hearing loss in modern times

This is a topic near and dear to my heart: hearing. My generation, Gen X, and the subsequent generation, the teenagers of today, are losing our hearing, but for a reason different from the previous generations.

While they lost their hearing largely for industrial reasons, we are inflicting the damage on our ears. We're attending loud concerts, riding around in cars with loud stereos, and we're listening to earphones and headphones much louder than really necessary.

I've personally subjected myself to all these scenarios, and I've the tinnitus to show for it. I also can't carry a conversation as well as I'd like, since one of the symptoms of hearing loss is the ability to differentiate a voice from background noise.

How to Prevent Hearing Loss, an article by Eliot Van Buskirk on the Wired News site, is an excellent article. If you go to concerts, listen to an iPod or similar, or drive around enjoying your car stereo, I encourage you to read this article and take the advice to heart.

Once the damage is done, you hearing doesn't heal; you just learn to cope.

Yahoo Music Unlimited revisited

I posted this about nine months ago, and I feel I should post an update.

June 14, 2005

Yahoo Music Unlimited

I've been trying out Yahoo Music Unlimited since Friday, and I'm of two minds.

I love the fact that I can stream almost anything in their catalog, including complete songs and albums. They've got a good catalog that I can take advantage of while connected at work. It's a great way to get exposed to more music -- way better than iTune's 30-second snippets, which can be downright frustrating.

What sucks is I can't put music on my iPod. I don't want to put rental music on my iPod, just the stuff I'd buy. I won't buy because of that. If a Jhymn-type tool existed for Janus-protected music, that'd be enough, but I haven't found one yet.

So I guess I try music in Y!Music Unlimited and buy it in iTunes. Not such a bad deal, so long as the music is in both catalogs.

I'll post about the merits of each player later. In brief: there's essentially no comparison. iTunes rules. Apple really knows how to create a user experience.

Posted by wesleyt at 08:24 PM

Life is strange. A buddy here at work was asking me how to fetch older versions of web pages, so I showed him how to fetch stuff from Google's cache, and I used my old weblog URL as an example. I stumbled across the above example while I was listening to music with the Yahoo Music Engine for the first time in a long time. A friend of mine earlier asked me if I knew of Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave Overture. I didn't off the top of my head, so I looked it up in Yahoo Music, and downloaded an album by Andre Previn and the London Symphony that included it. I copied the album onto my iRiver T30, which I use as a voice recorder, and to listen to Yahoo's Janus music.

Most of the time when I want to listen to Yahoo Music downloads I use Windows Media Player, since it's much lighter on my system. But I used YME today.

I think that's interesting.