Tolkien is awesome.

For those who didn’t hear, I broke my awesome Bose Triport headphones. They were in my laptop, which i set on the couch. I then stood up, the laptop clattered to the floor, and the headphone plug took the brunt of the fall. So I was left with a scratch in my PowerBook and a cock-eyed headphone plug that was touchy… if I didn’t touch it while playing audio, I got monaureal sound that was severely lacking in mid to high frequencies. That was no good. So that’s the story. Happy to provide you someone to laugh at. Anyway, I emailed Bose support to ask what my options were forgetting them fixed. Despite me saying that I broke them in the email, Bose offered to replace them free of charge (which is Awesome).

They arrived today. There was much rejoicing. Yea.

Anyway, for the visual learners, here’s the story in pictures:

The old headphones, after my best efforts to repair (straighten) the plug with two sets of pliers failed.

The new headphones, like magic.

Size comparison: sleek new Bose Triport vs. my old beloved Aiwa headphones, which, though bulky, survived 4 years of intense use at the mixing board at my high school. I brought them back from home as backup until Bose shipped the new headphones to me. I loved those headphones; I wore out the head strap part to the point that it broke once a week, and I stripped out the screws from taking the headphones apart and fixing them.

And a bonus picture that Scott pointed out to me. See here: Microsoft Software Piracy Protection

In other news, Jeni and I took Flash 2 from the software training for students program at DoIT tonight. Let me just say that Flash is the most convoluted “development environment” (not sure what else to call it) that I have ever worked in. Yes, even more convoluted than PicPro. Imagine PicPro, but for every wire you wanted to draw, you had to make obscure clicks on 3 different panels or modify settings in hidden panes. On the upshot, it has a really good undo feature, with a pretty long history, which beats PicPro by a factor of 1/0. The only downside to the Undo is that it didn’t undo the changes I made to my ActionScript. …wha…? It will undo my every mouse click but not the changes I made that completely hosed my ActionScript? Or maybe I just missed something…. In any case, Flash is messed up, and the antithesis of every accessability, usability, and compatability standard ever created. But it was kind of fun to make one of those “Loading…” screens for a change. I even figured out how to get a caption that tells you what percentage is complete, though I didn’t have time to convert the 15+ digit decimal into a nice round percentage, and it only updated the percent after the completion of each animation loop.