tekHedd – the blog

Update: I have received a very nice apology. I still don’t have my $12 back though. So a very nice, but entirely insincere apology. Of such things is passive aggression made.

The Letter

At least I got them

I’m not entirely happy with COTA guest services. (Note executive summary for quick delegation!)

I don’t enjoy complaining, and I’m sure you don’t like to hear it. I fully understand that I’m not rich or famous enough for you to care what I think. It’s quite likely that you will delegate the reading of this to someone totally apathetic, whose job is to pretend to care. I understand. That’s fine. That’s called customer service.

Writing takes extra time if you want to be clear, concise, and nice instead of just ranting randomly. The one thing I resent more than anything is that I have to spend time writing an email about this seemingly-inconsequential slight. But, I understand that quality control is important. What would we be if we didn’t even try?

So, here is the timeline on the delivery of my pair of tickets (at a turn about as far from the “good seats” as you can get):

1. I receive an email reminding me to make sure my shipping address is correct. It is not.
2. My wife calls to update our shipping address.
3. She is told that it is updated.
4. I receive tracking information telling me that my tickets have shipped to the old, wrong address. Augh!
5. I call. COTA has the correct address, but Ticketmaster does not. This is because was one of the eager first people to order tickets, and at that time Ticketmaster (yuck) was the only option. When we called COTA to update the address, this information was not communicated to Ticketmaster.
6. Editorial comment: How was I supposed to know that?
7. I am charged $12 to redirect the Fedex package en route. (Fortunately, it won’t be delivered for another 24 hours.) This is my problem. There’s no hurry; he’ll wait while I get a credit card.
8. With no other options, I pay $12.

The man I talked to told me that “he is a manager”, so I have to assume that this is company policy, as is the apathetic attitude.

What has made me mildly annoyed is COTA’s inability to accept any responsibility in the matter. Twelve dollars doesn’t matter. I’m delighted to participate in the ridiculously monetized upsell that is F1. But, I like to pretend that I’m not just another head in the headcount, being drained of cash by apathetic drones who care about nothing but their paychecks. I can’t do all of this pretending by myself. Paying another fee because customer service couldn’t be bothered to tell me about the Ticketmaster (yuck) problem is not helping me to pretend.

At the end of the day, it’s about respect. If you don’t have respect, you don’t have anything.

(signed)

PS – does ANYBODY like Ticketmaster?

It’s frustrating to watch TV in the run-up to the election. How can people miss so many obvious things? What is the deal with these nonsensical political advertisements?

My mistake has been assuming that voters are basically intelligent, when in fact they are emotional. Something like half of them are below average (it’s true!), and many of the rest are too lazy or stoned (willfully stupid) to bother thinking. And it’s more fun to get angry or upset than to think.

They’re also bigoted. We’re all bigoted by nature, but some of us work to overcome it. The rest of us are just pretending. And it’s so easy to play on that bigotry. A few subtle cues and you know…it’s not just race, it’s men, it’s liberals, elitists, people with more money than I have, people that smile too much. What do you hate? What triggers deep-set resentment? Don’t bother to tell us, we already know, and we’re using it to control you.

And there’s advertising. We’re drenched in advertising, which changes how we perceive incoming information. People are used to believing whatever they see on television–we’re predisposed to believe what people tell us, it’s how society works. We have laws against outright lies in advertising because of this. They couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true, right? Unless it’s in a political ad.

Put all of this together, and it’s clear that, as var as politics is concerned, we’re screwed.

Those commercials that insult your intelligence? Those commercials that are so slanderous and illogical that you can’t imagine how they could possibly influence anyone? They’re based on sound market research. They work for the majority of voters. They work.

That’s right. Most people actually believe that crap. Accept it. Embrace it.

Once you give up your idealism and accept that most people are ignorant, too lazy to do the simplest fact checking, and (on the average) of quite average intelligence, it becomes easier to understand. The only logical attitude is one of contempt. Let that show for a second, and the uneducated, lazy imbeciles will call you arrogant.

And rightly so. I live in a democratic society where logic is weakness, where the primary deciding factors in the election are laziness and bigotry. Maybe it’s time to lose my fear of appearing arrogant. Maybe I am actually better than average, both morally and in terms of intelligence. Instead of being disgusted at the stupidity of the masses, I should pity them.

Thank goodness it’s almost over, and we can go back to letting the corporations with the most money run the country.

I used to make fun of singers who use pitch correcting autotuners.

Now I make fun of singers who don’t. I’ve been singing backups for a couple of years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while I have great control of my chest voice, I have very little control of my “head voice”. For you nonsingers, this means I barely have any control at all when I’m trying to sing high without using falsetto. So I bought the TC Helicon “VoiceTone Correct,” pedal.

TC Helicon VoiceTone Correct

This is their “old” low-budget pitch corrector, which also includes a very nice sounding compressor and de-esser. It only does chromatic pitch correction, and it best used gently. In  fact, it doesn’t do a great job of “fixing” your pitch at all, and would be better named the “VoiceTone Trainer.” You can’t use it to fix your pitch without sounding quite artifical, but it serves great to provide a training pitch–you can hear instantly whether you succeeded or failed miserably. It’s much faster than watching a stroboscope and leaves your eyes free to stare desperately at the next line of lyrics. This device has done wonders for my ability to sing in tune, especially when singing backup along with singers who are out.

Recently, they came out with a new device, the TC Helicon “VoiceLive Play.” The new device does a lot of other things, but it also does “hard” pitch correction using scales. Unfortunately restricted to either “major” or “minor” but I guess that’s better than just chromatic.

TC Helicon VoiceLive Play

The thing is magic. Unlike the older pedal, it can be used to “fix” your pitches and sounds entirely natural. As one musician told me, “it’s like Avatar.”  I love everything about it…except that you can’t use the de-esser without also using the compressor. How could they leave that out? Hoping that’s fixed in a firmware update.

There’s certain amount of danger to using  scale-based pitch correction, of course.  Two weeks ago, I used my first song-specific setting, a correction for a song in G Major. It worked beautifully.

The next two songs also had backup harmonies… in E Major. It also worked beautifully for those songs, except that I had not reset it to chromatic mode. Guess what happened? E is the relative minor of G, isn’t it? That’s right, all the pitches were dead on, but I couldn’t for the life of me get my voice to make the major third. The monitors were loud enough that I couldn’t hear my voice in my head–I would sing and the wrong note would come out. Other notes were fine, but G# would either come out as G or A. Augh! I’ve lost my ability to sing! What a confidence killer. It doesn’t help that that particular G# is in my somewhat tenuous head voice region.

So it was certainly a relief to find that I had simply un-corrected myself. (Cor-wronged?) I have a feeling this isn’t the last time I’ll do that.

Oh well that’s about it. Anyway, I love this thing.