Wednesday 6 June 2007

Pic of the day: Office, my chaos node away from home. Also, that's a "wallpaper" picture on my laptop PC. I don't actually watch anime at work, more's the pity.

Loudspeakers

Bought a set of loudspeakers which I set up at my office. I have a stereo which I could connect to the laptop using USB and custom software on the PC that basically changed the stereo into a sound card. This was uber cool, except it did not work when I ran the laptop under Linux. Which I was frequently doing by now, since Ubuntu Feisty Fawn came out.

The new loudspeakers are not particularly made for portable PCs. In fact, they require AC power, and there is also a rather large bass piece. Well, large compared to the laptop. I understand that it is actually fairly small for a bass loudspeaker, and uses some kind of trick to sound more bassy, involving a sylindrical hole in one side. Anyway, there are limits to how much bass I can have in an office environment, so this does not worry me much.

The selling point is that the loudspeakers can take their input from anything with a standard small loudspeaker jack. Whether it is a PC, a PDA or an MP3 player, you just plug it in and awesome sound comes out. No more tinny beepy music at work!

I do after all spend an average of more than 7 hours a day at work, 5 days a week. (That is a bit more than I am supposed to, so it may vary over time, but still, pretty close to that.) Contrary to what some of my bosses may have believed in the past, I can't play computer games at work. Or rather, I would be crazy to do so since a) the machines are crappy and I have super machines running super games at home, and b) I have to be ready to sprint off to solve any sudden problems for the users even when I am not actually occupied doing routine file import / export / report writing / error loggin. I can however play music.

I have a bunch of CDs at work (some of which visible near the top of the picture), I subscribe to MSN music (this has largely replaced buying new CDs, since they are crazy expensive and have at best 1 good song, which I usually get fed up with in a couple days) and there is always the free Last.fm, where I have assembled a lovable "loved tracks" collection spanning from Christian rock to Anime soundtracks to Angst Metal. (Symphonic Metal, I believe is the official name for it. Sirenia, Nightwish, that kind of stuff.) It is too bad the Pandora music service is not available in Norway, or I would have listened to it a lot. Actually it is anybody's guess how long such online radio stations will survive in America either, with the new crazy rules about royalties. (Huge royalties even from non-profit radios, royalties that the artists then have to apply for, and if they don't want to be members the money goes to the organization.)

Anyway, while music is not a big part of my life, it is kinda nifty to have at work, which is otherwise not very entertaining, at least not in a good way. Thus I am TOTALLY JUSTIFIED in spending my money on yet more unnecessary electronic equipment, you see? And at least I did not buy the more expensive model which the young guy at Expert claimed was I could not get cheaper anywhere else. Which is true enough, except I got this one instead which is cheaper and indistinguishable for my use. I have no idea what extra features the other one had, I think it had more connectors, but I am quite pleased with the Logitech X-230. I have had plenty of Logitech stuff and generally it lasts until I forget where I put it. Which will probably take a while with this one.