fuzzyraygun

Rain rain rain rain rain rain rain. Rain rain, rain rain rain rain rain.
Rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain. Rain rain rain rain rain wet.

RAIN!

The ajax tool in Google Finance is great for getting a little perspective on the markets, especially when they go crazy like they have been since the beginning of the year.

You can see that the market looks totally crazy, but if you use the stretcher bars and lengthen the time line you see that the market (Talking mainly the DOW average) is only down 3.5% since last year at this time and over the last 5 years the market is actually up 3.5%. If you look back in the history, which the tool provides you see the crash of 1987 where the market only lost 432 points but the whole DOW average was at just above 2500 making that drop more substantial.

Although this downward slide has been in effect since the DOW hit 14,000 around October last year, the same correction would give us a relative bottom of around. 11,500 – 11,300 or so. In October of 2002 the DOW dropped below 8,000 for the first time since crossing it in 1998.

Buck up little campers. Buy the ticket. Take the ride.

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I am still here, in hell. My recent post about trying to buy a Pre-Amp is still an ongoing customer service infinite loop.

1. Order a product
2. Discover product doesn’t have a power supply
3. Return Product
4. Customer service is nice and apologetic offers to reship product with power supply and take money off
5. Customer service forgets to ship product and doesn’t take money off
6. Customer service says this time they will ship the product, Really!

At this point I am giving even odds that they ship me the same box that I sent back to them in the first place.

The key to this issue that I am having is that, when I call the customer service people are not with the warehouse and shipping people. In fact they are in Utah and the warehouse people are in Kansas so they are a good distance from each other. If I could get one customer service person to just go into the warehouse and look at the product on the shelf, they might be able to confirm that the product DOES or DOES NOT have a power supply.

I am through. I just can’t order from these guys anymore. Even if I get my product. This has been 3 weeks and over 10 phones calls and I’m pretty sure I will still not get what I want. Sometimes the savings just doesn’t even out.

How much is your time worth?

Update: Looks like I won’t get the product after all. Now I have an email from the MF saying that the product is back 0rdered. So my past 2 phone calls when they said it was shipping out this week… Were…. ahh exagerations?

Canceled my order with MF and ordered a Universal Audio Solo110 from Sweetwater. As always my rep Jon G. was super responsive and had even sent me emails previously about other mic-pres that would be comparable to the Chameleon Labs.

I did get a nice call from a customer service rep from MF, who was very apologetic about the problems and offered all sorts of nice things to keep my business. If I could have gotten that call earlier in the process it probable would have helped.

Updated Order Steps:
7. Customer Service doesn’t call for a week and then sends an email saying that the product is really backordered
8. I cancel the order
9. Customer service finally calls and asks if they can help me with something else. Maybe a new order!
10. Customer service says that they will credit my Credit Card
11. 2 1/2 weeks later and 2 phone calls later Customer Service has still not credited my credit card
12. Customer service now says that they did not credit back my credit card, they left the money on my account, so that they next time I order I can use it!
13. I inform them that I will never order from them again and that they should give the money back to my credit card.

I am spending a little time over the past week or so cleaning up my messy desks at home and at work. I tend to accumulate lots of little odds and ends on my desks. My work one is pretty good if I keep the papers in order but my home desk gets messy quickly because it holds so much. My home desk is my computer workstation, my music workstation, my general area for my bills and papers, and my area that holds all my keys, wallet and all the crap that I walk around with everyday.

I never thought it would be so hard to buy a working product. The comedy of errors around the Chameleon Labs 7602 pre-amp channel strip is truly epic in proportions. I am defeated and I have given up on the idea of owning one of these.

I had heard some really good reviews of this product and everybody seemed to agree that it was a great deal for the money and that it sounded good. Sounded great to me. I was ready to step up my Mic Pre game for my home studio.

I found it online at Musicians Friend so I ordered one. When it arrived I realized that it did not come with a power supply. The items description on the site said that it would come with one so I called up Musicians Friend. After about 5 days and multiple phone calls MF agreed that it should have a power supply and that it was kind of important. The kicker being that they do not carry the power supply, and had no way of getting me one. They had three things that I could do.

1. Try to talk to the missing part department at Musicians Friend. The person on the phone told me that this was not a good idea, because they were weeks and weeks behind schedule and that this would be like “falling into a black hole”, her words not mine.

2. I could go and find a CPS-1 power supply some where else and that I could “TRY” to get a credit from MF for the price. You can see how my faith that I would actually get a credit for this would be kind of iffy…

3. I could send back the Pre-Amp using a UPS call tag and they would credit me once they received the item.

I went with what was behind door number 3.

Even with all these problems, I still wanted the product. So I thought I would try Guitar Center (sometimes referred to as Retard Center). I called my local GC and they had the product and over the phone they told me that they also had the power supply. Wow I could pay another $100 bucks and maybe this nightmare would be over? Nope…. Not so fast.

When I got to the actual store they told me that they do not have the power supply, they have the $10 cord that connects the device to it’s power supply. So, in fact they also carry the 7602 Pre-Amp but were also selling it without the power supply. So that is two major distributors for Chameleon Labs that are selling their product WITHOUT the ability to actually turn the product ON. Both continue to sell the product under the guise that when you buy it you will actually be able to use it. But in fact it is a $780 doorstop.

I would have bought it from Sweetwater, but they do not carry this line of Pre-Amps. Looks like its back to my first choice, The Apogee Mini MP Pre-Amp. I wonder what kind of power supply that one has.

My luck just stinks.

Update: I must be totally insane, because when I called Musicians Friend they some how convinced me that the other 7602 Pre-Amps have power supplies and that they should ship one of those out to me and take some money off my price for the trouble. I swear if this one comes without a power supply, I am gonna pull what is left of my hair out and go screaming into the night.

I was waiting for the bus this morning and I was happy to see a totally empty 7 coming around the corner. The 7 starts right by my house in the upper haight and goes either to Van Ness or all the way downtown. Most of the time the 7 is a double bus so it’s huge and is almost never filled.

I was waiting at the bus stop with a bunch of people as well as a handicapped person in a wheelchair. When the bus came everybody got on the bus but the bus driver wouldn’t let the person with the wheelchair on because she said that he had too much stuff attached to his wheelchair (bag, blanket etc.). This is complete bullshit because the double bus was completely empty and wouldn’t have gotten in anybodies way. This pisses off the handicapped person and he proceeds to pull his wheelchair in front of the bus and not let her move. She is all to pleased with this and proceeds to tell everybody to get off the bus. She then grabs her bag, unhooks the electricity cables and walks off says that he can talk to her supervisor.

So now there are a bunch of people and here comes a 71 which is a short bus that goes all the way from out in the avenues to downtown. This bus can get pretty packed, even by the time it reaches the upper haight. This driver takes all the passengers onto his half full bus AND the guy in the wheelchair. No questions, no crap..

The guy in the wheelchair is still pretty pissed about the other bus and is still talking about it under his breath. The thing that really got to me was the amount of people who blamed this whole situation on the guy in the wheelchair. That he was making them late for work with his insistence and his complaining and what an asshole he was. He even got into a shouting match with another person on the 71 because some guy was pissed to have to get out of the way of his wheelchair. I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing. The whole bus seemed to turn into an angry mob. Someone couldn’t make it to the exit for their stop so they shout racial shit at the bus driver that he “can’t understand english”.

It was a sad bus trip and it didn’t make me feel very good to be living in this city.

I have been super busy at work doing stuff for CES, the Consumer electronics show in Vegas, so I have not had much time to do anything else. Once these jobs are over I will take a couple of days just to do some sleeping.