Gadget Post: Sennheiser HD570 Headphones

This is not a review of new technology, but rather a comment on how impressed I am with an older product. I purchased these headphones in 2001, for about $70, if memory serves. I don’t think you can find them new anymore, but Sennheiser should offer a comparable product today. I used them rather heavily when I was living with roommates. When I got married (and around the same time, switched to my own office at work), they languished and were mostly used during travel until I broke down and purchased Bose noise-canceling headphones in 2005.

Anyway, the Sennheisers have made a comeback since I switched to a cubicle environment at work. They have very comfortable pads that allow hours of use without fatigue. And of course, they sound truly excellent. Recently, though, I noticed the right channel would occasionally fade out when I repositioned the headphones. Not good. I thought I’d crack it open and just see what I could do… Best case, I thought, would be borrowing a soldering iron from the lab and doing a quick repair, if the wire was frayed near the contact with the driver. Worst case was a kink that was too far away from the driver to spot-fix.

It took me about ten minutes of fiddling with the casing to open it without damaging it, but my persistence was rewarded. There was no solder point at the driver. Instead, I was amazed to see that the wire was connected via jumper. For those who have never worked in electronics or inside a computer, a jumper is a plastic sleeve around the copper contact. Two copper prongs slide into the jumper, much like an electrical plug in a wall socket. In the case of my headphones, heavy use had caused the jumper to slip off the prongs over time. I just slid that puppy back down firmly, snapped the phones back together, and viola—he is clean: perfect sound once again.

This may seem like a rather archaic detail to you, but I was very impressed. A spot-soldered connection would be much cheaper to manufacture than a jumper, perhaps by several cents. A few pennies on every unit shipped is a big deal, more so because it is a detail unlikely to be noted by the customer. Gotta love that German engineering!

A Tale of Two Road Trips

Our Thanksgiving travel this year was memorable. In many ways, it was really two trips. Trip #1 was the journey to Flagstaff, and it could not have gone better. We were on the road early, hit great weather, and, as George Costanza would say, we made “incredible time,” arriving in Flag a mere 16 hours after pulling out of Austin. (That’s an average of 75 miles per hour, counting stops for gas and meals.) The only negative aspect of the whole trip was terrible service at a Denny’s in New Mexico, where, by all accounts, I channeled a grumpy old man when our food was late (and cold—though, despite my crabbiness, I did leave a tip).

As they say, that was then, this is now. We set out on our return journey on Friday evening. The first leg of the trip was uneventful, although I’m fairly certain the guys hanging around the gas station in Gallup were high on something. By the time we reached Grants (about an hour outside of Albuquerque), it was turning fairly foggy and icy. We took a quick survey of the motels in town (during which we momentarily lost power steering on our rental car—always a fine experience) and settled on the Travelodge.

The next morning we made it most of the way through New Mexico before we saw any bad weather, but it was again turning fairly nasty by the time we hit the Texas border. There was an inch or two of snow on the ground in El Paso and it was still coming down, but the weather report I’d read the previous night led us to believe that things would clear up east of town. This was not the case. We hit heavy snow within 50 miles of El Paso and spent the next three hours averaging 35 miles an hour in a caravan of about 40 cars. Every once in a while some foolish person would pass the caravan and throw heavy showers of slush on each of our windshields, blinding us for several seconds until the wipers could clear it.

Our next scheduled stop was the booming metropolis of Fort Stockton, TX (population: 2900), where we had intended to gas up and move on. By the time we saw the exit, we knew we were going to stay the night; one false move by anyone in the caravan could have resulted in a pile-up. And visibility was getting worse as the sun set. So, we pulled into town, only to find the entire town dark. Plenty of motels and gas stations, but all of them were without electricity. There was about 4 inches of snow on the ground and we didn’t have enough gas to get to the next town. Mercifully, a Chevron station at the east end of town did have the lights on, so I hurriedly put gas in the car while Karla went inside to see about the motels in town. All of them were booked, except for the Rodeway Inn at the far east end of town, and we got one of the last rooms there. It was pretty ugly and the heater didn’t work very well, but we were just happy to have a place to sleep.

The next morning we made the remaining five hours to Austin without incident, but this will definitely go down as one of the more memorable road trips we’ve taken.

Chuck Norris and Huckabee

OK, this one made me laugh out loud.



(In case you're wondering what in the world Huckabee is talking about, take a quick jump over to Wikipedia for an explanation of the Chuck Norris Facts.)

Amazon Prime Idiocy

In case you hadn’t noticed from my posts, I am a voracious reader. The nature of working for a large company is that you spend a lot of time on conference calls, most of it waiting. This is my time for reading blogs, news sites, editorials, etc—usually while babysitting some process or other that actually fits my job description. At home, a significant amount of my downtime is spent reading books, and most of those I buy at Amazon.com. Why Amazon? They have a huge selection and they are prompt and accurate in getting the product shipped.

Despite all the books I order, I have no interest in signing up for Amazon Prime, the service where you pay $80 a year for unlimited shipping. Most of the time I take advantage of “free super saver” shipping by ordering two or more titles at once, which means I never pay shipping anyway. So I tend to ignore the pitches from Amazon trying to get me to sign up.

Therefore, it was with tremendous dismay that I found myself enrolled in Amazon Prime after merely browsing through some titles on the Amazon.com website over the weekend. “Congratulations,” I was told, “You have completed your enrollment in Amazon Prime!”

Wha??

I did some poking around my account on the site, and found that I was indeed enrolled, although I was in a “trial” period for 30 days, after which they would happily charge $79.99 to my credit card on file. I have no idea exactly how this happened. When I queried customer service (very politely, I might add), I was told that this was due to a “combination of technical problems and human error.” The implication was the human error was mine, which I resent. But the important thing is that they were able to yank me from their gilded rolls of Prime Members from On High, and I am now once again a lowly bottom-feeder, super-saving my way to lower costs for me and lower margins for them.

Although they assured me this would not happen again, I am definitely re-thinking my book purchasing strategy. At the very least, I’m going to keep an eye on Amazon (and my credit card statement) to make sure no more of this hilarity ensues.

Thanksgiving Odyssey

Thanks to new requirements set by our dear friends at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, it is looking like our trip to Vietnam will not occur in November, so we are free make travel plans for the Thanksgiving get-together at my sister's place in Flagstaff. The only problem with this scenario is buying plane tickets from Austin to Phoenix three weeks before Thanksgiving, to the tune of $450 per ticket--far outside our budget. It looked like a no-go.

However, as we drove home last night, Karla suggested we look into driving instead of flying. A few minutes with Google Maps showed the route is fairly benign, even if it is over 1100 miles. We're not keen to put another 2200 miles on the Nissan, so we're looking into a rental car. So long as it has cruise control and a reasonable amount of legroom, I think we're good. We could do the entire trip for less than half of what we were originally budgeting for the plane trip. It will be great to see the parents/brothers/sisters/nephews/niece. Just can't wait for the West Texas part of the trip: so little to see, so much time...