I am a provisional psychologist, a doctoral candidate who has not graduated, a huge technology lover, a man constantly fighting off the fat, and a father.
Went with WK to McDonald’s for a late night chat over coffee and their terribly small poutine that was just ok.
WHAT’S THIS IN THE MAIL?!
The Ultimate Ears UE 6000 arrived! After mutliple shipping issues with UPS (seriously wtf) I managed to finally get my new cans for a great discount. I’m not sure if UE is coming out with a new line but their whole line went crazy the last month and there were big discounts everywhere.
Fancy inner box with magnetic clips.
Nicely packaged with a few goodies on the side. I love pack ins. The case is great and the cable feels strong. Too bad the remote is iOS only. I still can’t believe android doesn’t support remote control use.
The cans look good- I’m not totally sold on the Beats look (I totally think this has a Beats inspired look) but it looks different enough that I’m ok with it. The build quality is great. Everything feels well put together and there is no creakiness anywhere. The memory foam on the cups is actualyl really impressive. It fits like an aroudn ear cup for me so thats good. I like these much more than on the ear because of the pressure the latter causes. The noise cancelling on these is terrible. I don’t understand how their engineers possibyl thought this was a good implementation of noise cancelling. I might take these on the plane when I fly out to Toronto this holiday to see how they fare with airplane noise.
My phone finally got an update to Jellybean. The only thing I wanted was for it to work with my Sony Ericsson Liveview smartwatch and it did! It no longer asks if its ok to pair with my phone anymore. When the connection is lost, I just have to hit the connect button on my watch and boom! Its conencted. Nice. I’ll have to explore what changes Jellybean did for the Note II later.
So that’s my Black Friday. The Windows Surface RT has been fantastic for me so far- I took it to my final exam yesterday (written in class reflection) and it worked like a champ- it was remarkably light to carry (keyboard/tablet/mouse) and it gave me all the productivity power I needed to bust out a final paper. Very very happy with this purchase. I do see how a higher resolution would have helped this with reading, cause pdfs are kind of fuzzy but overall pretty slick. I was so worried in desktop mode looking at the battery drain but it was so so opposite of what I am used to on my VAIO. I think three hours of solid work burned out 40% of the battery at 100% brightness. That would be one full battery on my VAIO but at like 60% brightness. The UE6000 so far has been great- I like them for dance music cause the active noise cancellation starts an amplifier that brings the bass……but yeah I don’t see it being very versatile for other music in this mode. It kind of washes away the clarity in acoustic and rock and in the passive mode the sound isn’t really remarkable to my ears.
Oh and yesterday for chest day, there were three families with the moms, dads and kids in the gym. The kids were playing soccer with the dads with the Swiss ball. I get that they want to spend time together and often there is limited time where a parent is able to actually goto the gym without their kids, but this was really difficult to work out in. I forgot what sets I was doing twice because there were kids climbing the weight machines (I know big deal /s). Its incredibly dangerous to have kids around this equipment because they just aren’t kid friendly- there’s lots of places where fingers can get snagged, crushed or torn. One of the things that jumped out at me was the kids playing by the treadmill- I remember a tv production that looked at how kids would get degloved (read- all the skin torn off the hand) because they stuck their hand in the moving tread. I would be really impressed if the kids were doing supervised exercise on these machines, but they weren’t. They were using the machines like a playground. It was kind of ridiculous and I was kind of not impressed. On the plus side I got a wicked pump from chest day yesterday and felt pretty done and spend at the end of it. I’m also not sure what days I am going to work in my grip strengthening either- I don’t want to expend my energy and take away from my core exercises, but I don’t really have a forearm/grip day for that. I don’t even know anyone that has forearm day come to think about it.
Today I am working on pumping out the edits to publish my thesis which I would love to really just bury and get out of my system. Its been two years since I defended my masters. I also managed to chat with one of my profs about getting involved with a massive anti bullying program that might give me a great opportunity for data access and support so I’m really hopeful for that to work out.
