"Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too" Judge Smails

Years huh, I can't go a 2 days without a Flash or Java update with a reboot.

Definitely music without words, or but get good ear buds, don't bother with headphones unless they are thick enough to block everything. I also find that anything that blinks is incredibly distracting as well. I've always found a quite out of the way classroom or conference room worked the best, hell anything to not hear other people talk on their cell phone. When doing manual task (soldering, assembling) podcast work well, but not when I have to think analytically.