Joe Auricchio

An article on yesterday’s Slashdot warns of the dangers of hearing loss from earbuds.

I’ve played some music in my time, and a I’ve done a whole lot of listening, usually with headphones. My father used to run a small recording studio out of our home, so I’m acquainted with the dangers of volume.

I recently measured the decibel levels I listen at, and found I’m usually between 70 and 80, which should be fairly safe. The article mentions an audiologist found people in the wild listening at 110-120 decibels. I tried to turn my headphones up to that level and they simply would not go that high; they topped out around 95dB. I tried listening at that level. It was far, far too loud. I can’t imagine how anybody could enjoy that. I certainly can’t imagine how anybody could enjoy four times that volume. (115dB - 95dB = 20dB; each 10dB = twice the perceived loudness)

I have been guilty of really cranking it up now and then, especially in my car. Mostly good ’70s rock and roll (Chicago, Vanilla Fudge, Ten Years After, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida) and some modern stuff: tunes that are meant to be loud, dammit!. But not really that loud, and for a few minutes at most. We’re going for “powerful”, not “deafening”.

Have you ever heard 110 decibels? It’s immensely loud. 120dB is frightening. But even 85 can cause damage.

So folks… turn your earbuds down! Better yet, go get yourself an HD 201. Your ears will thank you.

Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the shuffle.

President Bush, on his iPod

If you’re worried, and you can’t sleep

Just count your blessings instead of sheep

And you’ll fall asleep

Counting your blessings

Bing Crosby, White Christmas

• My father
• His limitless computer wisdom
• My mother
• Her lasagna
• My sister—you’re one in a million, Jessie
• My warm and comfortable home
• This beautiful town and its amazingly nice people
• The ocean
• A good job waiting for me in SD
• Tea
• My health

and most of all

• All of my friends: from Coast, from UCSD, from everywhere else

Happy Christmas to All, and To All a Good Night!

Pencil Carving

The word of programming jobs has wide definition like, imagine, ‘working for driving a car’ means from a Taxi driver to an F1 driver. Ruby is a skill for F1 driving.

Daigo Moriwaki

My second SPARC assembly program: Adds one and two, and puts the result in its return code.

.global main
main:
    mov 1,%l0
    mov 2,%l1
    add %l0,%l1,%l0
    mov %l0,%o0
    mov 1,%g1
    ta 0                         ! they didnt teach us this in the book

My first SPARC assembly program:

[jauricch@ieng6] % ./a.out
Illegal instruction (core dumped)

Last night, keith, erik, vivien, mooneer, liz, danny, djc, jackie, glen, kenton, jessi, and I went to Buca di Beppo. It’s a family style Italian restaurant: huge portions (splitting is not optional) of tomatoey pastay sausagey goodness. We had, as best I can remember:

• Fried calamari
• Salmon with pesto and sundried tomatoes
• Rosemary chicken
• Quattro al Forno (sampling of four baked pastas)
• Penne Arrabbiata
• Bread
• Tiramisu (to die for)

My one complaint of the entire evening: there was neither oil/vinegar nor butter for the bread. That’s just plain silly.

[My] deep love of Free Software and Open Source is turning me into a penguin. The only visible changes (so far) are a gradual accumulation of blubber, a loss of hair (which I hope is the prelude to feather growth) and a growing preference for raw fish.

Zak Greant