Thursday, May 02, 2013

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Staples Hyken Technical Mesh Task Chair:
This was the chair I selected to replace the Costco bargain bin chair I'd had for ten years. It's one of the few chairs I've tried that a short person can sit all of the way back in and still have their knees bent properly over the front. The hardest part of adapting was to eliminate old sitting habits and force myself to sit upright for the first few days. The mesh is quite comfortable, and the construction of the chair is sturdy enough.

After a month of sitting, I've found that my acute back pain, generally focused around specific vertebrae, has now distributed itself evenly across my whole back. Following a long sitting session for my Olympic sitting training, I'm most likely to have normal shoulder stiffness, which can be easily resolved with normal stretches. This is a huge improvement, in my opinion.

I'm torn on the head cradle -- the part that supports the head and neck does a good job and is quite comfortable. However, the curved plastic on the edges tends to dig into my shoulders if it's not positioned just right, and its height is only minorly adjustable. I imagine that it'd be worse for taller people -- try in the store before you buy.

Final Grade: B+

Midlife Vices by Greg Giraldo:
Another fun CD of scathing social commentary that might offend people with thin skin. I liked this one slightly more than Good Day to Cross a River.

Final Grade: B+

Game of Thrones, Season Two:
Season Two was highly entertaining, but once I reached the end, I felt like not a whole lot had happened. In the one class session of undergraduate Operating Systems that I did not sleep through, I learned that as your job scheduler tries to multitask on more and more jobs at once, the job slices become too small, and the forward progress on each job is smothered under the overhead of switching between each job. Obviously, the plot for Game of Thrones was written to provide a concrete example of job scheduling, as we rarely got to spend enough time on any one storyline to get invested before jumping elsewhere.

I also felt like this season relied a bit too much on magic over politics, which is a dangerous path for any fantasy series to take. I would watch more scenes featuring Littlefinger's machinations any day over what appeared to be deleted scenes from Harry Potter and the Vagina of Shadows.

Final Grade: B

Budos Band III by the Budos Band:
I bought this CD based on a Pandora song recommendation. The songs on the CD are too uniform, and they all blend together when I listen to them -- definitely a case where a single song in a mix is great but a whole album is overkill. There's also an intensity to the music that's almost grim, as if they wanted to take the "fun" out of "funk". Final note: if you are ever composing a song and need to approximate the feeling of indigestion into musical form, just double the tenor sax and trumpet in unison for about 45 minutes. This CD nails it.

Final Grade: C+

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