If I could be said to have a vice, it would be fine, dark chocolate. Good thing too, since it is actually healthy (I happen to really enjoy red wine and coffee as well — all three are high in antioxidants). But the health benefits are beside the point. There’s nothing like breaking off a small square of 70% bittersweet goodness and savoring it.
Le Noir 71% from French makers, Valrhona has been a dependable high quality choice for years. It has enough bitterness to be sophisticated, and just a hint of fruitiness to open up the palette. Trader Joe’s is the place to get this — they are somehow able to charge less than half what most do.
For my birthday, along with a cd of music from the chocolate lands and a book about the chocolate barrons (my friends really know what I like), I received a bar of Santander 70% Columbian chocolate. This is really something different. It starts off fruity, moves into vanilla (or marshmallow) territory, slides into espresso roast, and finishes with a beautiful 50/50 mix of bitter and sweet. This one really changes if you exhale through your nose as you let it melt on your tongue. It may be a bit too sweet and candy-like to have on a regular basis, but so far I’m really enjoying it. It also happens to be an incredible value.
Amon Tobin is one of my favorite electronic music artists. Everything he does is very evocative, almost cinematic, if only action movies were this good. He has his own unmistakable style, yet it is more a planet than a palette, which is very hard to pull off as an artist. Which is why it is odd that it took me so long to grab his last full-length album, especially considering it is high definition surround mix on DVD-Audio. I suppose the fact that it was a game soundtrack (”Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 3″) was a stumbling block for me. How good could incidental music loops for yet another first person shooter be? I needn’t have been so cautious. It’s a great album. Maybe not his best, but it’s up there. Moody and atmospheric, yet driving and adrenaline-pumping all at once. Vintage Amon Tobin. Also, this time there are credits to actual performing musicians, including an orchestra. Now I understand — writing for a game was just a way to get someone to front the money for even more grand sound sculpting options. The surround mix is very well done, allowing the spatial placement of sounds to become almost another instrument.
I had assumed I’d have to borrow a friend’s CD version of this album in order to rip the tracks and import them into iTunes. To my surprise, when you put the disk in your computer there is a directory full of sound files. Both surround AAC (which iTunes doesn’t yet support) and high resolution stereo versions were included. That’s what won me over and inspired this post. Kudos to Ninja Tunes and Amon Tobin for this forward thinking, and for not treating their customer like a criminal. In a perfect world, this would be the future of music distribution.
Type in Dell Support into your favorite search engine, and on the first page of results you’ll see some pretty angry users. This was my first clue that exchanging a faulty 19″ Dell LCD monitor wasn’t going to be easy. My first try was to email them. No go. You need a service tag number to use any of the online support options, which is only supplied with computer systems, not monitors. This ruled out live chat as well. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll go the old-fashioned way and call them.” For some reason I couldn’t find the appropriate phone number on the Dell site, which was when I discovered the expletive-laidened articles mentioned above.
Finally I gave up and found the packaging slip on the outside of the box. I dialed the number and after some bland music a tech support rep. answered and asked for the service tag. I told him I just had an order number. After some back and forth he asked if I was a business or home user. Apparently being a “home user” is about the same as being a leper in the eyes of Dell. I was immediately ejected and found myself being lulled into numbness by the hold music until a fellow with a thick accent answered. Same questions. I gave him my order number at which point he said something like “let me just check… *click*”. I was disconnected. Oy.
That was last week. I figured I’d give it another whirl today. First person who answered said I needed to contact customer service, since I just wanted an exchange, rather than actual technical help connecting the monitor. He gave me a number and then transferred me. After 10 minutes of more numbing hold music I was disconnected. The outsourced tech support folks working for Dell must have some fumbly fingers. I called the supplied number and the woman said that I needed to talk to LCD monitor support, not customer service, since replacing the monitor was a “last resort.” Oh boy, how wonderful. Again she gave me a number and again I was transferred (I felt like I was in a deleted scene from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil). This time I wasn’t cut off. I actually reached a human. Only, the way he answered, it sounded like I’d woken the guy up. After some confused conversation, it turned out that I’d been routed to an LCD refurbishing plant in Ohio, and that this actually happens with some regularity. He gave me two numbers to try. Before hanging up I asked if he could give me advice on the problem with the monitor, thinking at least the refurbisher would know something about it. No go. The guy who answered was a security guard.
I thanked him, hung up, and just started laughing… not quite hysterically, but more just to convince myself that this was actually part of some brilliant comedy of errors.
Continued
