Today finds me relaxing into a slower pace of work than I have been used to recently. It’s nice - I get time to think about what I’m doing rather than just react all the time. It also means I can write entries in this blog during breaks.
It just occurred to me that many people (whoever you are) that read my ramblings may be completely unaware that I cross-post my Blog to LiveJournal and Blogger. My “real” journal is at http://www.pluggedout.com/blog, and has a corresponding RSS feed. I’m not sure why I started cross posting in the first place, but now I’ve been doing it for a while it would seem like a shame to stop.
So what else has been happening today?
Something happened this morning that annoyed me greatly. We witnessed our postman walk up our path, push a postcard through our door, and briskly walk away. The card said on it “We tried to deliver a parcel, but you were not in”. It was obvious that he didn’t have the parcel with him in the first place. Now forgive me for being a grumpy old man, but that’s just wrong.
The journey to work was pretty uneventful (for a change) - although one car did try and take me out at a junction, but that’s pretty normal. While cycling along (I ride a mountain bike 3 miles each way to work each day), I started wondering about how your ears work. I guess I should explain…
I have a “Muvo” - a little Creative Labs MP3 player, that straps to my arm (not unlike a blood pressure monitor) to listen to while I’m out running, or when I’m on my bike. You ould think that if you have “in the ear” headphones, they would stop external noises, wouldn’t you. They don’t. I guess before I go further I need to explain something else too for those that don’t cycle…
When you are cycling at any speed above about 20mph, unless you turn your head across the airflow, all you can hear is the roaring of the wind - and it’s loud. Loud enough that if a car was right behind you or even alongside, you cannot hear it at all.
So - getting back to the original subject - you would think that inner ear headphones might kill a lot of the wind noise, and you’d be able to listen to your music while cycling along. Not a bit of it. It would appear that the flappy part of your ear actually picks up most of the noise we hear, and transfers it neatly past the headphone into your head. The only solution I can think of is to wear closed headphones on my bike, but how stupid would that look?
If you’re wondering if I always have such idiotic questions and thoughts running through my head, you have no idea. This is the tip of an idiotic iceberg.