appeal. Add some additional functionality like “language modules”, “learning packs” and such and you could really extend it far. Make it networked, and play with users remotely across the Internet. Lots of potential for this kind of product. He’ll have to come up with a new name though, because “WordAce” is used in quite a few places that I can find, and is most-certainly trademarked by someone.

But Janusz’s invention, though extremely limited in scope and market, seemed to be the winner for everyone who called in and voted. Was it his empathetic appeal to everyone else that won the calling audience over? Was it the invention itself? Was it his commercial? I don’t know, but he did win… and its only fair to congratulate him on his invention.

Are these entrepreneurs? I’d argue that out of all of them, Francisco showed the most entrepreneurial spirit and heart, determination, and drive.

Now things are going to get really interesting… time to plan for my own appearance on American Inventor for next season.

Look Ma, no privacy!. It looks like the public is slowly being groomed to accept more and more invasion of their privacy at an even greater scale than before. London is piloting a program that will allow their public to sit at home, watching television, to tune into the more than 400 closed circuit cameras around town, 24×7, to watch their citizens for crime.

What does this REALLY do?

Well, for one.. it makes it easier to anonymously report your neighbors for their crimes (remember ThoughtCrime?), and it also makes it MUCH easier for predators, pedophiles and other miscreants to zoom in on their prey, watch their habits, monitor their behaviors, and stalk them.

Nice.

Combine this with Apple’s All-Seeing Monitor, and you have a full 360-° solution to watching the people, and watching the watchers. Record all of this data (storage is cheap these days), and begin putting together profiles of everyone’s behaviors, by keeping them in their homes during great television shows, keep them outside during work hours, and so on.

Hey, this could all be a great experiment on how to control the human conscious, by filling it with all kinds of subconscious bombardment. At the same time, we slowly erode their civil liberties, burn the Constitution off in the corner, and begin to turn our world into a complete totalitarian state.

Here’s a note to the current administration thinking this is somehow a good idea:

George Orwell’s book 1984 was meant to be a warning, not a script! – David A. Desrosiers, 2005

This reminds me of David Brin’s “Transparent Society” (on amazon here), a non-fiction work wherein he forecasts the erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology.

Brin argues that true privacy will be lost in the “transparent society”; however, we have the choice between one that offers the illusion of privacy by restricting the power of surveillance to authorities, or one that destroys that illusion by offering everyone access (including the ability to watch the watchers).

There’s another great article in the Arizona Republic online edition, that describes all of the various ways in which our privacy is being eroded every day. Here are some of those examples:

• Cameras eye you while you drive, bank, shop, eat and sometimes even when you stray into your neighbor’s yard.
• Your boss could be monitoring your computer-usage habits, maybe reading your private e-mails. Even the bathroom may not be safe from snoopers.
• Stores keep track of your shopping habits, sometimes sharing the fact that you prefer Crest over Colgate with marketers.
• Applying for a mortgage lays open the full details of your financial, employment and residential history.

This quote really stands out in this piece:

“Former Phoenix Police Chief Harold Hurtt, who now heads the Houston Police Department, suggested recently that crime-fighting in Houston could be enhanced with surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, on downtown streets and in private homes.”

“I know a lot of people are concerned about ‘Big Brother,’ ” Hurtt told reporters at a briefing in Houston, “but my response to that is if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?”

Perhaps Harold, because it violates the Constitution? Read your 4th Amendment recently? Just because you think you CAN stick cameras in every corner, doesn’t mean you’re legally allowed to.

And for that matter, why not just stick my own cameras on my own house, pointed in every corner of the street, driveway, street corners, and put those videos online for others to see. Its all public information, right?

These people seriously need a wake-up call.

I was just pointed to an interesting MSNBC video snippet where DCI nominee General Michael V. Hayden, who implemented and defended the NSA warrantless wiretap program, refuses to admit that the 4th amendment of the US Constitution requires probable cause for search. The video is quite funny:

“If there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency know very well, its the 4th Amendment.”

Would that be because you’re openly violating it at every chance you can get, Mike?

Which leads me to this other interesting article (not sure if this is true or not, but Google has quite a few references to it): “GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.”

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Nice. I’ve recently changed my email signature to the following:

“Erosion of civil liberties… is a threat to national security.”

The previous one was just as succinct:

“Do you think the government has no business wire tapping anyone?” No, I think the government has no business wire tapping EVERYONE.

Wired has an eye-opening article on how the NSA is now rising above the legal arm of the Department of Justice, basically telling them to pound sand with regard to their illegal spying activities. In short, the NSA has denied clearance to the DOJ, in an effort to investigate the Bush administrations illegal use of wiretaps. This was also covered in some detail by this article on CNN.

I hate to have to remind the corrupt, totalitarian administration currently in power… but we’re INNOCENT until proven guilty. You seem to believe that somehow we have to prove we’re innocent, while you assume we’re guilty by default. I’m sorry, no. Go back to the caves from whence you came, because that is not how this country is run.

There are a LOT more of us than you, and we’re a LOT more motivated and angry than you can ever be. People are beginning to rise up, you’re artificial reign is over.

You think these paltry laws will stay on the books to continue to twist these citizens to your will? No. Your time is at an end.

I’ve been a long-time Mozilla user. I love the interface, I love the fonting, I love the extensions, and in general, it loaded and ran faster than Firefox.

But I’ve now switched over to Firefox for all of my browsing. I have a ton of extensions loaded in it to make it useful for my day’s work (which is to say, my most-used tool, next to email and gcc).

Here’s a list of the extensions I’m currently using in my Firefox build (you can see how I have it tricked out with all of my theming and extensions over here):

• Sage, a really slick and fast rss aggregator/reader for Firefox. It docks on the sidebar and is visible with a simple Alt-S keystroke. Very nice, and easy for me to catch up on some quick headlines when I need to.
• AdBlock Plus with the AdBlock Filterset G Updater to stop the flood of useless ads from coming at me. I did have to add one small rule for Google’s ads, because I do actually like the recommendations they provide from time to time, and it helps out sites I visit with a little revenue. That regex looks like this:

  @@*.googlesyndication.com/*

• Web Developer, a very useful and slick toolbar/menu driven suite that allows me to do all kinds of things to websites I’m viewing, including validation, showing where their css classes are, manipulating forms, cookies, images, and dozens of other features. Hands-down, the most-useful extension I have as a developer/tweaker of web content.
• PrefBar, another powerful extension I use every single day. This one allows me to change the capabilities of my browser with a simple click of a checkbox. Want Java enabled? Click. Sick of popups? Click. I have Colors, Images, Javascript, Java, Flash, Popups, Proxies, Pipelining, Referers, Cache on my bar. Its completely customizable, and very well-done.
• SwitchProxy lets me manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. I can also use it as an anonymizer to protect my system from prying eyes. I have Squid, Squid + Privoxy, Privoxy + Tor and i2p enabled in my configuration at the moment. Quick and easy, and one status-bar dropdown lets me change from one to another.
• FasterFox gives me a little boost by auto-configuring some parameters for faster browsing, such as link prefetching, pipelining, DNS cache, paint delay, and others.
• ForecastFox, weather.. in my status bar. I’ve changed the icons a bit with a separate icon pack called Lansing, which is nice adn small and out of the way. Minimal is the way to go on my toolbars and status bars.
• Linky lets me open or download all or selected links in a page, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows. A simple right-click on any link or web address, and away I go.
• Google PageRank Status gives me a quick overview of the PR of a site in the current view. This is useful as I do a lot of web work, and knowing what kind of sites get a decent or poor PR is useful information.
• SearchStatus is another SEO toolbar for Firefox, which I use quite a bit. With this extension, I can see a site’s Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and others. Beautiful and easy. It sits quietly in the status bar and out of the way until I need it.
• FireBug is another great web developer extension, which shows me exactly how pages are failing when they error out. I can step into the code via the DOM, and see exactly what went wrong. OTHER pages of course, my pages never have troubles…
• Google Advanced Operations Toolbar uncovers the often-cryptic syntax that Google uses to search in more detail to find information. Need to know how to use the ‘site:’ syntax? Just use this toolbar and it’ll do it all for you. Quick, easy, simple.
• DownThemAll! is a downloader for Firefox. With this, I can right-click a page of links, and specify by a wildcard or any of the preloaded templates, which links on the page I want to download. Want to download all of the Linux 2.6 kernels matching a specific version? This can do it in one click. Very well-done, slick, and useful when you want to download a lot of links from one particular page.
• TamperData gives me the power to monkey with the form data being received or sent to servers. Want to malform that POST request? TamperData can do it. Need to send more parameters in with that form submission? This extension can do it. You can trace and time http responses and requests, validate your web applications against security issues by stuffing garbage into POSTs, and more.
• RankQuest SEO Toolbar, yet another SEO tool I use quite a bit. This one gives me access to over 25 different SEO tools to check, test, and qualify websites against their SEO health.
• HyperWords is probably the second-slickest extension I have. I can highlight any word or series of words on a page, and a menu will pop up allowing me to search major search engines for those words, or look them up on dictionary and reference sites, Wikipedia, stock exchange, IMDB and dozens of others. I can blog about the highlighted words, map them, translate them, and a truckload of other options. AMAZING extension.
• Free eBook Search lets me search the highlighted text for ebooks on Free eBook Zone. I can search using the Book Title, ISBN (10 Digit), Description, Book Author and even the ebook backward link.
• CacheView gives me the power to see a site’s cached copy through Google’s(tm) Cache, Coral Distribution Network‘s Cache, Wayback Machine‘s Cache, Dot Cache, and Tech Guru’s Cache of the current tab open via right-click.
• Live HTTPHeaders shows me the actual headers being passed in every request of a page or content. Want to make sure those headers in your web application are showing accurate data? This will do that for you.

These are the extensions I use every day, in my browser. Without them, I’d be spending a LOT more time hunting down links, sites, creating Javascriptlets, and lots of other tools. You can see what the whole extension list looks like in this screenshot.

As I mentioned, I tend to use Firefox with a lot of proxies (Squid, Tor, Privoxy, i2p and others). This generally means poking at non-standard ports. Until recently, this hasn’t been a problem for me..

But today, I noticed I can’t get to “non-standard” ports under 1024 anymore, with the current 1.5.0.3 version of Firefox.

To see this in action, point Firefox to http://www.example.com:72 and see what you get. In my case, I see:

This address is restricted
This address uses a network port which is normally used for purposes other than Web browsing. Firefox has canceled the request for your protection.

But there’s a way around it! Mozilla has Port Blocking enabled by default.

To enable some ports in Firefox, simply do the following in your user.js file

user_pref(“network.security.ports.banned.override”, “72,73,74”);

To disable ports, use this construct:

user_pref(“network.security.ports.banned”, “81,90”);

For an easier way, type ‘about:config‘ in your browser’s URL field, and you will see all of the tunable settings that Firefox has to offer.

Within these settings, you can create value that will allow or disallow these ports. Follow these steps:

1. In the list of values provided, right-click any line and choose “New -> String”
2. A dialog box will pop up asking for the name. Type ‘network.security.ports.banned.override’ into this box and hit enter to save the value. Do not include the single-quotes when you add this name.
3. A second box will pop up. Type each port number you need to use, separated by commas, into this box, for example ‘72,73’ (again, do not include the single quotes)
4. Click on “Ok” to confirm and save these values.

Now you should be able to access these ports on the servers that require them.

Perhaps this little “feature” is there to protect Windows users from being exploited by malware or phishing attacks, but it certainly got in the way of my daily use of Firefox when I realized it.

I haven’t blogged in quite awhile, and there’s been way too much going on to write about here. Maybe in bits and pieces, I’ll let it all out, but my life has been turned upside-down, shaken out, and scattered all over the floor. I’m starting to pick up the pieces, but its not easy.

On a lighter note, I’ve now given Seryn a blog! that we can all use to communicate her growth, pictures, milestones and all kinds of fun stuff.

Another in a series of my “Dragons” posts, this time about more invasion of my rights. This Guardian Unlimited article talks about the police wanting to make it illegal to withold encryption keys when asked for them.

“They also want to make it a criminal offence for suspects to refuse to cooperate in giving the police full access to computer files by refusing to disclose their encryption keys.”

Let me just publically reply to that with one word: NO.

My encryption keys are put there to keep YOU out, permanently. If you do not have the right to see the information, data or other bits encrypted by my (exceptionally-strong) keys, you simply won’t get access to it.

Threaten me with jail, throw me in jail, do what you think will work to get me to turn over my keys… it will not work. I would rather spend a lifetime in jail protecting my data, than give you the irrevokable right to invade my privacy and freedoms and the freedoms of others who would come after me.

The persuit of freedom and upholding those freedoms is worth more than my life or the lives of any of my friends or family. They don’t have my keys and torturing them will not get me to give them up. I have an incredible tolerance to pain, some would say inhuman in some cases (I’ve had doctors tell me this several times, as I’ve undergone several medical procedures without any numbing agent).

Shipping me off to some other country that allows torture to try to extract my encryption keys will result in one of two things:

1. A frustrated torturer, who is unable to extract my keys
2. A dead suspect, after enduring hundreds of different torture methods, unsuccessfully

Either way, you don’t get my keys, or my data, or anything I don’t elect to give you. Pain, medications, whatever you think will work, will not. My willpower and tolerance is stronger than anything you have.

Let me reiterate, you will not get my encryption keys, under pain of threat, physical pain, medication or otherwise. Either I will be dead, or you will give up. Either way, you have nothing.

Are we clear? Good.

I found this interesting article on Google News:

The British police on Sunday accepted ‘full responsibility’ for shooting a Brazilian who turned out to be totally unconnected to the July 21 London blasts, but said they will have to shoot suicide bombing suspects in the head to prevent them from detonating explosives.

“There is no point in shooting somebody’s chest because that’s where the bomb is likely to be. There is no point in shooting anywhere else because if they fall down they detonate it. This is drawn on the experience from other countries including Sri Lanka,” London’s Police Chief Ian Blair said about the way Jean Charles de Menezes was killed on Friday in South London’s Stockwell underground station.

Another article makes an interesting point on the murder of this Brazilian by these officers:

“They had to kill someone to show the whole population they are working and make the country safe,” Pereira told the BBC.

I’m sorry, has everyone gone insane? Not only did they kill this 27-year old kid by accident, but 3 cops held him down and then shot him in the head.. 5 times!!!

Shooting someone in the head does not stop them from detonating a bomb. A grenade is a perfect example of this. Pull the pin and carry it in your hand. Now, if someone were to shoot the person holding the grenade in the head, especially from a distance, muscle control to the hand would relax, and the grenade’s handle would spring out. Of course a more sophisticated system would be necessary to work with a “chest-mounted” device as this article claims, but come on now.

If a terrorist is willing to blow himself up (and any other people who happen to be in the vicinity), do you really think threatening to shoot them in the head is going to stop them? They don’t care about their “human shell” of a body, that’s not the point. They don’t value life in the way that many other cultures do. These threats will do nothing to stop them, and in fact may just motivate them further. There are probably more terrorists out there (or supporters of terrorists) in any one location than cops-with-guns to stop them..

This is nothing more than the typical fear-mongering running rampantly out of control in our society. You can’t control people with fear, and guess what… THAT IS THE DEFINITION OF TERRORISM.

Main Entry: ter·ror·ism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun
1 : the unlawful use or threat of violence esp. against the
state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion
2 : violent and intimidating gang activity <street terrorism>

—ter·ror·ist /-ist/ adj or noun —ter·ror·is·tic /"ter-&r-'is-tik/ adjective

I found a great comment on Slashdot that touches on some of these exact issues. Its a bit long, but well worth the read.

The irony of all of these attacks, is that Osama has already stated that the attacks would stop when we pulled out of Saudi Arabia. We all know why we can’t, however. I’ve been wondering what $182,862,244,509.00 (the current cost of this “war” so far) would have done if we invested it in alternative fuel solutions instead. Maybe dig a 300 mile lake in the middle of the Sahara Desert to help feed the millions of people there. We could have used it to do hundreds of things other than try to steal someone else’s property (cough, oil) under the pretense of a false war.

The Saudi’s attacked us on 9/11, why are we in Iraq? Why don’t we have Osama? Where are the WMD? What happened to all of these stolen, lost and faked votes from the 2004 election? Why aren’t we aggressively persuing these answers?

The current state of affairs sure is making George Orwell’s world seem closer to reality. I have to wonder if someone in office isn’t reading the book “1984” and confusing it with a congressional guidebook to running a country.

“Declaring things that clearly aren’t terrorism as terrorism is terrorism!”

One final thought: Our founding fathers were terrorists, by definition. Terrorists created this country. Repeat that over and over and you’ll see what a sad state of affairs we live in now.

Apologies for the rant, but this country and the growing invasive policies of other countries makes me so sick I could vomit.

I just found out that James Doohan, aka “Scotty” from Star Trek has passed away at the ripe age of 85. Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said.

From 1966 to 1969 he starred in the Star Trek series until NBC ordered it cancelled due to ratings problems. He also starred in the 6 Star Trek movies and several other Star Trek related appearances over the years.

James Montgomery Doohan was born March 3, 1920, in Vancouver, British Columbia, youngest of four children of William Doohan, a pharmacist, veterinarian and dentist, and his wife Sarah. As he wrote in his autobiography, “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” his father was a drunk who made life miserable for his wife and children.

At 19, James escaped the turmoil at home by joining the Canadian army, becoming a lieutenant in artillery. He was among the Canadian forces that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. “The sea was rough,” he recalled. “We were more afraid of drowning than the Germans.”

The Canadians crossed a minefield laid for tanks; the soldiers weren’t heavy enough to detonate the bombs. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on the screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. Fortunately the chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case.

For those of you who can, or have the means.. please consider donating to the Alzheimer’s Association so others can live long and prosper without suffering from a horrible disease like Alzheimers.

I’m sure I share in the feelings of millions of science fiction fans around the world when I say “Mr. Doohan, in your new journey, go as boldly as you did when you led us in all your journeys on our television sets over the years, in our hearts and in our imaginations.”

You will be missed.

I run some services here for lots of projects. Let me rephrase that, I run a LOT of services here for various projects, development and customers for the two different companies that I own. At any one time there are at least 7 servers up and running here doing various things; generating content, serving webpages, building software, whatever.

This includes personal mail for users (with imap and webmail access), about 2-dozen mailing lists, web hosting for about 70 different domains and projects, bug tracking, blogs, portals, revision control for Open Source projects, irc for developers, torrent tracker for releases, compile farm, and quite a few other things I can’t think of at the moment. All of this requires solid, reliable, 24×7 bandwidth to sustain… and clean power.

All of this comes out of my own pocket: bandwidth, power, servers, hardware, time. Its not cheap.

About a month or so ago, I decided to double the speed of the incoming bandwidth on the server’s dedicated lines (hosting the services above) and my inbound DSL connection. The DSL is my own “personal” Internet line, and the other lines are dedicated to the servers themselves. This also doubled the price I pay for the bandwidth, but the Google Ads seem to be sustaining most of that now.

I graph and monitor all the inbound and outbound traffic with quite a few different tools, so I can track and notice trends, attacks, statistics for customers, and many other things. Things were good for about two weeks… but then it started sliding downhill.

Here is an example of a recent Slashdotting that we cleanly survived:

Over the last two weeks, I’ve noticed the VPN to IBM that I keep open has been dropping out many times per-day. I’d try to restart the VPN and get errors. I went into the server room (where the DSL and other networking lines come in) and noticed that the DSL modem didn’t even have a line to the CO. A quick power-cycle of the DSL modem would cure it for a few hours. It started happening late at night and early in the morning, during lower traffic times for me.

Fishy. I checked to see if I was being “packeted” by some script kiddies or attacked, and nothing obvious showed up in the graphs. A call to my provider after 2 weeks of dozens of dropouts per-day seemed to provide some action. They believe the problem is with the port I’m using at the DSLAM, specifically that it is “over-provisioned”. They tried capping my line down a few Mbit, which helped for a day or three, but then the dropouts started again.

Its gotten significantly worse now, and my speed on DSL is slightly slower than a 28k dialup modem. I can barely use the web now because of it. Its painful to watch servers and DNS queries time out, because I’m browsing at less than 5k/sec. Yowch!

If my provider can’t fix this (and credit me for the horrible speed and downtime), I’m going to explore moving to cable modem service again, like I had in Westerly.

Is providing broadband REALLY this difficult? I pay $180/month for 1.5Mb-6.0Mb/384-608Kb here and I barely reach the low-end of that scale. I’m 8k feet from the CO, so I should have a nice solid signal. Other countries have 10-times the bandwidth and pay pennies for it.

To their credit, my provider has been very patient and helpful during these stressful times, and we’re working through the issues to try to solve it, but… its been two weeks now. Let’s hope they solve it tomorrow when the landline provider shows up to test the lines and figure out the problem.

I use the Internet every day for research, for my job, and for other development purposes. I can’t have it go down like this, at these speeds now.

This is ridiculous.

My daughter has taken to “exploring” her environment by picking up, touching, and walking around with anything she can. Its great to see her combine things in her environment, learn how to put things together, and where things go.

Unfortunately, she walked off with my Sony earphone buds, and nobody can find them… I’m sure she put them down somewhere, but I’ve searched every crevace in the house and I can’t find them. They were a bit old anyway, so I decided it was time to replace them.

My other headphones were a pair of BOSE QuietComfort noise-cancelling units, but over the last couple of years, the headphone cups deteriorated, leaving little rubber pieces of “goo” on my head when I would take them off. Too bad that BOSE can’t make a good pair of headphones for $300 that do NOT deteriorate. Ironically, their warrantee covers everything except the exact kind of deterioration that I suffered. Obviously they knew about it ahead of time.

Sigh.

So I went out in search of a replacement set. I have simple requirements:

1. Must be ergonomic to fit in my ear
2. Must NOT be white, I don’t want that iPod “cool” look, period.
3. The cord must be symmetrical. I don’t want the cord running down one side of my chest, and I certainly don’t want to have the cord running down the back of my neck and around my arm.
4. They must be able to handle 10-20k Hz, minimum. A lot of the music I listen to is bassy and has lots of highs (ambient, electronica)

That’s it. Simple… Nothing magical, ergonomic ear buds with a symmetrical cable, in black, that can reproduce a decent range of frequencies.

I went to about a dozen different stores to find some earphones. I went to OfficeMax, Staples, FHM, Radio Shack, Best Buy, Target, WAL*MART, and some other local no-chain stores. The one with the widest selection was FHM in the local mall here. Note to self: Do not go to the mall on a Friday night when school is out. It felt like a high-school hallway in every store.

FHM had about 20 pairs of headphones, none of which I could take out and try. Most of them had these wacky wrap-around-the-back-of-the-head earbands with huge earcups. Their buds were big, round, and non-ergo, and the others had white cords, for the trendy iPod crowd. I don’t want to look like I have silver dollars in my ears. They should be unobtrusive, black, and ergonomic, so they fit in my ears without any gaps to let sound (i.e. bass) escape.

Best Buy had a good selection also, but their headphones had that cord-down-one-side thing that I hate (because my laptop’s input is on my left and the cord went down on the right, I’d have to have the cord draped over or under my arms as I type. No thank you. There was a set of KOSS buds there, non-white cord, symmetric, but went from 70Hz to 20k Hz.

These are NOT ergonomic headphones, people…

What the heck is this? Quark from Star Trek?

For the last time, NO NO NO NO NO!

Come on vendors, just make some useful headphones, and don’t make them out of recycled milk cartons, and people will buy them. People who care about reproducing their music at more than 128k… you know, REAL audiophiles? Remember them?

Somewhere there is a design team who thinks their customer base is actually ASKING for this kind of garbage. Do some research, talk to your customers, stop calling them “consumers”, and treat them like people. You’ll find your products are not even remotely close to hitting the target market you’re trying to penetrate.

Sigh.

All I wanted was a set of earphones. I ended up coming home with NOTHING. Its depressing. The whole world’s products are turning to disposable garbage, mass-produced, without a hint of quality. The 5-year old headphones I had were ten times better than what you can find today, and today’s headphones are almost twice as expensive.