Alex Muir

I’ve been travelling quite a lot recently…

By plane, when I like to do work and listen to music. Noise cancellation is the priority here.

Walking around cities, where I love to daydream. I don’t want to stand out with some big over-ear headphones, and I’d like to hear some traffic noise to stop myself being flattened by a bus.

Running. In the rain. I sweat a lot. I need my bangers loud.

I used to have a nice pair of knock-off Bose noise-cancellers. Goldring NS1000s. They were very, very close to the genuine Bose ones in sound, but the build quality revealed itself after I lost the case and they disintegrated over the course of a week.

So for the past six months I’ve just been using Apple’s stock earbuds. I found them comfortable and reasonable sounding. They also seem to be fairly indestructible but the cable has a party with itself every single time I put them in my pocket. Now they’ve eloped so I nipped to the Apple Store (seemingly the only place that’s open on a Sunday in Paris).

Looking up reviews for everything on the shelves (unsurprisingly dominated by Beats) I chose a pair of RHA MA750i in-ear buds. Based mostly on a fairly glowing WhatHi review. Price paid €99.95. Which is cheaper than I’d find them in the UK.

First impressions are good - build quality is outstanding. Nice chunks of machined stainless steel. I’ll reserve judgement on sound quality until they’ve worn in.

Feb 2015 Update: The MA750i headphones are brilliant. I really bash them around and they are holding up extremely well. The sound remains excellent. My only problem is that I move around a lot at the gym and once I start sweating they tend to work their way out of my ears every few minutes.

I’ve done no physical exercise for the past month. Today I went for a one-hour run and wasn’t completely wiped out. That’s further than I was running when I stopped exercising a month ago. But I know from past experience that the next run I go on will be exhausting and I’ll struggle to match that first hour. It’s almost as though my body forgets where the limits are after a while of not doing exercise. I’ve had exactly the same thing with weights - go back to it after ages stronger than I was when I stopped (and then plummet back down after that initial spike.)

My current exercise routine is to run for 20 minutes each morning and do 200 sit-ups. I stuck to that for a month in Paris and I’m planning on doing the same here in Budapest.

I just read a recommendation from Fred Wilson for a book called Product Design for the Web. I’m hitting a lot of walls in developing UI and flows for a couple of projects that I’m thinking about - Napkin and How a Car Works. It’s hard not to just fall down the same REST trap all the time.

I can’t decide whether to get the Kindle or the paperback. I can have the Kindle version instantly, and it’s about half the price. But there’s something nice about having a physical book: To read, to be seen to read (“Are you a developer?”), to share or give away, and to glimpse on a shelf for as long I keep it.

Fiction goes perfectly on the Kindle - ultimately just words, and certainly only going to be read once. But for non-fiction, and particularly anything with illustrations or code, the Kindle just doesn’t display nicely. I feel like the Kindle is a little too sterile - but then it seems counterintuitive that fiction seems to suit that sterile setting perfectly.

My gut feeling is to get the paperback, but I’m going to try the kindle format and see whether eBook design has moved on from when I last tried.

As a startup community we love to frame Uber as an agile startup, beating down bureaucracy and disrupting an industry which hasn’t seen innovation in decades. And in the process, enabling drivers to set their own hours and freeing them from the shackles of employment.

And Uber itself revels in this type of coverage. Posting articles about the regulatory hurdles it facts, protests from entrenched drivers, and how it’s creating jobs. I’ve heard very polished PR people on various news bulletins explaining how they’re battling for the consumer and the driver. Of course they’re really battling for their investors against their competitors, but that goes unsaid.

But the reality is that Uber shareholders want to own the taxi market. Uber wants its drivers to remain drivers forever - there will be no scope for a driver to work hard, save money, and set up his own competitive taxi business with other drivers. Co-operatives? Nope. Uber wants to eliminate taxi businesses and own the market. What opportunities will there be for an Uber driver to progress? Very little. Instead of a taxi business with one or two local, comparatively wealthy owners and 20-200 drivers, there’ll be an uber-business, with 25 super-rich owners, and 20,000-50,000 drivers. That’s just further concentration of wealth. It’s probably inevitable, but I feel it’s also unacknowledged.

I’ve been using Google daily for over a decade. Today was the first day I found myself unable to quickly parse past their adverts in a search.

I’m not sure how they can continue argue that advertising isn’t effectively paying to be boosted to the top of their search results.