Looking at the boxes for both the Major and the Minor (the full and in-ear models, respectively), you can already tell something special is going on. Let’s start with the Major.

The Major’s box has a small seam running about 2cm from the bottom of the box, with just two small clear decals holding the top to the bottom. No fuss, no muss- just remove or slit the decals, lift the top, and voila!

The Major makes it’s entry in reclining fashion, so you can see all the small details that went into it. Knurled bronze tip, the iconic cabinet grille cloth covering the inner speakers, the Marshall logo on white above black Tolex- it’s all the little details you’ve become used to with Marshall amps remixed to powerful effect. And once you plug them in, they fit nicely but not too tight or bulky, provide a great , tight bass and crystally highs for a driver so small, and weigh up incredibly light- folding up neatly to slip into a backpack or laptop bag and still leave some room. I’m probably going to use these as my main headphones for general listening henceforth. They’re really as clean sounding as they are elegant. The bass isn’t hip-hop subwoofer low, but a tight, rounded punchy bass that sounds great across a reasonably wide span of styles. Thumbs way up.

Now, on to the Minors.

The Minor’s packaging is even more curious from the outset. The box itself has a little hook loop for carrying (nice), hinting at something of distinct interest within, and apparently opens in a clamshell format. By pulling off the small decal, the top opens and slowly reveals the headphones within. But not in a static fashion- although the surface holdilng the earphones themselves starts out flat…

… as the box opens further, it tilts forward ever so slightly to give a smooth final touch to the presentation.

The little details on the Minors are just as cunningly well-placed – the iconic gold-capped knobs-that-go-to-eleven form the outer surface of the in-ear units, and the knurled brass cable tip is a knock off of the ‘vintage OEM’ style. The microphone fidelity is clear, and the talk/play/pause button is easy to get to in a rush. Innovatively, these ‘in-ears’ don’t actually stick IN your ear, but clip inside your ear’s ridges to hold quite tightly. So tightly, in fact, that a MMA workout and jog couldn’t rattle ‘em loose – and I’m a person who has never had success with stock in-ear headphones – always finding them fitting too poorly to use in real active situations. These, however, have now become my workout workhorses. Their fidelity is reasonably good overall with a tight low midrange and clear highs, but suffers a reduced bass response as they are technically ‘out of ear’ headphones and don’t seal the ear canal to afford a tighter low end. All told, the Minors are still several cuts above any standard earbuds and probably on par with many mid-range over-ear headphones to boot.

As I’d hoped, Marshall took their legacy of high-quality audio and built upon it with the stylistic retro product design and engaging packaging make the experience as exciting as possible from the moment you crack the seal of the box to the first downbeat of the music you crank through them. This is how a product goes from good to great – by not missing ANY of the fine details.

Kudos to Marshall for making these headphones an absolute dream from start to finish. I haven’t had that much fun cracking open a pair of boxes in a long time. To read more about the Marshall Major and Minor (and pick up a pair yourself), just head over to marshallheadphones.com. I think you’ll be equally impressed.

For years, I’ve gotten used to interacting with high-tech/web colleagues via social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and the like, but the deeper life connections being made within Facebook are just too strong to avoid. Staying in touch with industry colleagues is great- don’t get me wrong – but the depth and breadth of connections on Facebook trump any of the other social sites hands-down.

So- I’m probably going to find myself posting on Twitter less and less, and Facebook more and more (especially as FB can send Twitter my status updates anyway). Interesting.

it depends on who’s calling the shots

If you’re a minority and you’re selected for a job over more qualified candidates you’re a ‘token hire.’
If you’re a conservative and you’re selected for a job over more qualified candidates you’re a ‘game changer’.

Black teen pregnancies? A ‘crisis’ in black America.
White teen pregnancies? A ‘blessed event’.

If you grow up in Hawaii you’re ‘exotic’.
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you’re the quintessential ‘American story’.

If you name you kid Barack you’re ‘unpatriotic’.
Name your kid Track, you’re ‘colorful’.

If you’re a Democrat and you make a VP pick without fully vetting the individual you’re ‘reckless.’
A Republican who doesn’t fully vet is a ‘maverick’.

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer growing your organization from a staff of 1 to 13 and your budget from $70,000 to $400,000, then become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new African-American voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, then spend nearly 8 more years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, becoming chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, then spend nearly 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of nearly 13 million people, sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you are woefully inexperienced.

If you spend 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, then spend 20 months as the governor of a state with 650,000 people, then you’ve got the most executive experience of anyone on either ticket, are the Commander in Chief of the Alaska military, and are well qualified to lead the nation should you be called upon to do, so because your state is the closest state to Russia.

If you are a Democratic male candidate who is popular with millions of people you are an ‘arrogant celebrity’.
If you are a popular Republican female candidate you are ‘energizing the base’.

If you are a younger male candidate who thinks for himself and makes his own decisions you are ‘presumptuous’.
If you are an older male candidate who makes last minute decisions you refuse to explain, you are a ‘shoot-from-the-hip-maverick’.

If you are a candidate with a Harvard law degree you are ‘an elitist – out of touch’ with the real America.
If you are a legacy (dad and granddad were admirals) graduate of Annapolis, with multiple disciplinary infractions you are a ‘hero’.

If you manage a multi-million dollar nationwide campaign, you are an ‘empty suit’.
If you are a part time mayor of a town of 7000 people, you are an ‘experienced executive’.

If you go to a South Side Chicago church, your beliefs are’extremist’.
If you believe in Creationism and don’t believe global warming is man-made, you are ‘strongly principled.’

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.
If you have been married to the same woman with whom you’ve been wed to for 19 years and raising 2 beautiful daughters with, you’re ‘risky’.

If you’re a black single mother of 4 who waits for 22 hours after her water breaks to seek medical attention, you’re an irresponsible parent, endangering the life of your unborn child.
But, if you’re a white married mother who waits 22 hours, you’re ‘spunky’.

If you’re a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton, the right-wing press calls you ‘First dog’.
If you’re a 17-year old pregnant unwed daughter of a Republican, the right-wing press calls you ‘beautiful’ and ‘courageous’.

If you kill an endangered species, you’re an ‘excellent hunter’.
If you have an abortion you’re not a Christian, you’re a ‘murderer’ (forget about if it happens while being date raped).

If you teach abstinence only in sex education, you get teen parents.
If you teach responsible age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are ‘eroding the fiber of society’.

…

Yeah, we sure do have a ‘liberal media’ in this country, don’t we… >:/

I love my MT, but have to admit the dynamic/PHP nature of WordPress’ siren song has pulled me in for a closer look. Let’s see where this all goes?

Update: so far it seems OK, but I’m still getting random 404s/errors when clicking into individual post pages, and unfortunately the tags did not transfer, as I’d feared. 9 years of tagging down the drain is a bit hard to swallow, honestly- that may end up being a deal-breaker honestly. If you stumble across this site – and post – please feel free to bang around a bit, and let me know if you see any other weirdnesses (aside from the dismal default template I’ve got applied right now)?

Update: screw that- I’m testing out WordPress right now to see if it’ll work better for me.  So far, the import in WP 2.5 is working like a champ, and aside from losing my tags seems to have migrated everything pretty well.  We may be moving to WordPress in short order.

Scott explaining quantum physics

Originally uploaded by grewis

SxSW (South by Southwest, to the uninitiated) is my favorite event of the year, every year. Great conversations, amazing parties, and you get to meet up with all the cool people from around the globe you never see on a day-to-day basis (like Veerle Pieters and Geert Leyseele, behind me).

And apparently, riff on quantum physics. I guess when I get half a margarita in me my conversational skills increase exponentially… does that really surprise you, though?

If you don’t get the title reference, you can see a clip here that should explain it.

• You have to post the rules before you give your answers.
• You must list one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. (If you don’t have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother’s maiden name).
• At the end of your blog post, you need to tag one person (or blogger of another species) for each letter of your middle name. (Be sure to leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged.)

So here’s the answers, so I can get back to my rather insane Friday and still leave the office at a reasonable hour. Didn’t think I’d be doing this on my own hours, did you?

My middle name is, believe it or not, Scott. Feel free to guess my real first name.

• S = sarcastic. I’m not sure I’d have a communication style at all if sarcasm didn’t exist. If you didn’t see that one coming, be very careful in crosswalks.
• C = cat lover. Had one dog – a golden retriever named Tarka – who was absolutely amazing, but also the most needy companion I’ve ever had in my life. She passed painlessly of natural causes when I was about 27, and in honor of her storied life I’ll never own another dog again. Cats are much more self-sufficient and snarky, which (if you caught the first bullet point) is more my speed these days.
• O = overloaded. I always have more going on than I’ve physical and mental bandwidth to process. This has been either the direct or indirect cause of every failed relationship I’ve ever had, and the reason I take things way too seriously at times.
• T = terror on 4 strings. Just throw me a bass guitar, and I’ll rock the house into shambles. Seriously. If I could pick one thing I do better than anything else in my bag ‘o skills, it’s thumping a bass. Only problem- I fucking HATE the music industry, so rock stardom was something I took a pass on years ago. Sorry, ladies.
• T = total clean freak. I can’t leave the kitchen until all the dishes are done and either put away or in the washer, I can’t leave the living room until my empty drink glass and coaster are returned to their places of origin, and I’m compelled to pick up trash, close open cabinets and doors, and Windex counters should they stray beyond the general range of cleanliness. Oddly enough, closets are the only exception to this rule, and I basically use ‘em as junk drawers to get random personal items out of sight while I figure out what to do with them. Step at least a few paces back should you open my office closet, or I’m not responsible for injury.
• Y = Y the fuck am I still typing this? I’ve got work to do. (this is a bonus letter, as I still – for some unfathomable reason – get called ‘Scotty’ on a regular basis. Ugh.)

As the curse of these memes is to tag someone else to play along in chain-letter fashion (and god knows I have no patience for chain letters and pyramid schemes), I’ll simply tag someone who has bit on these hooks before, and break the rules of ‘one per letter’ with wanton abandon. Plus, she’s expecting her first child in short order, so probably has some pent-up editorial angst to work out.

Wendy, you’re up!

(note: apologies that you can’t even complain directly, as comments are currently disabled here while I sort out my latest Movable Type upgrade nightmare. Hah!)

[From Best Places to Meet a Guy - Apple Store - Cosmopolitan.com]

And me thinking that Cosmo was completely worthless… sheesh.

Well, movin’ on East, that is- just over the Bay Bridge. The Maxwell Park area of Oakland to be precise, a nice little neighborhood in the foothills near Mills College that’s neither too upscale or too ‘hood. This is the curb shot I took last month when we were doing the inspections. Only real change is that it’ll be sporting a new roof when we move in, otherwise it’s pretty much in fantastic condition with a lot of little areas to improve along the way.

Apologies that I’ve been really lax in blogging lately, but between an infant son, insane Q4 work schedule at Adobe and the property hunt with it’s subsequent collaterla negotiations/escrow bullshit I’ve been really stretched the last few months. We actually kicked off the offer a week or so before Thanksgiving, and will close this coming Tuesday- I’m feeling comfortable posting about it now as the heavy lifting’s complete, our money’s safely in the escrow account and the paperwork was all signed as of yesterday morning. We’re going over for the final walkthru in a few hours this morning – and to measure some rooms/walls/doorways for the movers – but it’s all over except for the movin’ now.

Quite honestly, the insane real-estate valuation in San Francisco city had us considering other options that may actually net us some return downstream, as with 3 bedroom houses in the city limits ranging 800k-1.2 million, (with the low end being really low-end) there are a lot of neighborhoods just outside the city that have a lot more turnaround potential aside from finding some sucker dot-com profiteer to pay 30k above your purchase price for a closet-sized 2br flat you really just upgraded the kitchen on.

By the way, I have to give major thumbs-up/props to Redfin, which we used originally as a property listing service, but ultimately netted us 2/3rds of the buyer’s agent commission back as a refund as we did most of the hunting work thru their web site/service. Pretty cool real-estate shopping experience- I got new listings with my coffee each morning, we culled ‘em down to a short list to check out, then did drive-bys ourself before getting a Redfin local agent (Elan Chertock- a great guy who we’d actually met long ago at a gig, no less!) to set up actual tours for a small fee. Once we made an offer, another agent (Jim Holt) jumped in and basically made the rest of the process painless. The extra legwork during the hunt on our end was a bit more draining than having an agent hunt for us, but getting that ~12k of commission back after close will more than pay for my time, honestly. Can’t speak highly enough of my Redfin experience so far, that’s for sure.

Anyway, it’s kinda nice to be out of renting again, although rent control is nice if you’ve gotta do it. We’ll be moving on December 29th, just in time to crack some Dom Perignon on New Years’ Eve. I’m sure Jan 1st I’ll be off and running on my first project- rewiring the office. W00t!