I’ve written about the fantastic sounding Grado SR80 cans before. I’ve had them for over two years now, but they never cease to amaze me. I normally plug a set of Sennheiser PX100 into my iPod video during the two hour/day commute into Seattle. The train is quiet enough that I bypassed the noise-cancelling models and the PX100’s sound quite good. They sound substantially better than the stock buds that come with the iPod. The stock buds are just downright terrible. I tossed mine in the trash.

But tonight I decided to hook up my iPod with the Grados and listen to some Clash. Dang! As much as I like the PX100’s the Grados are in an entirely different league. The harmonica in “Train in Vain” is so clear, and the music sounds so immediate and clear that I couldn’t take them off till I’d gone through my entire playlist.

I tell all my friends they need to test drive a set of Grados. It doesn’t make sense to me to spend $300-$400 on a sweet iPod and then settle for stock earbuds.

David Brent is in mid-season form in these two Microsoft UK videos. Brings back great memories of the series….like Free Love. Or Keith’s review.

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Link to full versions on Google Video.

From the same guys who did the very funny “Internet Help Desk”

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This isn’t a story of a bad customer service experience I had myself, rather it’s a bad experience I saw another person having. I was at Fred Meyer a couple of nights ago and was running my items through those new self-serve checkouts that never seem to work properly. This time it was my steak that wouldn’t scan because the bar code had placed over a corner and couldn’t be flattened for the scanner to recognize.

At the self-serve station behind me was an elderly woman who had a number of clothing items. She was obviously having a tough time getting each item to scan correctly, but she was giving it her best shot. As I was placing my bags in the cart, I noticed another Fred Meyer employee was standing next to this lady. I thought to myself how nice of her to give this customer some assistance.

But I was wrong. The Fred Meyer employee said to the customer: “I hate when people use these type of coupons because now I have to ring up all your stuff again manually”. The poor lady, who just wanted to make her clothing purchase, just stood there probably feeling like she was in the wrong for trying to use a coupon. The Fred Meyer employee grabbed all the clothes in a huff and bought them over to her station where I can’t imagine it took more than 2 minutes to ring up the purchases and redeem the coupon.

Found this on Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog. I love this shirt.

Gotta feel bad for this guy trying to demo Windows Vista speech recognition capabilities. Wow, let’s hope other new Vista features work better than this.

Oh, and if you like the video so much you can even buy the t-shirt now.

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“I can fix this….SOB”

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I love Zillow. It’s pretty dang cool to type in nearly any address and have it spit out an estimated home value. Several agents I’ve talked to have mentioned they feel the Zillow values are on the low side but are pretty close. We’ve started to look a bit at areas north of Seattle. We lived in Woodinville for six year years and loved our neighborhood. I think Kim and I long to get back there.

Zillow now has “Heat Maps” for 17 cities that visually show the how “hot” an area is based on the property’s price per square foot. Here is the map for the Seattle area. Lots of red = expensive homes.