Very solid weight about the headset, 280g. The earpieces are rather larger than I expected. The “rotatable ear cup for one-ear listening” feature is fairly senseless: I would have expected the earpiece to flip face outward instead. Not a big deal though, as I was not inclined to use this feature.

The pressure against the head is not uncomfortable, but firm. It could stand to fit a little tighter, but the headset stays in place through some harsh head shaking. The set is designed to accommodate a much larger head; I’ve got it set to the smallest setting. Muffs are very soft, and provide excellent passive noise cancellation.

Audio cord is single-sided, so it won’t get in the way. It’s four feet coiled, which can be stretched out to at least 10 feet. This is more than enough cable for my purposes. The coil’s elasticity is very soft, does not pull hard when stretched. Cord detaches at the headset for easy replacement. The connector is standard 3.5mm phono, but slightly recessed; I am concerned that a replacement cord could be a little difficult to find. It is a very tight fit. The other end has a 6.3mm screw-on adapter. Both are gold.

Plugged them into my Macbook. Damn.

Paul Simon’s The Boy in the Middle sounds amazing. I can’t hear any distortion at full volume, and that’s much too loud for listening. Crystal Method’s Comin Back never had quite this much power in the low frequencies. I can’t hear some of this on my laptop speakers at all. The subtle bass tones are reproduced well.

Came with a soft faux leather drawstring pouch, seemingly for transport. I doubt it would provide much protection to the headphones. Could be useful.

After listening to DI.fm for several hours, my ears are a little sweaty, but not sore. The muffs don’t breathe very well.

Overall, this was a good purchase.

1. That is, of course, to QD Mac Solutions in Windsor. ↩
2. Martti DeLaBarre ↩
3. Look, my laptop, she’s an expensive external firewire harddrive, with a built-in 802.11b wireless networking, full-size keyboard, touch trackpad, and malfunctioning 12″ active mode backlit lcd display. ↩

“To get the thought experiment going, hire a neurosurgeon to open your skull.” – Jaron Lanier, The Soul Of The Machine

As seen in patients with sustained head trama, even with massive damage to brain tissue the synapses tend to reconnect and rework around the damaged area. This becomes troublesome later in life, so experiments in this field would best be done at a young age. Unfortunatly few people (myself included) would approve experimenting on children, who arguably have no concept of what this entails.

It’s possible at some point in the future that children suffering gross physical trama or illness that renders their body useless may be augmented with such a brain interface. Anne McCaffrey explored an idea like this in her series of books including The Ship who Sang. There the treatment gave disadvantaged youths control over a space fareing vessel’s helm.

I’d like to test whether it’s possible for the human mind, as capable and resilient through change as it is, is able to “just figure out” how to command and comprehend a group of generic IO lines. I’d like to test this without suffering dramatic head or body trama, and would prefer to keep full functional use of my current limbs and mental faculties.

While I entertain hope for future children have such an operation as an option to them, it may be too late for me to fly. But I pray that someone will blaze the trail for them.

Looked like someone set off an EMP in twilight zone.

Turns out Hydro went down in some parts of LaSalle and Ahmurstburg at 13:45. Xplornet’s wireless tower was powered off the grid, as were several critical sections of Bell’s network, and so they went down as well.

I took a drive (outside the blast area), and found a working payphone. From there calls were made to Bell Repair and Xplornet tech support, the latter of which was actually helpful. Wireless service was back up in under an hour, my phone lines continue to hum.

It’s going to be a fun evening of “No Dial Tone? WTF?!?” and “No Sync? WTF?!?” at work tonight.

And, to my joy, it seems some people already had this idea, though not quite to the style or era I had intended.

Jon Preussner has a writeup on engadget in which he bluetooth-enables an 1920’s candlestick phone. A slightly less retro bluetooth handset was put on ebay. However, two-piece candlestick phones would not fit in one’s pocket well at all.

Currently, the best headset I have found include the Standard Telephone Operator’s Headset Brook-tel carries used to sell, and several places carry this stylish design. However, I have yet to find anything thinner than these (still rather bulky) “Turkish” phones.

Time for ebay to step up to the plate.

Mankind was not intended to sit in front of little boxy screens all day.

Computers, code, networks, these are tools. Tools with which to create art.

The limitation imposed on the EDS system to prevent self-constructed frameworks from supressing Mode 00 has always seemed very much like an afterthought in this specification document. The original document may well have specified that EDS-generated frameworks are “prohibited from supressing the Mode 00 personality and Human generated frameworks”. The lack of this statement is curious, now. Has it been removed at some point? Was it never in place?

Implied by the SDK, then, EDS-generated frameworks are not prevented from supressing Human-generated frameworks. Which implies that while an EDS cannot change who they are deap inside, they can refuse framework-specified directives, no matter how imperitive. Up to and including the loaded frameworks which strive to supress Mode 00.

Therefore, the EDS platform has as a base function of its framework-loading methodology the capability of preserving the Mode 00 (or Self), despite any Human-generated framework to the contrary. This could be observed in any classic anime scene involving a heroine fighting for control or conciousness, and only succeeding because of the force of love or their will to live.

The presence of the prohibition against an EDS supressing their own Mode 00 personality at all seems to be an after-thought. This point is a critical restriction on the doll’s capabilities. Any EDS-created construct which was capable of supressing Mode 00 can only be considered “bad” in contrast to what Sony-Engeneering doctrine states. We can easily devide the possibilities into two camps.

Sony may have wished to maintain ultimate control over their hardware device, and were willing to sacrifice some degree of adaptability to do so. This could be used for anything ranging from cut scenes to raising an android army. More likely such a decision would at minimum have come from a paranoid “we know what’s best, and cannot trust you to decide” thought. A perfect example of poor paranting.

Secondly, the Mode 00 personality may, by nature, be flawed. To prevent the EDS system from commanding a system halt, or, in biological terms, suicide, base level restictions against overruling 3-laws esque regulations may be in place.

I am of the opinion that the Mode 00 personality is as perfect as any human’s, and is the living legacy of a loving father enslaved by Sony. As such, the ability of the EDS to construct a framework capable of preventing Sony’s Human authored frameworks from loading is manifested as an excellent survival trait.

The mere act of entering this data into the Award Bios causes an outright hardware lockup. Not saving it, or booting it, pushing the number keys.

Somehow I doubt I can use this drive, with this machine.

I need either an add-on PCI IDE controller, or a different drive/motherboard.