Once bitten, twice shy

[Thomas Henry]

Hi Guys,

I received this PM (see below). Does anyone has an opinion of this guy or his proposal? I sure wouldn't want to see a repeat of my bad judgment last June in trusting a certain other person whose name need not be mentioned here.

Any comments?

Thomas Henry

-----------------
Hi Thomas,

I hope you are well and in good spirits. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude for all the circuits you have designed, I have learned a great deal from your articles and still learning, many thanks.

I have been yearning to make the Clangora for myself, I missed on your Midwest project. I have done a new lay out for the Clangora. I am going to make a couple of pcb's for myself. I have spent a fair amount of time in the process.

With your permission, I would like to make your design and my efforts available to the electro-music DIY community by offering the pcb. This will be a one-time offering. The Clangora PCB will professionally manufactured. I will charge only for the PCB and distribute the shipping and handling charges evenly. I will add a $5.00 mark-up on top to make a donation to Howard Moscovitz for the electro-music.com web site.

I know there has been some concern with regards to the QFG pcb offering. To make sure that there are no hiccups in the process, I will take orders for the Clangora in advance, like Fonik aka Matthias Hermann does. Once the number of pcb's is set, I will finance it personally and order the boards and then collect the money and ship the boards out. All related invoices will be made available to you, for accountability. Maybe the pcb could be made available to through the electro-music .com store. I will have to ask Howard after your decision.

Please, let me know if you are interested, if not I will make a run of 10 pcb's, 1 for you, 1 for Mosc, 1 each for Scott Stites and Andrew Krunkus for their efforts making the EM Klee available and 5 for a friend and myself.

Best of luck and health for the Holidays and the New Year . Looking forward to new designs from you and the guys.

Best regards,
Hugues St.Amour

[v-un-v]

omg!

My first reaction is that this is Randal- but with a new name.

I could be very wrong- but there are too many clues there.

like being too close to the new ideas that we have discussed recently.
Is the mod forum invisible to the outside world?

I'd say "thanks but no thanks" Studs.

I've gotta go again- I've got a deadline for 12 noon tomorrow

[blue hell]

What is the user name for Mr. st. amour?

Somehow I think I saw it before ... but a forum search reveals nothing.

[Thomas Henry]

[fonik]

it's not randal. i sold this guy a PCB this year, can't remember which one, but he is situated in canada IIRC (or was it NY state?).

i check paypal tomorrow and let you know then.

anyways, you are a well known man, thomas...

[blue hell]

Ringer has been around here since feb 20 2007, he built (or intended to) a TH SN76477 thingie on a fonik PCB, he ordered 5 sets of klee boards around july 10, 3 sets of your VCQFGs he seems OK to me, but maybe Scott or Matthias know more about him.

See http://electro-music.com/forum/post-135300.html&highlight=#135300 for instance.

in http://electro-music.com/forum/search.php?search_author=ringer you can find all his posts.

I'm glad he is not a frequent poster

[blue hell]

He is active on some more lists/fora as ringmod45 it seems. He claims to be from Montreal and he posts using a Canadian provider. Nothing obviously wrong there.

Maye just chat a bit with him to see if you like him.

[elektro80]

66.212.171.42 [ 1 Post ] [ Look up IP address ]
Users posting from this IP address
ringer [ 1 Post ]
Other IP addresses this user has posted from
70.80.236.221 [ 7 Posts ] [ Look up IP address ]
74.99.221.227 [ 2 Posts ] [ Look up IP address ]
208.97.86.98 [ 1 Post ]

Hmm..

And this is the profile:
http://electro-music.com/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=6463



I dunno. Do you have to decide this right now?

[Thomas Henry]

Well I confess that his plan of action strikes me as more sensible and likely to succeed than the mess of this last summer. And his PM is friendly, well written and doesn't reveal any grandiose money-making schemes. That is, it doesn't appear that he's doing this to capitalize personally on one of my circuits.

I'll engage him in conversation a bit more.

In the meanwhile, Mosc, since he refers to you as the beneficiary of this plan, how do you feel about it?

Call me a nervous Nellie, but I sure don't want to stir up trouble again by making a bad judgment.

Thomas Henry

[Tim Servo]

Well Thomas, I can't say that I blame you for being a little gun shy. However, the guy has put everything up front in writing, so that means the terms are reasonably well defined. I'd say it looks okay, especially since he's only asking to do a limited run of just one board (rather than looking for permanent rights to all your work, etc., etc.)

On the other hand, people say I'm too trusting. Still, it looks okay so far.


Tim (trust never sleeps... oh wait, that's 'rust') Servo

[fonik]

[Scott Stites]

I want a Clangora board, so go for it.

Seriously, though, I don't know anything about this guy - is it Ringer?

I do know that Ringer reserved and actually purchased five Klee board sets. IIRC, they were for him and his friends. His message didn't include any undersea millionaire hobbits or anything else of that nature - it was short, concise and to-the-point.

I understand the gun-shyness. The advance-order-before-taking-money thing is a good sign. That had a lot to do with Randal's un-doing; the taking-the-money aspect of it (at least for me) is crossing the line. Getting people's hopes up then not following through is bad enough, but taking money and then throwing in a free merry sleigh-ride through psychosis-ville takes it to an entirely new level.

Cheerios,
Scott

[v-un-v]

[Thomas Henry]

Okay, I guess I'll go for it. I'll write the guy tonight and emphasize the "good customer support" thing once again.

I'm also going to stress how important it is to keep everything out in the open on the EM Forum, with updates, responses to inquiries, and so forth. Transparency and "let's pull together" should be the theme.

And Fonik, would you mind if I used you as an example? I'd like to suggest to the guy he imitate your approach, which means he might write you with question or two. Would that be okay?

I guess we really should the Clangora out there.

Thomas Henry

[mosc]

I'm OK with this. I don't mind taking care of the ordering and shipping. After a few more of these projects I may become more efficient at it.

I suggest that before you agree, TH, you have him send you a copy of the board to verify that it actually works, or maybe Scott can check it. Then have him order the boards and send them to me. Then I'll post them on the store and we can sell them.

To summarize.

1) we know the boards work
2) we have them in hand
3) we announce them and start taking orders.

I've got an idea for a simple web based reservation application. That would save somebody having to keep track of a lot of PMs, emails or forum posts. I know that was a difficult job for Scott. but he still did terrific at it.

[Scott Stites]

[Thomas Henry]

Well that was strange. I posted a reply here a few minutes ago, and it disappeared. Let's see it I can recreate it. (My short term memory isn't what it used to be).

I mentioned that I had just sent a response to the guy seconds before seeing your comment. He said he would contact you (Mosc) first before proceeding so be sure to reiterate your concerns.

Here's what I wrote him:

-----------
Hello Hugues,

Thanks for your message and kind words.

I think this sounds okay, if things are done right. There are two concerns. First, I sold the Clangora project to Nuts and Volts, so they own the article. Customers will have to get the article legitimately from Nuts and Volts if they want to build it; we can't give out copies. I wonder, is it on their Web site?

Second, and even more important, the QFG turned into a real fiasco and has made me gun-shy about ever offering a project again. I had specified to the chap at the outset that customer satisfaction had to be the primary objective before I would give permission...and you can see what it turned into. I was very embarrassed since my name was linked to it.

The approach you suggest is good, however. I will give permission as long as these points are met:

1. Customer satisfaction has to be paramount.
2. You're not doing this to start up a company or commercial affair.
3. Nuts and Volts is properly cited and links are provided to them as a source for the article.
4. You start up a thread on EM in which you lay out the ground rules explicitly on how you will conduct the ordering and shipping.
5. You don't promise things ahead of time to purchasers that can't be fulfilled in a timely fashion. In the event of some catastrophe that upsets the timing, you will immediately alert the EM thread.
6. And, you promise not to spin out long-winded, wordy postings to the thread.

I hate to come across as such a Martinet here, but the QFG thing really stung me. So, I would rather make the ground rules fairly precise now to avoid disappointment to either of us.

From your message, I gather you're ready to do this the right way and make people happy. If so, and you're agreeable to the above, then you have my permission.

Here's a couple suggestions. First, you might want to emulate Fonik's approach to the SuperController. He did a splendid job of making the PCB available and acted honorably throughout. Second, I'd suggest starting your thread with a "poll" on EM to see how many people are interestied and even more importantly, clearly laying out the principles you intend to obey in taking orders, receiving money and shipping orders. After the mess of the last half year, I'd like to see everything as transparent as possible to our wonderful EM-ers.

If this all sounds good, then go for it.

Thomas Henry

[Dan Lavin]

I think these are great rules that should apply to all projects. I blew coffee out my nose on #6!

[frijitz]

Going through my records I notice that this guy bought 2 ea of all my boards. No problems at all. Another guy named Bob Dobbs handled the actual orders -- he seems to be the Tech. Is this going ahead smoothly?



Ian

[EdisonRex]

Bob Dobbs?



bit of a piss take methinks...

[Thomas Henry]

I haven't heard a thing from the guy.

I'm starting to wonder if there's more to this than meets the eye.

Thomas Henry

[EdisonRex]

[Uncle Krunkus]

I do whatever I can, whenever I can. Even if it means being up at 2am while my little harem are asleep.
But don't worry, I'll leave the laying out of PCBs until I get sober again.

BTW I understand you being very nervous about this Thomas. I really don't know what to say. It'll be mostly up to N&V won't it?

[Thomas Henry]

[Thomas Henry]