Slashdot Mirror
Headphones in Corporate Culture?
TheGreatOrangePeel asks: "In an ever increasing sea of white-earbuds in my office, I broke from the mainstream and recently purchased the iAudio X5 to help pass the downtime I experience behind cube walls. I've got a decent set of headphones, but recently I've discovered that being able to hear the rap-tap on the cube frame is sometimes a problem even with the volume cranked way down and considering how my current headphones are about ready for retirement anyway, I thought I would start shopping around for a new set. The problem is that most of mid priced headphones out there are designed to block out real world noise. The Sennheiser PX100 look like they may fit what I'm looking for, but I question the durability of folding headphones and I thought I would see what my peers on Slashdot prefer. What I'm looking for is a set of headphones with (1) good sound in a wide variety of music (2) in the $30-$99 range that (3) will let me hear the warnings of imminent attack at work by co-workers, and the alerts at my monthly LAN parties from allied gamers."
Oh, sorry, I had my noise cancelling glasses on. Anyway, most (all?) noise cancelling headphones have an off switch which puts them into normal headphone mode.
My tactic is to leave one ear bud out and hidden away under my shirt. I've managed to convince everyone in the office that it is a hearing aid. Now even in the odd chance that I don't hear someone they just chalk it up to my bad hearing.
You could also try some cube modding to find out when people are behind you!
The low-tech solution is to set up a rear-view mirror. But this is slashdot, so...
Write an app to lower your volume and/or play a sound when one of the following inputs are detected:
- your doorbell is pressed
- your touch-sensitive welcome mat is stood upon
- your door-mounted IR/laser beam is broken
- your cube-mounted microphone picks up an audio pattern that matches your "knock-knock" or "ahem" signature.
- your directional light sensor detects a shadow between it and a certain ceiling light above and outside of your door.
- your digital IR camera detects a body mass of close to 98.6 degrees fahrenheit standing in the doorway.
OK, so maybe ALL of these is overkill. But I haven't been snuck up on in years!!!
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
I, for one, welcome our floating, invisible, cold-blooded, eavesdropping overlords.