Of massaging office chairs and Chopin

Hope everyone had a great Consumermas. We did here in the SIDN house. Among the many things I bought myself recently, two are worth mention as I enjoy them together on a Sunday evening.

Chair awaits my aching back

1. A leather mid-back office chair from Office Depot, (True Innovations Mid-Back Bonded Leather Massage Chair) on sale late last week for $79 (regularly $149). Not the best chair in the world , but pretty darn good and the massage is a nice bonus for those evening s when digging through the snow you didn't shovel for the past week has got the back a-aching.

massage remote in pleather holster.

Online, Office Depot still had these chairs listed at full price, but in the store they were still on sale. If you're looking for a new chair, don't want to spend a ton and need the occasional massage, this might be the chair for you.

Don't you feel relaxed already?

2. The other night I was jonesing for some classical music. We still have a bunch of cds in storage that have never made their way to the hard drives and frankly, I was feeling way to lazy on Xmas Eve to go digging them out, so I went to Amazon and found that they are selling huge collections of classical stuff for $5. By huge, I mean 99 songs for $5. I'm no math genius, but that's a great deal. I got 99 Chopin tunes and 99 of the "Most Relaxing" classical music ditties. Clearly, I'm looking for alternate methods of relaxation, but in this case, $10 for 198 pieces of music is hard to pass up. If you wanna get your classical on, check it. There are a bunch of different, mood-centered collections to choose from, as well as some Greatest hits. Sound quality is fine for casual listening at 196k, but classical-heads will scoff at this decidedly lossy bit rate. I venture to guess that Amazon is not targeting the classical-phile with these gluts.

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Relaxing-Classics-Amazon-Exclusive/dp/B003O3MTM2/ref=pd_sim_dmusic_a_8

If I could have anything for Christmas...

The eternal question: If I could have anything at all for Xmas, what would I want? This is a question pondered ad nauseum this time of year. We're trained from the cradle to want, to list, to cajole and badger. And we teach our kids to do the same. Mind-numbingly preposterous commercials flood the airwaves and whip us into a fever. Most egregious are the "Lexus December to remember" ads (see above), that advise us to go out and buy a luxury car for our nearest and dearest during the holiday season. This year they state, "Let's face it, no one ever said they wanted a smaller holiday gift" or something. And that might be true, but I think if I went out and bought the wife any car, let alone a Lexus, for Xmas, that would be a good way to get myself divorced. Does anyone actually heed the advice of these ads? And if so, what is the divorce rate amongst this group?

Yeah, 'tis the season of giving and getting and I have to admit that I'm probably one of the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) at showing restraint, at this time of year or any other. So when I posed this question to myself, I found myself strangely stymied. Surely I could spend a few minutes perusing the Internet and find dozens of things I wanted, but if I could have anything, what would that be?

And the answer surprised me even more: it's complicated. I searched my mind for a reason for this answer and I found two. One: I want to "earn" the stuff I buy for myself. That's not to say I want to "deserve" the stuff, but that this whole hobby of buying stuff, trading up to other stuff, is a process. Each new purchase, each new bauble offer its own small clue toward the next step in the journey. If I just got whatever I wanted, no consideration to price, that would be like cheating.

Two: Even I can get overwhelmed by the sheer consumerism of this season. I know, it's hard to believe. Today I had a day at home with my wife and daughter and I realized that over the next week and a half I'll have several more days with them. And that is a blessing. Now, I use the word blessing in the purest secular sense. I am not a religious guy, at least not in the organized religion sense. I do have faith in my life, but it's more of the "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me" variety than the benevolent old guy in the sky kind. And so being here with them got me thinking, maybe because I recently started this blog that's all about the ephemeral, maybe because some other things in my life are changing right now as well, that I'm a pretty blessed guy. I have a wonderful family that supports and surprises me. I am almost 40 and I'm still making art and I have a job, a job that seems pretty well suited to me to boot. And that's a lot to be grateful for.

So, what would I want most if I could have anything for Xmas? The foresight and calm necessary to slow down, look around me and enjoy and appreciate the two special girls in my life, to appreciate what I have and the good that's all around me, both self-realized and by the grace of others. Everything else will come.

Happy holidays, all.

PS: Couldn't resist putting this video in either. Even a two dimensional Edward is soooo dreamy.

Stuff I Don't Need: Now with a fancy rating system

Thanks to my good friend Angus McEtler of the podcast "Angus and Toddy's Special Treat" (he came up with the concept and the design of the images), the blog now has a rating system. Angus also designed our fancy new logo, as well.

When applicable, I will rate the stuff I discuss here on a scale of zero to five wallet moths. Zero being completely unworthy of letting one little moth chew away your hard-earned cash and five being the total opposite. Below I insert the icons for your familiarization.

Well, this has my heart a-racing: Mic stand iPad clip

This is what you iPad will look like after the screen times out while you're in the middle of a verse. It's also what your iPad will look like moments before the tweaker stage left steals it when you turn away to sell a cd.

I knew it was just a matter of time...and the time has finally come: There's a mic stand adapter for the iPad. Goodbye spidery foldy-up stand. You're $10 ass has been replaced by a $500 imminently stealable piece of tech. What do you do when you're rocking and the screen times out? Yeah, musicians are stupid and love gadgets, but really. And it's $40 dollars. (Where can I get one?)

This is a graphic representation of how much you will rock using the iKlip. Sensitive emo hair not included.

Coming to this space soon: I took my iPad to the gig and someone stole it, but they left my stupid iKlip behind to mock me.

M-Audio Studiophile AV30: In which I continue to search for great, cheap desktop speakers

In the basement of my house, I have a recording studio. It's not the best recording studio in the world. Some might not even call it a recording studio at all, but it's mine and I make some recordings down there I'm pretty proud of.

The command center of the studio

The Dynaudio BM5A, a lava lamp, a grenade, and my first driver's license

The center of that recording studio, and the most expensive piece of gear aside from the iMac (by a little) and my Les Paul Traditional (by a lot), is my set of monitors, the Dynaudio BM5As. These monitors cost me $1000 and they are really great. there are better, more expensive monitors out there, but I've learned to hear on them very well and the mixes from my studio sound like what I intend them to. That's the ultimate test of studio monitors: how do they translate mixes to other systems.

Recently, we got a new desktop computer for the family to share upstairs. This is first time I've had access to all my digital music in one spot upstairs and I wanted to be able to listen while working on that computer or while I puttered around the house in the morning and not have to suffer from cheapo desktop speakers that aren't worth a damn. I've been through them all, it seemed over the years, a set of Klipsch that sounded pretty darn good, but one of the jacks went bad after a year or so, an iPod boom box that sounded great, but the power supply died two years in, some Bose Companion 2s that were so awful I took them back less than a week after I brought them home (in a later expose I want to discover how Bose makes their stuff sound so good in the store and then perform so damn poorly in the home.).

No matter what, consumer desktop speakers have always disappointed. We have a nice set of Polk speakers in the living room hooked up to the TV, but the TV is often being used for TV watching, so I'd have to retreat downstairs and listen to music in the studio. And the TV's not hooked up to the network, so I have to plug in my phone. Oh, the humanity! Going downstairs is not a bad thing, but what if I wanted to be social and spend some time with the family while also listening to the computer and doing some work on the computer? Well, I had to suffer. Poor me, right?

Well, this past weekend, Mom sent money for Christmas (Thanks, Mom!) and I was determined to take a chunk of it and find some decent speakers for the computer. And there was no way I wanted to spend more than $100 on them. I went to Best Buy and looked at all the computer speakers in the computer section. There were all the usual suspects, Klipsch, Logitech, Creative, and fools gold of all fools gold, Bose. And I listened to them all. The stuff with a sub was way too thumpy and mushy on the bottom. The stuff without was too nasally and thin. Again, the Bose sounded best, but I wasn't going down that primrose path again, even if the Companion 2s were on sale at $89. I have to admit. I was weakening and walked around the store with the Bose under my arm for fifteen minutes, wandering aimlessly, reluctant to go to the checkout. There had to be another way.

Then I remembered that M-Audio, a purveyor of pro-sumer studio gear, also had a line of desktop monitors. Now, in the recording world, M-audio is kind of like Hyundai. They make decent stuff that almost keeps pace with the big boys, but is just a shade to the cheaper side. But they get the job done. So I set out, with poor, cranky daughter in tow, back across the store to Best Buy's pathetic little recording section. And there they were the M-Audio Studiophile AV30s. And they were exactly $99.

Have I chosen wisey?

So, like any gadget addict I toted them to the check out mumbling the mantra of all gadget hounds: "I can return them within 30 days. I can return them within 30 days." I must apologize to the nice older lady who was looking at the Sex in the City boxed sets as I passed in a fever of gear lust. I know I must have seemed threatening, mumbling in that way, unshowered and be-sweatedpanted as I was. I think it was only the cute little girl with me that kept her from macing the me right then and there.

I got the things home and tore into the box with abandon. This was going to be it, the moment I walk into the promised land of acceptable budget desktop audio. Early signs were promising. These monitors were hefty. They are self-powered and sturdy. The casing is not made of plastic, it's more of a nice, black vinyl covering over pressed wood, like real speakers. Not the best, but they certainly don't feel or look cheap.

Back at the family manse, Studiophiles in place.

The left speaker, which has all the controls.

M-Audio brought the price point down by waving RCA connectors instead of TRS, which would be a non-starter in the studio world, but here, an acceptable trade off. And the new computer has an audio out on the back, so I plugged them in and was ready to go. In a moment of enthusiasm I flipped on the bass boost switch on the back before firing up a tune (Black Sabbath's War Pigs. I've been in a proto-metal mood lately). Ugh. Thirty seconds in, I flipped the bass boost off. I don't know why folks like that much bass in their music. I understand that dance and hip hop are predicated on bass, but to me, if it throws of the balance of the overall piece. I generally don't use EQ or hype anything when I listen to music. There are engineers in the studio and at the mastering house who have fretted over the right balance for everything. Who am I to say they're wrong?

Look, no bigger than a couple of cool box sets.

Bass boost canceled, I sat back and listened for a few minutes. Very nice. No wait, VERY nice. What I was hearing was music, a wide range of frequencies, nice separation, good detail in the mids and highs. The bass was still a little untamed for my taste, but I can also chalk that up to sympathetic reverberation through the metal Steelcase desk (some Auralex monitor isolators would fix that). And this was just the first play. All speakers and headphones need a break-in period to really sound like they're intended to sound. I'm very excited to see how these sound when that happens.

Conclusion!
All in all, these are the best, by far, desktop speakers I have ever come across. I'm sure there are other, more expensive, monitors out there that would blow them away, but when I have $1000 monitors downstairs, how could I justify anything more upstairs. Well, I'm sure I could, but I'm trying to be reasonable. They have a smallish footprint, quality craftsmanship, very good sound (especially when compared with their competition), and they won't break the bank. If you're looking for great desktop speakers, go this route.

iTunes is a terrible music player. Is there a decent one?

There, I said it. I've felt this way for a long time, but I feel like I have to say it again. iTunes sucks. The interface isn't intuitive, cover flow is an unnavigable and unimaginative joke, the program won't crawl through your various media folders to find what you have on your system, the fact that you have to make a playlist to burn a disc is ludicrous and the Genius feature is anything but. How much of a genius can it be if it keeps shuffling around the same 25 songs when I want it to pick new songs. I can make much better playlists by myself, which defeats the purpose of this feature to begin with.

Let me say at this point that I've been an Apple guy for the better part of twenty years now. My first computer was an Apple and I have always preferred them, but I have never liked the iPod (at least not the early versions of the OS) and iTunes has not taken the leap forward that iOS has in its recent incarnations. The UI is still clunky and boring and doesn't capitalize on the latest in software possibilities for interactive and interesting interfaces.

And Ping? Please. That's a half-assed attempt to do something Facebook like in Apple's closed little playground and, well, we have Facebook, so who cares. Go away, Ping. You bother me.

And none of this has even touched on the Apple Store, which I don't even want to get started on. I can't understand why people buy anything from this store. They were the first to market? How long does that have to last? I've long contended that subscription-based music is the only way forward for the music industry. Recorded music is no longer a product in the way it was ten years ago. The best way for the industry to survive is to allow unfettered access to as much music as possible and divide the royalties in the same way ASCAP, BMI, et al have done for years for radio airplay, etc. As a musician myself, this is what I want to see. I want people to be able to get ahold of my music and listen to it without having to make a commerce decision. But Apple's store perpetuates the old model of ownership. And it's the way it works now.

So, now you're asking where one might find the forward thinking software and business model that I speak of? Napster? Ugh. I tried Napster's new iteration and the streaming quality was terrible. If you want to download a sing at higher quality and listen at home, you have to, you guessed it, buy the MP3. You can download up to 100 songs onto a mobile device, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

Rhapsody? Pandora? I haven't tried Rhapsody, but I get the sense it's very similar to Napster. Pandora is cool, if you want to listen to the radio, but you can't listen to a record..

Emusic? I was an Emusic subscriber until about a month ago when they went from a subscription-based point system to, you guessed it, a money-based system. Sure, the pricing structure was about the same, but I get the sense that Emusic sold themselves out to get the big Universal catalog they'd been coveting. I can feel the slippery slope from here.

So where does that leave us? What service offers an unlimited subscription-based music consumption model with a really slick desktop client that finds all the music on your computer and network as well making suggestions from the marketplace to go along with what you have in your collection and then plays them all together when you use the genius-like smart dj feature?

Wait for it....

Zune

That's right, for my money, Zune is the best music player and online marketplace out there by far. For $14.95 a month you have unlimited access to everything on the Zune Marketplace--that's decent quality downloads, not streaming--plus a desktop client that really looks beautiful, integrates artist pictures as the music plays, has multiple themes to choose from, offers a dashboard quickplay screen where you can pin your favorite stuff, find the new stuff you've added, or look at your history.

In every way, the Zune model is exactly what iTunes should be but isn't.

So why isn't the Zune wildly popular? The players are pretty slick, and I've already told you how much I like the market and software. One word: Microsoft.

The folks in Redmond, Washington have a burr under their saddles and have had for a long time. They're the smart, awkward sibling in this technology family. And they can't seem past their own anger and frustration. Instead of realizing they have a great model here and selling that model to any and all takers, forsaking the hardware for market penetration across platforms, they force you to buy their Zune player to take the music out of the house. And in this day and age, who wants to carry around another device when smart phones are perfect for music listening and apps give you the opportunity to listen in multiple ways. No, Microsoft wont even write a Mac version of the software, stubbornly continuing the hardware wars that they were winning ten years ago, but have become completely irrelevant in recent years.

Pull your head out of your backsides, Microsoft and sell the service, port the software, and let people experience what a great product you have, especially compared to the savants at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA.

We have 5 iPods (1st gen Nano, Shuffle, iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, iPhone 4) in this house, three Zunes (one lost, one broken and one pink). If I could download the Zune app on my phone tomorrow I'd re-up for the subscription service right now and download until I couldn't download any more. I'd try new music that I wouldn't buy. I'd consume like a bear getting ready to hibernate. But as it stands, I have to limp by dissatisfied and frustrated because one company is the victim of its own arrogance and another is a victim of its own blinding pride and vanity.

And who loses out? We do.

Tis the season for fake gifting: In which I buy a Nook Color for the wife and use it myself for two weeks

One day soon, I'm going to write a long post in which I explore why I think I'm so inclined toward buying gadgets. It will be a deep and cathartic exploration and we'll call come away from it feeling as though a great weight has been lifted. But in this post, I'm going to focus on one of the ugly symptoms of said disease: Fake gifting.

Now, fake gifting is maybe not the right way to put it. I mean, when I buy these gifts, I fully intend to give them to the person they are intended for. And usually said gift is something I think the giftee will really enjoy. But I wouldn't be a thorough gift giver if I didn't try the gift out first to make sure it's in perfect working order, right?

Case in point: The NookColor I bought for my wife as an Xmas gift a few weeks ago. My experience with ereaders has been a little spotty. I got a Sony Reader for myself last Xmas and used it a good bit, but ultimately, the e-ink screen was too dark to read indoors without Klieg lights at the bedside and the interface was clunky. And there was no wifi. I never understood how much that would matter until I was in bed, finished with a book, wanting to read another and I had to get out of bed, go plug the thing into the computer, etc., etc.

And yes, the wife likes to read. At first I was thinking Kindle, but the e-ink (which I think is a ridiculous boondoggle of a technology) made me hesitate. If I wanted e-ink, I could just give her the Sony, and I wouldn't wish that on my enemies, let alone the woman who feeds me. I have my iPad and I read on my iPad. But there's no way she was going to let me buy her an iPad and there was no way I was giving her mine, so when the NookColor came out I thought it could be the best of both worlds--within the price point that she would let me spend and back lit LCD tablet optimized for reading and purchasing books.

So one evening after a dinner out, I convinced her to drive to the Mall so I could grab one for her. I got the last one in the store. The Barnes and Noble folks there acted like I just got the last piece of pizza on earth. I was pleased with myself. Of course, when we got home, I broke it out right away and started fiddling with it, purely for quality control's sake. I would have to, I told her, run it through its paces before I could give it to her as a gift. So I charged it up and went to work testing it out.

The interface and form factor are both pretty nice. The screen is as bright as you need it to be and I found myself liking the sepia-tone pages on a slightly dim setting. The NookColor was more comfortable to hold while reading than my iPad. It was easy to cradle in the palm of my hand and it had a nice soft-touch rubberized backing. The interface was responsive and the reading experience was fine. We read a lot in bed and I found that I could read it in the dark with the brightness turned down and experience no real eye strain. There are a lot of people who say the LCD screen cause eye strain when reading, but I haven't had that experience. YMMV.

Both of us already buy Kindle books for the iPad/iPhone/Andriod phone and I was anxious to see how the Barnes and Noble bookstore fared against Amazon's selection. Sadly, not well. the first few titles I looked for were not there, including The Windup Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards this year. Not a good sign. I looked for more books and my success rate was hit and miss. As a control, I looked for the same stuff on Amazon and found every single book. Sure the selection will get better over time, but I'm interested in what is, not what will be. This is a $250 gadget here. I want the world! In the continuum of ebookstores, I put the Barnes and Noble store in between the Sony Reader Store (which seems to be geared toward readers of romance novels) and Amazon, which is a full-service store with just about anything you could ask for. I finally found a book I wanted to read from the BN store (Into the Forest by Jean Hegland) and read it in a day or so on the NookColor. All in all a fine experience.

So far so good, right? Well, not so fast. Yes, the NookColor is just about the best ereader I've had my hands on. Yes, it does run Android (1.6?!?! Really?). Yes, the reading experience was pretty good. Yes, it could be a fully functional tablet as well. There are apps (Pandora being the only one worth even opening). But it's not great. Not in the way it needs to be at that price point. Too many disappointments.

After the initial blush, I fell out of love quickly. The little glitches in the OS grated on me, the clunkiness of trying to access the web became tiresome. Even the cute little "Nook Hook" design element bothered me going into week two. The NookColor has been described as an in between device, as in in between a tablet and an ereader. And I agree with that assessment. Unfortunately, that also leaves it in between being worth the $250 price tag and not. It's a nice bauble and it comported itself well, but when $250 is a chunk of change that makes you think twice before you spend it, the NookColor just ain't worth it.

"But wait," you must be saying . "You bought it as a gift. What did your wife think?" Honestly, she never even touched it. At the end of my trial I asked her what she thought and she said, "I'd rather have a new phone."

So there you go. On the "Stuff I Don't Need rating scale," the NookColor gets a "Shrug, pretty cool, but not all that" from me and an "I'd rather have a new phone" from our co-judge, my wife. The NookColor went back to the store and the wife is now sporting an iPhone 4. More on that later.

Seriously, if you have the dough to spend and read in darker environments and you really want an ereader, this is the best one out there. Just be warned, that ain't saying much.

Wallet Moth rating:  

In which one man buys stuff he can't afford and then writes about it

Hi, welcome to Stuff I Don't Need, a blog I decided to start in a lame attempt to justify my desire to buy a lot of crap that I don't really need. This space will also serve as a means to keep me from doing the writing that I really should be doing. So it serves two questionable purposes. Thanks for being here to enable me.

In these "pages," I'll endeavor to write about the gadgets I buy or gadgets that I really can't afford but I want to buy anyway and offer up my voice to contribute to the din of others already going on and on about this stuff.

How will this blog be different than others? Well, not much, but maybe I'll be able to provide a viewpoint that offers at least a little different slant than the Engadgets and Gizmodos of the world. I'm not really a techie. I'm a terrible gamer, but I want to be good. I'm going on forty and like to think I'm still as cool as I thought I was twenty years ago. I'm a writer, musician, recording engineer and education professional who lives in the midwest. The only gadget stores anywhere near me are big box stores, so I'll be providing feedback based on what the average person can get within twenty miles of home. I like to think I'm funny. My wife usually doesn't agree.

So, that's the story. Without further verbiage, let's get started.