Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Fresh gear: Travel headphones

Earbuds_sm_2 As you may be able to gather from some of my posts here, I spend a lot of time on airplanes. Last year, I used some of my American Express Rewards points to get a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 2 headphones (I couldn’t justify paying $300 in cash for them, but using my Rewards points was painless). The Bose headphones are very nice - they’re the Escalade of noise-cancelling headphones.

Unfortunately, the Bose headphones are so bulky (even when they are folded) that I don’t really bring them along any more except when I travel on international flights. As a result, I’ve been listening to my iPod and my laptop using the headphones that come with the iPod. They’re very good, but they just weren’t doing the trick for me on planes - particularly when listening to the audiobooks I download from my subscription to Audible.

Well, I just finished a round trip to NYC with my latest headphones, and I love them. They’re Sony’s MDR-EX71 earbuds. They don’t have active noise cancelling, but they have very comfortable rubber ear pieces (three sizes are included) that allow them to block out most of the ambient noise, including the racket on a plane. They sound great, come with a tiny case (not shown in the picture) to hold the extension cord and extra ear pieces, and have a cool little sleeve (looks like a capsule in the photo) to help you store them in a laptop bag without messing up or losing the rubber earpieces. The sleeve also reduces the likelihood of tangling.

The sound quality is very good, and you get a lot more bass out of these buds than the ones that come with the iPod. They sound good enough that I’ll probably put my Bose headphones up on eBay or something. I wore them continuously on a 5½ hour flight and they were comfortable the whole time.

At about $30 via Amazon, the Sony MDR-EX71’s are affordable, and they perform at least as well as other earbuds I’ve tried out that cost $150 and up. If you’re in the market for some comfortable, great sounding earbuds for travel or other places where you’d like to isolate the sounds around you, I recommend these.

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Save your comments

Des (desparoz On The Go) has a fantastic technique for keeping track of comments you've made on blogs around the web.  It involves del.icio.us tags, and it's elegant in its simplicity.  I plan on starting to use this, as it will be simple with the "Popup post to Del.icio.us" link I've added to my browser toolbar. (see tip below)

Thanks for the great technique, Des!

** Tip:  How do you add a button for Popup posts to Del.icio.us?

  • Once you're registered and logged in to del.icio.us, you can find "Popup post to Del.icio.us" under Browser Buttons. 
  • Then, you just drag the link to your toolbar or add it to your Favorites to use it.
  • I have also created a an ActiveWords keyword called "pd" which does the same thing.
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Spreadsheet to help decision-making

Back in the late 20th century, my team and I needed to do a lot of hiring as I staffed up a call center. We needed to fill about 80 slots, so we had to interview a lot of people. This brought many challenges to the fore, such as:

  • How do you keep track of all of them?
  • How do you know which ones are the best fit for the job according to your selection criteria?
  • How do multiple people apply consistent evaluation criteria to the candidates?
  • How do you compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of candidates in an objective fashion?

...and so forth.

Recently, I had another multi-dimensional decision to make and (thanks to MSN Desktop Search) I was able to dig up an ancient copy of some Excel-based selection tools I developed over ten years ago. After some minor tweaking, they worked perfectly for my 21st century selection task. I decided to share the tools here in case they come in handy when you have multi-factor, multiple choice decisions to make.

The spreadsheet contains tabs with three different styles of selection matrices. Each one has different "features" so figure out which one fits your purpose and tweak from there. Basically, you decide the key factors or attributes you're evaluating, and the relative weighting of each factor. Input that stuff into whichever matrix you decide to use, and save it to a meaningful name.

Then, as you go through the selection process, score each person after you've interviewed them according to how well they compared to your ideal for each factor. At the end of the process, you can quickly and easily rank them based on the factors, or on an overall score based on the composite score from all factors.

These matrices can be used to help evaluate just about any multi-choice, multi-factor decision - not just hiring decisions.

You can download the spreadsheet here. (28.5K) (right click the link and select "Save target as..." or "Save link as...")

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