I'm smart, I swear I'm smart

Though sometimes it's really a questionable statement to make. I know that on paper I look smart, any fool who manages to get a Ph.D. can't help but look smart on paper. But in the real world...well that's another story. The latest example of my intellectual shortcomings is really quite impressive. Ok, it might not be as good as getting assistance in the lab with an instrument that wasn't working (after an hour of trying on my own) only to find out that I hadn't pushed a switch all the way into position.

As I may have mentioned before Deirdre has been lending me her iPod for some time now (many months in fact). Through this time using it I have been resigned to using the standard earbuds that come with it. Now I'm not one of those people to do something just because it's trendy. I don't own a pair of goggle like sunglasses or "distressed" jeans (personally if my pants get a hole in them I throw them out, but that's just me). So my choice to use the original earbuds was not one that was made just to be "fashionable". See it was made for a very stupid reason, because I thought that the iPods used connection jacks that were smaller than the current norm.

This wouldn't be unheard of, many companies have proprietary versions of standard items, like batteries and memory cards, in order to control an additional revenue source. For some reason I had assumed that Apple had done this with the iPod, after all the damn thing was so tiny it didn't look like it could really accept a normal earphone plug. On top of that the plug on the iPod earbuds is very sleek in design, making it seem a lot smaller than it really is.

So because of this, yes I know it's my own damn fault, I have been using the original earbuds. This wouldn't be so bad, but they really aren't that comfortable in my ears, they tend to fall out from time to time and extended periods of wearing them seem to hurt my ears. For some time I had actually wished that I could use my old earbuds with the iPod since they felt a lot better and I though that they had even better sound quality. Finally I noticed that a friend was using the same earphones with her iPod as she had been using with her computer. Now to show just how bright this is I puzzled over how this could be possible for a few days. Finally this morning I figured it out. I held the iPod port up to the port on my computer and realized...THEY ARE THE SAME SIZE!!!!

So now I'm either a complete retard and I can't figure out the simplest thing (or even test an idea in a logical way, it would have been easier just to try and plug a set of headphones into the iPod) or I'm finally reaching that state that has eluded me for some time. That state of idiot savant that seems to be a virtual necessity for having a successful academic career. So yeah, I'm kind of hoping that it's the latter.