Sat 4/6/02

Well, here it is April and for the 23rd April in a row I'm doing taxes. It takes a lot of time `cause there's a lot of numbers to enter, but at least I have the fabulous Turbo Tax program. I really makes me wonder how I did things those first 10 or 15 years... (How long has Turbo Tax been around?) I remember when we got our first computer here, it didn't even have a hard drive! Every morning we'd load a floppy drive with the store program on it, and then we'd take that out and put in another floppy with the Inventory file on it. (This is back when the floppy discs were really floppy...) When you turned it off at the end of the day it'd forget everything.... Man, that was a weak computer... I still have it here in the office... I don't know why...

Anyway, it's almost impossible to remember what it was like running the business before computers. And I could not possibly have imagined that I'd spend the first hour of each business day responding to an invisible form of mail that magically appeared through my phone lines and showed up on a screen!

It really makes you wonder what it will be like in another 15 years... Wow, that's gonna be something.... whatever it is...

But it also makes me really appreciate the job (if you can call it that) that we have here at Pittsburgh Guitars... Last week I bought a Martin from 1935, and despite all of the technological advances in the last 67 years, that guitar works as well now as it did in `35, and it fulfills the same purpose... it makes music. Sure, guitars got louder when amps came along... but the concept and execution is still the same. You fret some strings at one end, and you strum some at the other end. No amount of technology has changed the simple beauty of a guitar. That's why I like `em.

See you soon,
Carl

PS: This week's Customer Web Site:
Cockeyed Ghost
Adam Marsland of Cockeyed Ghost will be appearing next Wed 4/10 at The Rex Theatre here on the South Side. 8PM.

Sat 4/13/02

I just heard "All My Loving" by The Beatles on the radio... and I'm not sure, but I think the guitars were slightly out of tune. Of course, in those days all they did was gather around the piano, hit a note and tune from there. That was looooong before today's miniaturized technology that can put a highly accurate tuner in a little box.

And if you need a floor model tuner that you can link between your guitar and amp, so the amp signal shuts off while you tune, a really cool one is the Fender PT-10.

On sale this week for half-off...

And "All My Loving" still sounds great.

See you soon,
Carl

PS: This Week's Customer Web Site:
The Happy Accidents

PPS: "All My Loving" is in 4/4, and the vocal starts after the 2, so the normal way to count out the beginning of the song would be to count, "1, 2, 3, 4, 1.." and start singing after the upcoming "2". But if you watch Paul McCartney start the song on Ed Sullivan, he counts: "I, 2, 3, 4, 5.." I always got a kick out of that...

Sat 4/20/02

I was dusting some amps yesterday... (We have to dust here on the historic, yet dusty, South Side)... and I noticed that the chrome panels behind the knobs on a couple of our new Fender amps were slightly scratched. These are the amps with the controls on the top of the amp. I suppose as you reach down to turn the knobs your fingernails naturally scratch the chrome behind the knob.

So I decided to have a scratch and dent sale, except without the dents. These are brand new, perfectly working Fender amps, complete with the Five Year Warranty. They just have some slight scratches from being tried in the store.

See you soon,
Carl

PS: Did you see the the news this morning? There was a story about some kids across the street from our store whose lives were saved by a carbon monoxide detector. Apparently last night, someone from Mike & Tony's Gyro shop forgot to turn off one of the grills and carbon monoxide leaked into the apartments above. As you probably know, carbon monoxide is odorless (unlike some of our customers), and it would have killed everyone in their sleep. Fortunately, one of the tenants had a working carbon monoxide detector in his room, and the alarm woke everyone up. Everybody made it out safely, AND got to be on the news! Even though I don't live above a gyro shop I'm going out to buy a carbon monoxide detector today. Scott says they make a combo smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector. You should get one too. Odds are you'll never need it. But if you do, it'll be worth the couple of bucks it cost.

Sat 4/27/02

We're having a great time with our new iMac... you know, the one with the small white body and the really thin screen that moves all around. I know that Mac still has a small share of the market, and there are PC-heads out there who don't know why Macs even exist... but you have to give Apple credit for innovation and creativity. If it weren't for the user-friendly Mac platform, Windows would never have been invented and we'd still all be staring at black DOS screens, typing in gobblygook. (I have an older PC here on my desk, and I have to type: " btrieve/M:64/c \utils\b_assist" just to open a program.)

This week's email special kind of relates: Looking back, it's almost hard to believe the impact the first iMacs had on the world of packaging design. In less than a year it became common-place to see colorful see-thru shells on just about anything. Fender, of course, jumped on the trend with their California-Clear guitar cables.

We're featuring the cables on this week's special.

See you soon,
Carl

PS: Go to Lawrenceville tomorrow night (Saturday April 27th) for the fabulous Art All Night exposition!! Artists from all over the area will be displaying their works in an all-night event. It's free. And The Spuds will be playing. Last year there were 450 different pieces of art at the show, and over 2000 folks stopped by to look. It's great! Click here for directions and more info.