When the first personal computers were purchased by businesses back in the early 1980s, I was a freshly-minted engineer that was working in Washington, DC. I was trying to change the world, like so many other 20-somethings that were living there, working in and around the federal government. Little did I know that my love affair with PCs would become my career, and that they would change the world on their own, without much effort on my part.

I was thinking about this arc of my own humble life when thinking about the concept of digital nomads, those folks who have used the ubiquitous technology that has infused our lives over the past 40 years that we all now take for granted. Most of you inherently know what this means: the ability to travel and work anywhere in the world, as if you were sitting at your desk. Essentially, your desk becomes wherever you are: thanks to Wifi, the cloud and a truckload of communications technologies, you can be present globally.

While I am not one of them, I can certainly understand the appeal. In this edition of Web Informant, I want to highlight some of the folks who have interesting lives as digital nomads.

The concept of nomadic technology certainly has changed since I first started reporting for PC Week. Back then, the payphone was my go-to tool. Actually, let me revise that: Having a phone charge card was the killer app that enabled me to make calls without having any coins. Now we use a bunch of smartphone apps and the appropriate SIM card for our nomad connections. Of course, things aren’t always that easy, but still it is pretty amazing how far we have come since those early days.

My earliest memory of the prototype nomadic lifestyle is Steve Roberts. He is definitely into hardware, and his first experiment was to equip a recumbent bike with all sorts of tech that enabled him to ride 17,000 miles around the country and report on his travels. He started in the 1980s, just as the PC was taking hold, and the bike is now in the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum.  Back then, you had to have a strong back and a lot of knowledge to cobble together the tools to report on the road. I also consider him one of the early “makers” as he has what has to be the most well-equipped travel workshop that now used to build his hi-tech boats. He is still active in his nomadness, just from dockside.

Another deep resource on nomadic tips and tricks is from Jodi Ettenberg on LegalNomads. As you might assume, she was a former corporate lawyer who took to the road back in 2008 and started writing about food. But then her lawyerly training took over and she dug deeper. She has a very extensively curated page of meta-things such as international visa requirements, the philosophical differences and motivations among nomads, and links to numerous discussion forums and other nomads that you can follow. Sadly, she is no longer traveling due to health issues.

A few years ago, I came across Nikki and Jason Wynn, a 30-something couple that has been on the road since 2011. They initially sold their Dallas home and contents and bought an RV. They drove around the country for six years and then traded their RV for a sailboat. They are now somewhere in Polynesia, taking on the world.  Their YouTube channel gets 200K views with a wide range of upbeat videos that show lots of hands-on insight into the gear they use to stay connected when in the middle of an ocean, along with how they keep fresh water and live off the grid with all their electronics. The videos also have the usual travelogues about what they are up to and where they are.

Boating is also a big motivation behind Cruising the Cut. This is a solo effort from a 50-year-old former British TV journalist David Johns. For the past three years, he has been living aboard his narrowboat and navigating the extensive British canal network. I found him appealing, a combination of understated British irony (think of some of the characters played by John Cleese) with some boating-flavored HGTV “tiny house” design shows thrown in. Johns averages about 60K views of 170 different episodes. He also has an extensive curated list linking to other narrowboaters documenting their nomadic existence if you want to take a deeper dive into this subculture.

Let’s move on from boating to flying. Kara and Nate Buchanan are another young couple that three years ago took to the skies and have a goal of visiting 100 countries. They are currently making their way through the Middle East and have produced more than 500 videos with 600K followers of their exploits. They are all about the people and the food and are very upbeat (sometimes bordering on the twee) about their adventures. If you want to know exactly how much money they make from their efforts, they are also the most transparent and provide monthly reports of their expenses and income. If you want help accumulating your own travel miles, they will freely share which are the best travel credit cards and other tips that they use to get around.

Chris Dodd has put together some very practical tips on how to become a nomadic freelancer, complete with flowcharts on where to find online training for the skills that you lack. This training orientation is something of his specialty, and he provides details on selecting the right coworking space among other things. He has been on the road for the past two years.

Mike Elgan has been writing about tech as long as I have, and now he has turned his nomadic leanings into a viable business. He and his wife Amira run Gastronomad, where they offer foodie tours to satisfy those who can’t afford to go 100% nomadic but still want to travel to interesting places and get off the beaten path. Given his background as a product reviewer, their site has a lot of info on camera choices, among other things.

One perspective you don’t always see online is from Matt Karsten, who started out with the ExpertVagabond blog back in 2010 and eventually gained millions in followers. Earlier this month, he wrote about quitting traveling due to burnout and after meeting the woman he would eventually marry. “Trying to juggle a normal work routine when you’re also trying to figure out where to sleep next week just isn’t ideal. Often, I never wrote much about the places I was living because I was too busy catching up with work after months of traveling.”  They have moved to LA.

I have just tapped the surface of these nomads, and have tried to give you a sampling, including a few who are still wandering the planet in search of new adventures. As you can see, some have given this life up and “settled down,” whatever that means. Some travel as couples, others as singles. Some are into the hardware, some are more about learning their craft. You may follow or know of others or count yourself as nomads; feel free to share your own stories and recommendations on my blog comments. And good luck if you decide to pursue your own nomadic dream.

If you have an Alexa or Google Home nearby, you probably already know how handy it can be to help your life. But what you may not be as aware is how businesses are adopting voice-enabled information access, and how this technology could become as revolutionary as HTML and websites were back in the 1990s.

I got to see some of this future at the Prepare.AI conference yesterday here in St. Louis. In particular, a presentation by Bob Stolzberg, the founder of VoiceXP, a two-year old startup that is beginning to make some noise with a voice toolkit that is aimed at business. At the show, Bob demonstrated a couple of examples, using an Alexa as his speaking partner.

One was an app developed for Mercy Health, so you can locate the nearest doctor with just a few commands (Say “Alexa, Start Mercy”). Another was for a law firm, so you can use voice commands to find a lawyer after you have been in an auto accident. One app showed how an executive could easily get various business metrics reported via voice, rather than plowing through a bunch of spreadsheets. One for a scientific research company allows their researchers to add experimental notes via voice commands, so they don’t have to remove their gloves and type them in. “Businesses are adopting voice apps to start their conference calls, to integrate with Slack as replacements for front-desk check-in kiosks, and numerous other apps. We are living in a voice-enabled world,” he said at the conference. They have a few demos on their site with apps that they have built for other companies as well.

The Mercy app was a significant effort, taking a good-sized team working over several months and a pretty substantial budget to put it together. That experience got them working on a much easier path for developing business voice apps so that ordinary folks could build them without a lot of programming or systems integration knowledge. They call it their Voice Experience Platform. They are still in beta but nearing its launch with several different plans that include managed services hosting, custom lead gen features and help with on-boarding the apps. They also provide a voice marketing plan that teaches business how to successfully market their new voice experience.

Voice-enabled apps do have their downside, namely a threat to our privacy and potential misuse by bad actors. Given that the Alexa/Home device is always listening, this data could be captured or subject to a man-in-the-middle attack without the proper security posture. VoiceXP has security built into its platform, which is encouraging. “What if a rogue device shared confidential medical data,” asks Adam Levine, a privacy expert. “These new technical advances may make our lives easier, but we need see a greater focus on privacy.”

Another issue is that to voice-enable your corporate apps, you need someway to access them programmatically. That could be trouble: with one of their customers, VoiceXP ended up using a complex spreadsheet and pulling data directly from that into their platform.

Finally, voice apps touch many different parts of your organization, similar to how web apps did when they were first created back in the day. You will need to keep an open mind, build your team accordingly, and empower them to collaborate to formulate best practices to make them work successfully.

If you have examples of your favorite business-related skill or action (as these apps are called), do share them in the comments.

This week saw the announcement of Apple Card, a credit card that doesn’t even a number on its face. While it remains to be seen if Apple will be successful here, certainly we are witnessing a new era of online financial services. More to the point are the development of open banking in the UK. The idea behind open banking was standardizing on APIs to make it easier to move from one bank to another. We are far from that here in the States but there are many innovators in the banking field. As a big proponent of online banking, here is my report on what I have been using and how they work, for Simple, Aspiration, USAA and Marcus.

Simple was one of the first online banks and I have had an account for several years. They offer  no-fee checking/savings and VISA debit cards, although there are some fees for foreign transactions and some ATMs. Opening an account takes minutes and their web interface is clean and easy to understand with superior online help and telephone support.

Marcus is the online entity of Goldman Sachs (who is one of the partners for the Apple Card) and they have two main products: high-interest CDs (right now they offer a five year 3.1% rate) and no-fee loans (6% APR). Opening an account takes minutes and their web interface is clean and simple to understand. I had some issues setting up joint accounts and their telephone support was efficient and helpful and resolved it quickly.

Aspiration offers no-fee checking and debit cards. Actually, that isn’t quite accurate: you decide on the fees that you wish to pay them. It is an interesting gimmick. You can select nothing, and you can change the amount as often as you wish. There are some third-party fees, such as for wire transfers, that they pass along at their cost. They also make it easier for you to donate money to particular causes that you can setup online.

Activating my debit card from them required a call to their telephone support center. This could have been a network problem that they were experiencing at the time. They have a mobile app where they have spent more development time, and their web interface is pretty spare.

USAA has been in the online financial services world for a very long time, and it shows. If you have a family member that has served in the military you can open an account. They offer life, car and home insurance, CDs, credit cards, mutual funds and many more products. They try to keep their costs low and usually send me a small check at the end of the year as a “dividend” to thank me for being a member. I have had my car insurance with them for a long time and they have superior claims service and amazing response time from their telephone call center.  

If you are looking for online banking services, here are some things to look out for:

What services do you need? If you just want a no- or low-fee credit card, there are many solutions, including products from regular card issuers. If you need more online services, you will have fewer choices. USAA offers the widest spectrum and as I said has been doing it for the longest time. 

Opening and funding your account. You want a provider that has taken the time to build a simple and easy-to-use interface. Each provider does this slightly differently. All offer the ability to enter your bank routing and account numbers and make two test small deposits that you have to verify or you can provide your funding bank’s username and password. Aspiration had two issues: they made finding the external funding menus hard to find, and also they took a week to fund my account. The others were speedier with their funds transfer. Marcus wins this category. 

Making deposits, money transfers and obtaining reports. This is the meat of any provider and most have obvious ways of doing this. My local online bank had two separate procedures for funding and then linking an external account, which was annoying and took two calls to their phone support center to resolve. None of the four were any better or worse than others.

What are the hidden fees? Simple is my favorite here, they were one of the first to be very explicit about the fees they charge. Plus, you can find out everything without having to become a customer. The others are less transparent, although they all offer lower fees than your traditional retail bank (as they should).

What are the MFA implementation(s)? Both Simple and Aspiration offer SMS PINs to authenticate, and once you set this up, you can’t change anything without calling them. But the real standout is USAA, which in addition has other options as explained here, including support for Symantec’s VIP smartphone app. All of these are easily changed online, as long as you can find the linked URL above.

If you check this list of MFA options for the banking sector, you will see support for the MFA authentication smartphone apps is pretty sparse. Sigh.

International travel. Simple and Aspiration both offer quick notification of when and where you travel online, which is appealing to me and one of the reasons I went down this rabbit hole. For many years, I only had one credit card that I would pay off the balance each month. When I began doing more international travel, I realized that I wanted to minimize my exposure if my high-credit-limit card was lost or stolen. I opened an account with Simple, one of the first online banks.  

Do they offer a mobile app? Simple and Aspiration both offer them and focus on mobile as their primary method for customer transactions.

As you can see, no single provider is strong in all areas, which is a shame because you would hope their development teams could learn from the best examples and enhance their sites.  

Some final words of wisdom: prepare to spend some time with your own research and step into these waters gingerly before committing a lot of your money with any provider. Find out what your local bank offers with their online services, as many of them realize they have to be competitive in this area. And feel free to make recommendations of your own experience in the comments.  

If you have seen the Netflix show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, you might have noticed the spectacular eye-popping set that is used for the show. And if you are a curious geek like me, you might want to know about the people responsible for building and operating it.

The show is a comedy vehicle for the Daily Show correspondent, and mixes a great deal of pop culture and news references in the goal of tackling a single topic each week. Minhaj is on stage for almost all of each episode. You first notice the stunning visual design of the set because it is the set. Minhaj stands on an LED floor that changes in synch with the screens that form the background of the show. This isn’t your grandfather’s PowerPoint, baby: images zoom in and out and video animations roll across the screens. There are catchy infographics that rotate and fade in, and all the other tricks that we have come to expect in the average Marvel or Pixar movie. Only it is a TV talk show. I think it is pure genius. After you watch this show, every other talk show looks dull as dishwater by comparison.

My interest here is also personal: as a professional speaker, what the team that produces this show is doing is showing how we can use technology to truly immerse an audience into a performance. It is as big a sea change as when I swapped out my black-only “foils” for color PowerPoint for my speeches. Only better.

I interviewed two of the folks that are responsible for the show. Granted, any show is a collaboration of many, many people, including a dozen different animators, designers, and pre-visualization specialists, not to mention all the writers and other usual TV production folks. If you aren’t familiar with pre-viz, as it is called, this is an interesting part of the entertainment universe. As more filming has gone digital, pre-viz folks become very important, because they give directors the ability to see exactly how a scene will look like in its final form before anyone has touched a camera. Think of it like a virtual scene — you can manipulate all sorts of stuff without having to actually build it in real life. I’ll get to why this is important in a moment.

I first spoke to Greg Bloxham, who is the computer operator for the show. That title doesn’t really do his role justice, which is critical to the whole operation. I then exchanged emails with Marc Janowitz, who is the Production and Lighting Designer for the show. Both guys have developed the look and feel and chose the technologies that are used each week.

If you are a fan of Minhaj’s standup, you probably have seen his Netflix special, Homecoming King. Janowitz was involved in that production, which really was a beta test of what the TV series is doing.  “Patriot Act is more like a deep dive into a particular subject that requires intense visual aids to help support the thesis. We had this desire to delve into a style of visual narrative that blends imagery, form and structure and helps to immerse the audiences in the material,” said Janowitz. And as I said earlier, the studio audience is immersed. “A big part of the design impetus for this show was to capture the energy of a live performance with an audience,” he said. Basically, they have turned the tired model of anchorperson-behind-a-desk on its head.

Bloxham spends two days a week on each episode, one day for basic rehearsals, the next day for more detailed rehearsals and then the live-to-tape final run through. He has had a long career in lighting and media design, starting with the Oprah show and then moving into doing live music events and other extravaganzas. “This was a field that was pretty obscure a few years ago, but is now getting to be more common,” he told me. If you remember Oprah, she had video screens around her studio, but not to the extent that Minhaj uses on his show, and certainly not to the extent that they are run in real time.

One of the reasons for the look and feel of the show has to do with Minhaj’s personal preferences. He is very involved in the pre-viz process, naturally, and also has a lot of opinions in how the final shows appear. “It is nice that he is so deeply involved,” Bloxham told me. The show takes a lot of collaborative work, because as you might imagine having such powerful tech means that writers can change things pretty much up to the last minute. He takes the content from the animators and then puts it all together so that they can run the visuals in real time during the actual performance. If you look carefully at any of the episodes, you’ll see the set lighting change colors in synch with what is shown on the video screens. “You can literally program things to move in time with each beat,” he said.

The gear that they use is the Disguise 4x4Pro, which is a specialty piece of hardware that is pretty much the gold standard in the industry and used in many concert venues to drive their complex lighting and visual effects. “The Disguise system is what allows the set to exist as a 3D immersive visual display and can map these different surfaces into a cohesive image,” said Janowitz. “The set design is composed out of multiple different styles and resolutions of LED video displays.’

This system costs tens of thousands of dollars, but what you’ll find inside is a couple of 16-core Xeon CPUs and 32GB of RAM, running Windows embedded 8.1. It outputs 4096×2160 video streams to the various LED screens that are part of the show’s set. “We are certainly pushing a lot of pixels,” Bloxham told me, although I was surprised that this is well within the reach of a typical high-end PC server. “The tech has gotten approachable,” he told me. Each summer he runs a boot camp in Vegas to teach video designers some of the tricks of his trade.  “Your average PC with a good graphics card can do a lot today.”

Actually they have two media servers, one for backup. “Tech always has a risk, and this way I can switch over to the backup system with just a push of a button,” said Bloxham. He has a control console board  that is custom built, and includes the lighting controls as well. Given the number of people involved in producing the show, paying for a second server is a wise investment.

So check out Patriot Act on Netflix and let me know what you think. I think years from now we will be talking about its influence, just as we wax on about The Sopranos today.

There are more than 20 different coworking places in the St. Louis metro area where I live. I have been to many of them, even though I have my own dedicated office. Why? Because I want to be a part of the startup community and that is where many of them work. The spaces also are great meeting places.

Coworking spaces are useful for several reasons. When you travel, you have a place to set your laptop down and a nearby bathroom. If you just need a space for a few days or a week, you don’t have to go through the hassle of a monthly office rental. And if you have outgrown your dining room or spare bedroom in your home, and want something other than the local coffee shop, it might be time to investigate the local co-working scene.

There are a wide variety of operators, from the global, multi-city ones such as Spaces,  WeWork and Industrious to smaller, one-off locations that are quirky and anything but corporate. Finding the right one can be a chore, but you should take the time to make sure it matches your needs.

Why a chore? When you begin your research, you will find out that it is hard to track down exactly what you will be paying for renting an office. This is a combination of factors: First, occupancy varies widely, and many places charge for different sized offices. Rates can also vary depending on how many people will be housed in any given office, although some places don’t care (within reason). Many of the operators want you to come in person to check things out, so they can give you the hard sell. So my first suggestion is you should make sure you know the costs and contracts up front. Here are some other tips:

• Understand whom you will be working next to. Are you interested in meeting people like you or unlike you? The choice is up to you. Some have private offices, some have shared private offices, and most have bullpen-style tables where several people work at close quarters. Make sure you understand what your actual space will entail.
• Check out their vibe and décor. The spots also vary on their vibe, and that will be the hardest thing to pin down if you are looking to plant yourself in one of them. Some are more intimate, which could work or not depending where on the introvert/extrovert scale you are. Lots of them have a Scandinavian design, and some could range to the very artsy funk, which could appeal to some. Some are enormous, such as Chicago’s 1871 that is located on the top floor of the Merchandise Mart. Some are small enough to just house a few people.
• What are the amenities besides a desk and Wifi? With some places, you pay extra for printers, coffee, a gym membership, using conference rooms, having a live human secretary to answer your phone, having a dedicated postal mailbox and a dedicated office phone number. You may not care or need any of these things. Take the time to figure out what is important to you and what that will do to the ultimate rental price.
• Where are you going to get lunch? This isn’t so silly a question. Some places are located in suburban office parks and you have to travel some distance to find food. Others are in downtown areas or in walkable neighborhoods.
• Can you try before you rent? One of the places near me offers a free day pass to check them out. But they also offer the most flexible pricing and usage plans: you can rent an office for a single day or a year, and there are a wide variety of floor plans and even an interesting hybrid shared but private office that has a locked door but can house a dozen people sitting at study carrels. Other places may not be as flexible or offer a complete array of rental terms. Some can be useful just for temporary team conference meetings too.
• How quiet or noisy are the spaces? In my travels around to these places, many people worked with headphones on to isolate themselves and concentrate. You may want to check this out if the ambient sound level is important to you. Of course, the noise level varies depending on how many people are there on any given day.
• Do you need 24×7 access to your office? Some of the properties offer this, some don’t, some charge extra if you want to enter after normal work hours. If this is critical, make sure you ask for the details.
• Are you a party person? Some try to foster more of a sense of community with after-hours events and lectures. Others are strictly utilitarian.
• Do you really need your own office? Many of us can work with a laptop and a cellphone and not much more. If you need a lot of stuff as part of your job, you need a private office to house it all .Some places have lockers that you can store your stuff in as part of their rental fee.
• Will you be going to your office more often than not? If you are going to be out and about, or only in town occasionally, then having one of these spaces could be economical.
• Is parking a hassle? Some places have free parking or include in their rental fees, others you are on your own or pay extra.
• Does the place have arrangements for co-working in other cities? Some of the larger operators, such as WeWork and Spaces, offer complementary rentals in other cities in their networks.

We have a new co-working space in St. Louis that brings the total to six choices in my immediate neighborhood of the Central West End to locate your office. These are alternatives to renting your own office, or when your business has grown beyond your dining room and requires something more professional. Or when you need temporary conference space, or want to conduct a training session. They combine flexibility with the gig economy, and provide benefits and camaraderie too. I am a big fan of these places, even though I inhabit my own permanent office.

The new kid in the ‘hood is called Spaces and is part of a network of hundreds of sites located across the country and around the world. I wrote this review for Nicki’s Central West End Guide about them and its competitors. Surprisingly, it was hard to pin down prices on office rental. I also suggest a few things to think about when you are trying to choose your space that can apply no matter where you are located.

Normally, these essays are a lot less personal, where I write about something tech-related. Today I want to talk about myself. Actually, my hearing.

You see, I was born deaf in my left ear. I didn’t realize it for several years, until one day I happened to pick up a ringing phone in my left hand while I was eating something in my right hand. I didn’t hear anyone. Back in those days, they didn’t test kids for hearing until later on.

Being monaural meant I have never heard stereo, have difficulty locating the direction of sounds, and it is tough when I am in noisy places. My wife has so gotten used to being on my right side that when she is with her friends she tends to migrate to that position too.

But my deafness isn’t all that debilitating. At least not until 20 years ago, when I started getting these random dizzy spells. They would happen seemingly at random: sometimes when I was just sitting in my kitchen in the early morning, reading the paper. Once I got one when I on a flight – that wasn’t fun, but fortunately I could lie down across a row of seats and just hope it would be over quickly.

Eventually, I was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease, which has no known cure and no simple cause. As you can see from the above diagram, your ear is a very complex organ, with a lot of moving parts. Some folks have it worse, with daily dizzy spells that severely limit what they can do. Mine were relatively minor. To try to fix things, I went through dietary changes, saw a lot of different doctors, gave up driving for a while. And then the dizziness went away.

However, it was replaced by something less onerous but equally vexing: Tinnitus. A constant ringing in my one working ear. Sometimes the ringing would be more noticeable at certain times than others. Lack of sleep, added stress, too much alcohol or caffeine: all of these would make the ringing noise worse. I can hear the ringing right now as I write this.

One of the interesting aspects of Tinnitus is that it comes in various shapes and sizes. People hear different sounds and at different modulations and frequencies. For some patients, it can be just as debilitating as my original Meniere’s. For others, like me, it is just mild enough to be annoying.

Over the years, I have learned to deal with it. Sometimes I would hold a pity party for myself, sometimes the ringing was more than annoying, especially when I was in crowded noisy rooms or restaurants. I remember one time I was at a professional conference of about 300 people. For dinner, we were seated at very long tables in a cavernous room and the noise was literally deafening. I quickly ate my meal and literally ran back to my room, in pain from the noise. I know it looked odd to my dinner companions.

For the most part I accepted the ringing and figured it was better that being dizzy and having the whole world spin around me. But it wasn’t until this summer when I went to a medical conference on Tinnitus that I realized what I hadn’t yet accomplished was actually owning my disease, and facing it head-on. Or ear-on, as it were.

What does owning mean? It means that you control it, rather than it controlling you. You aren’t defined by your Tinnitus, you aren’t at its mercy, and you manage your own treatment and your own response to the disease. The noise you and I hear may be all in our heads, but we have to use our brains to figure out a way to cope and live our lives. For some reason I didn’t really understand what owning my Tinnitus meant until I was sitting in that medical conference, listening to the various presentations. Then it all clicked, so to speak.

As patients, we tend to interact with the medical/industrial complex at the moment when we have a problem: we break a bone, we want it fixed. We have an infection, we want to get rid of it by taking medicine or getting surgery. But the single point of contact with our doctors method doesn’t work with a chronic condition such as Tinnitus (or Meniere’s or whatever). That is because research is ongoing: new drugs, new procedures, new devices, and so forth. We aren’t watching the medical literature like our doctors are doing, because we are busy living our lives. And even if we are willing to put the time into doing Internet research, we aren’t going to medical conferences and learning about many of the latest technologies and techniques that don’t reach the general public for several years.

So I came away from the Tinnitus conference with newfound conviction, and one of the first things that I wanted to do is to get fitted for a hearing aid. The process is relatively simple to explain: you sit in a sound proof booth and listen carefully as the audiologist plays various sounds to test your hearing. But like many medical solutions, the devil is in the implementation details. And as patients, we have to learn a lot before we can figure out the best course of treatment. I found I had some slight high-frequency hearing loss, which is pretty typical for someone my age. So while my hearing is “fine” I could benefit from an aid.

Here’s the thing. When you don’t hear across all the frequencies you are supposed to, your brain doesn’t get to process those sounds, and it is likely that your hearing will only deteriorate as you get older. You go to the gym to maintain and build muscle tone. You need the sonic equivalent of that to maintain your hearing “muscles.”

Before I got an aid I also had to conquer the “old man” stereotype about wearing one. My dad resisted getting an aid for a long time, and by the time he got one it was too late to do much help. But the modern aids aren’t that noticeable, and if I had long hair they would be almost invisible. This is because they separate the battery compartment and the sound processor (which sits behind your ear) from the speaker, which goes inside your ear canal. The two are connected by a very thin wire.

Then I had to decide which problem I wanted to fix more: Did I want a hearing aid that would simulate stereo by placing a microphone in my deaf ear and transmitting the sound to my hearing ear? Did I want an aid to give me more high frequency amplification? Did I want an aid to try to counteract my Tinnitus? Turns out I couldn’t have all three in a single aid.

To fix the deaf ear, there are specialized aids called CROS and BAHA that are available. Years ago I tried the BAHA and I could hear stereo and place the direction of sounds behind me, and it was amazing. But these aids require surgery, and I passed on that opportunity. I tried the CROS aid this time around and didn’t get much benefit from it. So forget that issue: I have lived up until now with a single ear. I decided to look elsewhere, and focus on the latter two issues (Tinnitus and high frequency boost).

At the Tinnitus conference, I got to see what the latest aid technologies were – and being a techy kinda guy, I was somewhat excited. The aids can be used as a Bluetooth headset for your phone. They have all sorts of programmable modes that work with your smartphone. They even come with GPS chips so you can try to track them down if you misplace them. They can help you cook your dinner. Well, not that last item, but almost.

Now, I should know better than to trust the wonderful claims of tech vendors. I found the software lacking: unless I set it up in a certain sequence, the smartphone app (as nifty as it possibly could be) would crash. Hearing the word “Bluetooth,” I immediately thought that the sonic quality of the aid would be close to what an Airpod would be, and it wasn’t even close. Outdoors in a high wind, the aid wasn’t very usable as a phone headset. I am still getting used to having something sitting in my ear canal during most of the day. And the various programmable modes that I can dial into on my phone really don’t have much difference (at least that I can distinguish) on what I can hear from the aid. My audiologist says that my results are typical for many of his patients. Some of the aids have even more buggy smartphone software controls.

However, if I leave these issues aside, I can hear better with my aid, especially those higher-frequency sounds. And the aid does help reduce the ringing tone of my Tinnitus, which was one of the original goals.

I am still learning how to own my Tinnitus, but the hearing aid is a great first step. And here are links to the American Tinnitus Association and the Vestibular Disorders Association, both of which have helped me find other sufferers and great helpful resources to cope.