30 Rock, white noise, 3D sound?, music while working

Woo, 30 Rock is one funny show! Man, it really manages to tickle me all over. I just saw the Werewolf Bar Mitzvah episode (season 2, episode 2): "Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves!" Heh, good stuff.

A fire alarm drill at work this week got me acting on a desire to get a good white noise mp3 or generator or the like, to drown out the annoyance and any future annoyances. I did, eventually, find one but it was MacOSX only and figuring out how to copy it into MP3 form was not obvious (though I thought it was). I also learned that you actually want pink noise, which is softer on the ears or some such thing. In any case, I ended up with (thanks to a co-worker's Google help) Aire Freshener (scroll down to download directly), an excellent charity-ware Windows application. With my new Grado's this allows me to work with minimal intrusion from the outside.. and I can pretend it's spring time, or that I'm by the fireplace, or even in the bath. The program itself features a lot of my favorite things to look for in software: a) it's free, b) it's small in size and desktop space until you need it, c) intuitive and easy to use, and d) it just works! It's pretty much the best thing I've found for January. Is it? Maybe, yes!

As an aside, I was thinking of that it would be cool (or perhaps, it's already been done? Johnny Chung Lee, I'm talking to you! What I'm envisioning is using the wii's controller (or whatever) with the head-tracking system to aurally draw items in 3 space. That is, if you turned left, the tracking would paint the sound sources/vectors accordingly. I say vectors because there would be a certain amount of measurable distance involved as well as direction. Would it be as impressive as visual head-tracking? I'm not sure, probably interesting with your eyes closed anyways.

So yeah.. getting out of the habit of listening to music at work. As much as I sometimes enjoy it, it also (seemingly) acts as a distraction at least as much of the time. Our office, as you may know, hardly has any privacy and everyone has their headphones and music (actually, a couple do have those strong sound-deadening acoustic earmuffs). I am looking forward to many more days of clear thinking! For.. well, I've been letting my mind cloud, letting my body's sensations dissipate, fizzle away, thinking it would lessen my, hmmm, awaked-ness, as it were. And now I'm tired of it, tired of floating along, my thoughts remote from my environment. Does this mean much? I hope so, I really do.

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