Notes In The Margin

I am now wearing my new BAHA Intenso ®, which I acquired about 2 hours ago at the UK Hearing Clinic.

As we walked out of the clinic, I heard a fire engine siren, and I knew which direction it was coming down the street before I saw it. This is a pretty big deal, since have lacked directional perception in my hearing for more than 20 years now, so I assumed this would be something I'd have to relearn. But I heard it, and immediately knew that it was to the left of me.

The device itself works amazingly well. In fact, when I first put it on, we thought that we'd have to send it back and exchange it for something less powerful, because even moderately loud noises were painful with the device set on a hair above zero. However, the audiologist adjusted it, since the gain and low-tone setting were both cranked all the way to max, and it was much better. Even now, I've got it set on 1, or somewhere between 1 and 2, and it is very loud.

I am sure that it will take a long time to get used to it, and that I will have headaches for the next few days. But, to be able to hear is pretty amazing.

On the way home, Maria drove, so was sitting on the left of me. Turns out that when she mumbles inaudibly to herself, she's actually saying intelligible things. Who knew? ;-)

About ten years ago, I went to an event where Dr. Vint Cerf was speaking. His wife was there with him, and she has a cochlear implant - not the same thing I have, but much more complicated and amazing. At question time, one of the suits asked the standard question that you ask technology wizards. What's the most amazing advance in technology in the last 50 years? And, of course, being Vint Cerf, the expected response was some blather about how the Internet has changed everything. But, being Vint Cerf, he said instead, my wife's cochlear implant.

Polaroid has announced that they are now marketing a camera that lets you take a photograph, and then print that photograph immediately.

It's this kind of amazing fresh thinking and out-of-the-box engineering that keeps the United States firmly in the forefront of innovations in technology. I mean, who's ever thought of anything like this before?

Of course, my first thought was ... nice photo, can I get a digital copy of that, please?

I got an iConvert as an early Christmas present, and have been playing with it today.

I've been eying several of the USB turntables for a while because I have a pretty big stack of LPs that I'd really like to be able to listen to. I expect that this kind of device has probably reached its low price point, and will just go up from here as the demand drops off and folks stop making them.

As you might expect, I've had successes and failures, as a function of the condition of the LP that I'm trying to convert. No big surprise there. I have LPs as late as 1990, and some as early as the 1920s, so I don't expect 100% success.

While the Jeep was getting fixed, someone went into it and forced open the center console where I had, among other assorted junk, my ancient GPS receiver. I bought it in the early days, when GPS technology was first available to civilians. I paid an enormous amount of money for it, and, by today's standards, it hardly did anything at all. But it kept me sane for a couple years, giving me something to do in those endless days and hours.

This weekend, we went up to spend some time with Skippy, and while there, I found a refurbished TomTom One for about half of what they're going for new, and we snapped it up. I'm completely blown away by what a low-end device like this can do. It's got street-level maps of the entire USA. It does turn-by-turn routing, and reroutes if you choose to ignore its advice. It tells you where the nearest restaurants are. And all sorts of other useful things.

So, today, after more than 3 years of not Geocaching at all, we went out and found four caches, and did maintenance on one of mine that's been disabled for a while. It looks like we might get back into geocaching again, which would be cool. I've enjoyed it for a long time, just my schedule the last few years has made it very difficult to make time for it.

I'm in today's Herald-Leader!!