I wish...

Warm and Cozy Greetings from Sweden!

 

 

 

Conversation with my partner this morning:
"Hey, the news says Seoul got 5cm of snow, and might get 5cm more! The streets are a parking lot!"
"The streets were a parking lot when we were there, and it was 20 C and sunny."
"Oh."

 

Being a spoiled kid from sunny SoCal, I thought I'd enjoy living in a place with four seasons. Then I went to interview with schools in Boston in the thick of winter in 5 degree Fahrenheit weather, and my viewpoint changed...

I hear that so often from people from California.

All that easy living makes you soft.

 

It does. I fully admit I'm not hardy when it comes to weather. I complain when it's too hot, and complain when it's too cold.

So, the bad winter weather is basically immobilizing the bigger part of our communications over here. Buses are practically cancelled, subway trains are severely delayed, other trains are delayed or cancelled. The roads are practically unusable at this point due to the snow. The police and the Swedish Transport Administration are telling people not to use roads because of the obvious dangers with not seeing the roads. I'm kind of starting to question whether or not I'm coming home tonight. Also, I'm invited to a christmas dinner tonight after work to celebrate our malaysian colleague who passed her dissertation today.

 

Here I was earlier in this thread showing you pictures of a beautiful winter in Stockholm, yet it might be the same beautiful snowy winter that will cause a lot of accidents and chaos today (and apparently, tomorrow). I should get home today after the christmas dinner, but I might just choose to work from home tomorrow if it looks like this.

Obviously the answer is to take a vacation to Japan. If the mountain won't come to Mohammed...

I hear it's what all the cool kids do anyway: Visit their customs manufacturers

The photos made me nostalgic for winter, actually. I miss snow.

I'm a little surprised to hear Stockholm can be brought down by snow, but I suppose it is in a less snowy part of the country?

I think I rambled on about this over there already, but I find this to be one of the most irksome things and the world and I've encountered it the most in this hobby.

 

It's like:

 

Hey Fitear, I'd like to buy your $2k earphones 99.999% of the population would consider completely insane.  Would you let me give you money?

 

No gaijins!

 

Ok...

 

^ What the hell's the logic behind that?

 

And what's with speaker companies being so weird and dodgy about what their stuff costs and where I can actually, you know, buy it?

Edited by driver 8 - 12/5/12 at 7:36am

I like snow. I think it's beautiful and there are few things in life that is better than having been out in the snow for a whole day just to get home and relax in a cozy coach under a cover.

 

As for Stockholm being brought down by snow .. well, it is a bit strange that a capital of a country that is renowned for its winters can be brought down this easy. But there's two things that need to be taken into consideration:

 

A) The snow came down fast and there was a lot of it. Yesterday it was supposed to snow 20-30 cm of snow, and today an additional 30 cm (according to forecast, I don't know the real numbers). A few days ago it was raining and it was still 'autumn' here. Now in a few days we've had bizarre amounts of snow here.

 

B) There are strong winds that creates snowdrifts along our roads making it almost impossible to distinguish where the road ends.

 

Then again, this "snowstorm" (not sure whether it's classed a storm or not, and the swedish classification of a storm may differ from yours) doesn't explain why the communications are brought down by normal winters. Last year it was the same thing. And the year before that. And so on. It seems to me that the subway systems were not designed for this type of weather, which is (imho) idiotic since we live in... well, Sweden - a snowy country. I mean, I can understand that buses are brought down by a lot of snow - snow on the roads is dangerous and when it pours down, there's only so much you can do. But the subway trains? The ordinary trains? Come on .. someone needs to step up his game over here.

Edited by Coq de Combat - 12/5/12 at 7:40am

Customs require a great deal more direct contact with customers than almost any other product. If the product isn't exactly right, the customer isn't merely inconvenienced, they can be injured. Acrylic is unforgiving.

I doubt it's specifically because we're white foreigners. It's because we're not local. When I was at Hidition, the owner, my wife and I joked about the difference between caucasian and asian ears -- there are differences, although if anything the ears of us honkies are easier to build for, not harder, because they tend to be larger. The owner did mention that foreign orders stand a greater risk of being less profitable because something as simple as shipping a replacement headphone cable internationally can cost a considerable amount of money.

FitEar isn't the only customs company that won't deal with customers overseas. It's a risky proposition for a variety of reasons (SpiralEar stopped taking orders from outside the EU after getting burned by overseas orders), and beyond that FitEar might just not want to compromise on their standards of service, such compromises being almost mandatory to handle overseas customers.

Interestingly though Jaben here in Singapore is an authorized dealer of FitEar and handle customs and universals. I'm just not sure if they carry the full custom line.

I was half joking with the gaijin* remark but it still seems bizarre to me when I got my customs after spending 15 minutes with an audiologist over 1000 miles (or something to that effect) away from the place they were actually made.  I called them twice for various reasons and both times they basically refused to speak to me (**** Westone), meaning I had no direct contact with them whatsoever.  I guess I could understand it if they only trusted a handful of select audiologists or something, but it's always seemed more like you can use any one of them so long as you're in Japan which doesn't guarantee the impressions would be better or worse than those any other audiologist would give you.  And, having seen Jude's 334's in person, while the build quality's impressive it doesn't look like they make the canals deeper or particularly different from what I'd consider to be typical of CIEM's.  It could just be a difference between mine and Jude's ears, but they actually looked like a shallower insert than my ES5's.

 

And Fitear would technically only be shipping to the middleman anyway then let him raise costs to account for shipping and all that.  I guess what I'm saying is I'll never buy the idea that I shouldn't be able to send Dimitri (I'm assuming this info is fine now since ALO sells them in the US anyways) the impressions I used for my ES5's (which I know are good) and have him ask Fitear to work with him for customs.  Musica Acoustics are doing all the overseas dealings.

 

* Although I've seen Japan be pretty damn xenophobic for one reason or another in every field of theirs I've dealt with.  In the worst instance of such I was called something along the lines of "foreign devil" for asking (in Japanese) about a doujin game on 2Chan.  I guess they could see my IP or something.

Edited by driver 8 - 12/5/12 at 8:36am