Category: Uncategorized

“I’m never drinking again” usually follows this statement, but this year was different much to the surprise of my beloved.  You see, he’s now been around for a few events that I’ve put together, and they usually take a lot of energy and anxiety, climaxing in a great night.  This is usually followed by what many would consider a rather messy house…and that’s without mentioning that cleaning up with a hangover is no better in my late 30’s than it was when I was just a young thing!

But this year was different.  This year the theme was the 90’s, an era in which both Lindsay and I experienced out youth. It had been our time to experiment with bad fashion, alcohol and to push the boundaries of our age.  And because it was the 90’s, we decided to reminisce by throwing the party in the garage.

Much to Lindsay chagrin I once again hired a mirror ball. An eager friend offered to put together a ‘best of the 90’s’ play list.  And in the final week we could be found madly dashing about picking up quality plastic cups (Id usually hire good glasses but not for this bash), costumes and purchasing the tipples of our youth – Southern Comfort, Double Brown beer and medium white wine in a box, aka ‘vin du cardboard’.

Lindsay had decided that we needed to go as a famous couple of the 90’s and in the end we settled on Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.  Okay, so not in the best taste, but it sure had people in fits of laughter.  One group of male friends decided to join us as the Golden Girls and of course that caused a bit of an uproar on the dance/garage floor.  We were also graced with the presence of characters such as Britney Spears, Peter Pan and Wendy, and those who had dug deep into their wardrobe to find a delightful display of 90’s regalia.  A giant sized penguin that apparently wasn’t Pengu also joined us. He’d been drinking at the cricket all day so it seemed a sensible choice.

The night went off with a bang.  The weather was perfect, the music rocked and the array of tacky nibbles that everyone had bought along did its best to line the tummies of those over indulgers.

The night came to an end without to many issues and only one neighbour asking us old timers to turn the music down (Hint: always invite the neighbours).  With friends staying over, the clean up in the morning was easy and no sticky floors to contend with, just a sweep out of the garage.  And it turns out that drinking all those cheap sweet tacky tipples has less of an effect than it did in my youth.  When all was done, and we sat down to a cup of coffee and a big breakfast at a local café I could say ”Yeah, maybe we will do it again”!

You may noticed the new headline – this site is now for northlandboy and his girl. You can now reach the site via northlandboyandhisgirl.com. Links to northlandboy.com will still work.

That’s because it’s no longer appropriate for the site to just be about Lindsay, as Anna is now at least 50% of his life.

Expect to see posts from Anna coming up, and more posts on joint activities. The theme will also get an overhaul in the next month or two – it’s desperately in need of it!

Lindsay is currently working on the look and feel of a new site, that will be dedicated to his professional technical writing. This will be much better than trying to mix life + travel with a deeper explanation of TCL scripting in IMC. Details to be made public soon.

Whenever you buy hearing aids, they almost always come with a small plastic case. As I’ve been trying different hearing aids over the last couple of months, I’ve ended up with a reasonable collection of hearing aids cases, from different manufacturers. These have a range of features. Sometimes it’s a bit unclear how the designers expect you to use the cases, other times they’ve put a bit of thought into it. Below I’ve rated each of the cases I’ve received, along with a few notes on each.

I would use these cases whenever I need to put my hearing aids somewhere safe, possibly for transport – e.g. I might put them in my bag while swimming, or maybe while I’m riding my bike. Overnight I’ll generally store them in a drying kit, but other times they’ll be put in the case. The case should be able to safely store the aids, and ideally it will have a compartment for carrying useful accessories – spare batteries, cleaning tools, that sort of thing.

Here’s the collection I’ve amassed so far:

Let’s go through them one by one, in the order I’ve picked them up. First up is the small Widex case I got around 1999:

I like the relatively small size of this case, and the soft interior lid, which gives the aids some protection. Easy to put in the pocket. No place for spare batteries or tools though. Overall rating: Good

Next up is the case I received with my second set of Widex aids, around 2006-2007:

This is my current go-to case. It is bigger than the previous case, but it’s still small enough to put in a man’s pocket, if required. It’s got the hard outside, with softer inside that I like. It’s also got a little storage space to put spare batteries and tools. On the inside of the lid, you can see the pack of spare wax guard filters. It’s a nice touch being able to slot those in there. The designers have clearly put some thought into how people use these. Overall rating: Excellent.

Now, let’s move on to some of the cases I’ve received as part of my recent testing. Phonak really go to town, starting with a large soft case, which contains a smaller soft case, and a smaller hard-sided case. It has room for all manuals, tools, everything. Unfortunately this overall case is pretty large, as you can see in the earlier photo.

I’ve ended up with two of these, which is over-kill really. I don’t know who needs this great big case. I ended up with two of the smaller hard-sided cases from Phonak too, one slightly large, but both pretty small:

These are both very nice little cases. Nice and small, but still have some protection for the aids, and they have storage space for tools and batteries. Well thought out. Phonak also gave me this soft-sided case, but I have no idea where to use it, as it really offers no protection:

Overall, Phonak seems to be trying to cater to everyone. But they end up shipping a bunch of stuff that no-one really needs. Ultimately, I would probably only use the smallest plastic case, and everything else could be thrown away. Overall rating: Very good (would have been excellent, but they ship too much extra stuff)

Finally, the Oticon case that came with the most recent pair of aids I’m trying:

I’m not really impressed by this case. It’s a nice looking slide out case – not much chance of it accidentally flipping open, as the Widex cases are prone to do. But inside, it’s all hard edges, and there’s nowhere to put spare bits and pieces. It’s quite a large interior space, and they could have had something there, but they just didn’t seem to bother. Overall rating: Below Average

I’m undecided on keeping my Oticon aids. Possibly I’ll return them, and try the new Widex Dream aids in a few months, when they become available. I wonder what 2013 will bring for new case design from Widex?

I’ve been using Widex Inteo hearing aids for about six years now. One CIC (Completely In Canal) model, and one ITE (In The Ear) size. Prior to that, I had another set of earlier Widex digital hearing aids for around 7 years.

Hearing aids have an expected lifetime of somewhere around 5-7 years, perhaps a little shorter for models like mine that live inside the ear. I’m lucky that I don’t seem to get much wax in my ears, so I’ve been lucky that mine last reasonably well. I’ve still had to get them serviced periodically, and I did once have them fail in Turkey (but luckily I was able to get them repaired!).

Technology moves on, and hearing declines as we age. At a minimum, I need my current aids serviced, tested, and possibly reprogrammed for my changing hearing. But since my current aids are still working, I’m not in a hurry to get new ones. Instead, it’s a good chance to look at my options, including a changing to a different manufacturer.

To start off, I had a full hearing test conducted by Dilworth. This went beyond the usual “tell me when you hear the beeps” test, and included comprehension tests in noise, and electronic measurements. Apparently not only is my hearing worse in my left ear, but my eardrum responds differently. If only there was a simple operation that could fix hearing. Not likely in my lifetime though.

Once we had the results, the audiologist and I had a look at what my options are. I wanted to stay with CIC or ITE style aids, which is a bit tricky, since my left ear is marginal or outside the limits for most manufacturers, in that style. I like CIC because they are good with the wind, I can put headphones over them if I need to, and they’re reasonably discreet. I’m getting older now though, so I’m not quite so fussed on that last point.

Depending on development cycles, vendors jockey for position for “best” hearing aids. Even then, what’s best for one person will be terrible for someone else. This is in part due to different philosophies of different manufacturers, as to how best to help with hearing loss. If you haven’t dealt with this sort of thing, you may think that it’s simply a matter of raising the volume. Turns out that it’s far more complex than that.

Firstly, different people have different patterns to their loss. For me, my low range is poor, my mid frequency is worse, but going up it gets quite a bit better. This is quite different to typical age-related loss, where the high frequencies are affected. If you raise the volume across all frequencies, you will distort speech as that person perceives it. Apparently increasing levels in one frequency range can drown out perception in other ranges. This can lead to the situation where everything seems very loud, but you still can’t understand what people are saying. All you get is a headache. Not much fun.

Secondly, different environments require different sorts of help. In a quiet environment, you probably do want to hear the page turning. But if you’re in a noisy environment, you really want to be able to focus on the conversation going on right in front of you. The last thing you want is every conversation in the room coming through at full level. So manufacturers work hard to try and detect the environment they’re in, and adapt. Some aids have programs that the user can select, but many now are automatic. These will try and work out what’s going on, and how best to respond. One of the things they will do is to compress loud sounds, to ensure they don’t cause discomfort to the user.

Thirdly, some manufacturers have a philosophy of “speech comprehension is more important than anything else.” In some ways this is true, but this can make the adaptation phase harder for those using aids for the first time, or changing manufacturers. Others aim for more natural sound.

The other thing that plays into this is the user – you get used to a certain sort of “style” and changing can be very jarring. If you expect to hear a car door slamming sound like, well, a car door slamming, it’s very disconcerting when it sounds like a short clap. It’s also very odd to hear your voice changing. Takes a while to get used to.

Anyway, we decided that Phonak Virto aids would be the best for me to try. The specs said I could get two CIC aids, so we ordered those. Turned out the specs were a touch optimistic. Even with my good-sized ear canals, with the gain needed on the left ear, they just couldn’t make a shell that worked. In the end, we got a slightly larger aid than originally anticipated, but it wasn’t too bad. The initial moulding of the right ear was also a problem, with it being very long, and pushing on my ear drum. Very painful. Managed to get that one shortened though, and all was good.

The Phonak style is very different to the Widex style. Much more focused on speech, and to my ears at least, somewhat “tinny.” Huge amounts of echo too, until we got them programmed right. That’s the other thing with modern hearing aids – you hook them up to a computer, while they’re in your ears, and you have a million options you can change on them. You can also insert tiny tubes alongside the aids while they’re in your ear, then a machine plays a sentence to you, and shows what the aids are doing, along with recommendations on improving the settings. The only problem with having a million options is of course trying to work out which ones you actually need to change. Also tough when you’re doing it at the clinic, as there’s not that many different environments you can be exposed to.

The Phonak aids were strange to get used to, but I decided to only wear them for several weeks, and not fall back to my old aids. Turned out to be pretty tough going. I realised I was missing a lot of conversation, and my wife saw me missing more that I didn’t even notice. But it was in noisy environments that they were toughest. Shopping malls or parties were very tough, where they just gave me a wall of noise. In that situation, you tend to shut down, as it’s the only way to cope.

We tried making adjustments to them, but ultimately they just weren’t going to work for me. Maybe someone else, but they weren’t an improvement on what I had – they were worse – so there was no point paying the $7,100NZD. So back to the audiologist.

Now I’m trying some Oticon Acto aids. I had to go for an ITC Power style for my left ear, to get the gain I needed, but I’ve got CIC for the right ear. I’d rather have them the same, purely so they use the same battery, but hey, I’m used to this setup now. Initial fitting went well, and the tests on the machine show that we’re able to get these ones to pretty much exactly where the machine thinks they should be.

It’s hard to say what they’re going to be like – my brain is still adjusting to the changed sounds. They feel like they might be a little worse right now, but I need to give it a few more days before we’ll know. Hopefully these work out, otherwise I’m going to go back to my trusty Widex Inteo aids. They’re being serviced right now. Widex tells me that they’ve got new stuff coming out soon. So if I do go back to the Widex aids, then I’ll stick with them for a bit longer, and maybe in 12-24 months I’ll try again.

I’ll report back in a couple of weeks with progress.