There’s nothing like a reboot, is there?

Hollywood has used this technique with great success; look at the recent reboot of the Star Trek movie franchise. A wormhole, some time travel, and the whole scenario starts over from scratch.

I’ve maintained a blog, off and on (mostly off), since 2003. It’s been a random collection of, well, crap. Some of it very, very good crap (if I may say so myself), but most of it crap, plain and simple.

So consider this a reboot of my blog. My old blog content still exists, though it’s moved to a permanent archive site. It’s searchable, and there is still stuff of value there, but I’m going to focus my efforts here.

“Focus” is a very important word: one of the problems with a blog like mine is that it was very unfocused: mostly a random collection of stuff I found here and there, and things I wanted to rant about. Here, I’m going to try to be more focused: I really am interested in the intersection of technology and our society, and I want to keep things focused on that.

I also want to be more consistent in my updates. I cannot guarantee a new post per day, nor a new post a week, even, but I do hope to do better than I did before. And I invite your participation and feedback as, together, we explore new worlds, search out new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.

I’ve now been using these headphones for more than a week and, quite frankly, it’s pretty upsetting. A few years ago, I paid more than $300.00 for a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones, and I’m seriously thinking of throwing them away.

Don’t get me wrong: the Bose headphones aren’t terrible. But the bass is so amplified, so overwhelming, that the impression I get from them after hearing the Urbanears is that everything sounds muddy. The Bose have the advantage of noise cancellation, which actually works very well if there are repetitive, droning sounds (like a window fan, and air conditioner, or airplane engines). And the Bose are extraordinarily comfortable; I could wear those for hours and never get tired of the feel. The Urbanears have a tendency to pinch my ears after an hour or so, and the material of the cushioning is more like vinyl than leather so that my ears get sticky and sweaty after a bit.

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This afternoon, I came home to find a package from Sweden waiting for me. It was a pair of Urbanears “Plattan” headphones that I had ordered a few weeks ago.

Urbanears is an upstart headphone company; they say that

Urbanears is a collective out of Scandinavia, motivated by a common interest in global relationships and shared involvement in the relevance of the living brand. Urbanears promotes a deeper connection to color, form and people while providing the freedom to transcend individuality and unify the sound experience.

High ideals, certainly, and they’re certainly eye-catching, but how do they sound?

I’ll have to admit that my very first impression wasn’t good. I had been listening to my $349 Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones at work, and my initial impression was that the sound was very flat with the Urbanears. After flipping between several songs on my favorite playlist, I soon decided that these weren’t flat; the Bose headphones were indeed very muddy, with artificially-enhanced bass and poor quality high tones.

Having spent some time in a recording studio, the best analogy I can make is that these sound like a set of highly-balanced studio monitors, with an extremely flat response. I can hear high notes better with these than I ever had with the Bose. The clarity is amazing, at least to my aging ears.

I don’t think these are for everyone. If you live for the thump of the artificially-enhanced bass lines in some music, you probably won’t like these. If you like classical, jazz, or more complex music, you’ll probably appreciate the clarity.

This is just my initial impression, so I hope to report back in a few weeks to see how they stand up to repeated use.

Note: some minor corrections based on comments.

[Robert Scoble](http://scobleizer.com) hits the nail on the head when he says that, “[On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.](http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/11/why-i-cant-kick-the-apple-iphone-habit/)” He was responding to [Louis Gray's post on how he switched from iPhone to Android](http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/07/why-i-turned-in-my-iphone-and-went.html).

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an [Amazon Kindle](http://www.amazon.com/kindlestore) (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an [AT&T 3G Microcell](http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/why/3gmicrocell/) in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

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You’ve done the research, gathered the data, created your beautiful charts and graphs, maybe even added a video or a soundtrack. Now you have to take your precious PowerPoint or Keynote presentation and, well, present it. You can either shine like the consummate professional you are, or you can have all your hard work hidden behind a distracting facade of blunders and missteps. Here’s some of my top tips for making sure that the presentation goes smoothly.

Practice makes perfect

Actually, a better phrase is “Practice makes permanent, so always practice perfect.” It’s astonishing to me how often someone will give a presentation when it’s obvious that they haven’t looked at it in months, if at all. Nothing reduces your credibility quite like saying, “Huh, I didn’t know that,” when the slide of last quarter’s sales figures comes up on the screen. Always make sure you run through your slides in a rehearsal before you present, or otherwise you’ll look like a loon. A rehearsal, by the way, does not mean merely skimming through and reading silently; you actually need to plan on saying what you’re going to say in the presentation (see the next tip).

When you rehearse, you should pretend that you’re actually presenting; make sure you allow time for questions, and make sure that you know how long the presentation will take. You look like a fool if you are on slide 31 of 60 when you’ve reached the end of your allotted half-hour and there’s a crowd of people standing outside waiting to use the conference room. You should know, within 10%, exactly how long your presentation takes.

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If you’re anything like me, you work in a corporation or organization, and you work for someone else. Usually, that person also works for someone else. In any decent organization, two potentially conflicting things should occur:

1. lower-level employees are given responsibility and the ability to work under their own initiative, and
2. higher-level managers need to know what’s going on.

This is called *management.* The net result of this is that you will almost certainly, at some point in your career, be called upon to give a Status Report.

A Status Report can be as simple as a casual office conversation, an email, or a fancy presentation complete with overhead slides, video, and a soundtrack. No matter what the medium, there are a number of things that you should and should not do in a status report. Here’s my list of the most important things to understand about a status report; forget these at your peril.

1. No surprises

Surprisingly, a status report isn’t about you reporting on your status. Your manager should already have a general idea of your or your project’s status. If you have problems with your project (for example, you’ve fallen behind schedule), then you need to let your manager know *immediately,* and not wait until it’s time to present your status report.

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