Billie and I had a really bad experience with The Brick recently. I wrote the regional VP of The Brick about it a few days ago, but I haven't received a response. Instead of retyping everything, I'll just copy portions of the original message I sent. Sorry for the wall of text:

I bought a 5-piece dinette set from The Brick and had it delivered to my home on March 10th. Upon unpacking, I noticed two of the chairs had significant damage to their backs, so I called the store and they had two replacement chairs delivered to me later in the week. I understand things like this happen from time to time, so it didn't bother me too much.

When I unpacked the replacement chairs, I assembled them both and noticed one of them had a leg that was about half an inch shorter than the others. As a result, you can imagine the chair was unreasonably wobbly. For a second time, I called the store and arranged to have another replacement chair delivered to me.

The replacement chair arrived a couple days later and I unpacked it. Immediately, I noticed the base of the chair was completely cracked. Not just a little fracture, the wood was broken in half. Frustrated now, I called the store a third time to have yet another replacement chair sent to me. This time, I was told that I had to wait significantly longer to receive a replacement, so I decided to drive to the warehouse myself to pick up the replacement. I explained to them that this was the 4th chair that I was returning, and I requested that the chair be assembled at the warehouse by somebody in the staff. I wasn't about to drive home with yet another broken or faulty chair. The man I spoke with (whom I forget the name of) insisted that nobody at the warehouse was able to assemble the chair for me. I politely explained the story to him, how this was the 4th chair I was returning, how it was an incredibly frustrating experience, but he still refused to help. I get it, policy is policy, right? The warehouse staff isn't supposed to assemble furniture, not even a single measly chair, so I was out of luck. Maybe they just didn't have a screwdriver hanging around. Defeated, I looked over the chair the best I could, didn't notice any obvious damage, and drove home with it in my back seat.

I neatly laid out the individual parts of the chair on the floor. Everything seemed to be there. I had all the proper screws, nuts and bolts. Time to assemble. Wait... What's this? Why won't this leg fit properly to the base? OH! It's because the warehouse staff gave me TWO LEFT LEGS.

Again, I called The Brick and explained the situation to them. This time I had them deliver a chair to the store and had them unpack and assemble it for me. A couple days later I was able to go to the store and pick it up.

I had to return five chairs. Five chairs from a dinette set that comes with four. That is worse than Ikea, the company that is known for selling the most mass produced cheap furniture. Something is seriously wrong there, and during the entire experience, I never heard a single "we're sorry" from anybody at the Brick. Even the regional VP who I wrote personally hasn't been able to get back to me.

If you're in the market for new furniture in the future, don't buy from The Brick.

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I've been meaning to write something about Zune fans for a while, so here goes. They are just as annoying as iPod fanboys.

I recently subscribed to a few Zune blogs in my feed reader so I could keep up with firmware updates (or the lack of them), and it seems most of the Zune related blogs offer nothing but the same tired "can your iPod do that?" arguments and blind praise for seriously flawed software. Makes me wonder if Microsoft is actually paying for this kind of garbage to be written, kinda like this completely realistic review of the Zune car charger/FM transmitter on Amazon:

I'm so glad I finally broke down and bought one of these. It's tiresome trying to find a good song on the radio or burning CD's all the time when you find new music you want to listen to in the car. With the FM Transmitter, you can listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. And couple that with the Zune Marketplace and your listening choices are limitless!

Please.

Dear electronic device owners: If your electronic device of choice works better for you than somebody else's electronic device of choice, keep it to yourself. Nobody cares except other people who use the same electonic device... And even then, you're just annoying a lot of them too.

I am writing this right after reading yet another article praising how awesome the Zune software is, and if you read my blog at all, you already know my thoughts on the Zune software. I immediately wanted to reply, but like most annoying blogs, I had to register before I could even comment. After registering, I posted my comment but it looks like it has to go through some kind of approval process first. Wouldn't want any negative (aka truthful) comments, would you? If my comment actually gets approved, I'll be surprised.

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Last.fm just released an experimental little application called Boffin, which scans your entire music library and creates a tag cloud based on all of the genres in your collection. It doesn't just read the genre tags for every song, though, it instead looks up every song of yours in the Last.fm database and creates a tag cloud using their own tags. So you don't have to worry about retagging all your stuff! The result is something very similar to the regular Last.fm radio, except it plays from your own collection rather than theirs.

Do I want to listen to only folk and punk? Yes please. You can read about it here or download it here for PC or Mac.

It also lets you export your tag cloud to Wordle, which I wrote about before if you remember. This is mine:

PRETTY NIFTY.

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Right now.

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I haven't used iTunes in a while but I fired it up today to play with some Genius playlists, upon which I noticed a lot of my music was without album art. I selected my entire library and told it to grab album art for everything. Normally iTunes has been pretty accurate when deciding which album art to use, but today I ran into a few oddities. Behold:

Team America: World Police Soundtrack

Nine Inch Nails - CRC Sessions
(this is a bootleg and doesn't even have any official artwork)

Tenacious D - Self Titled

I've never run into anything remotely as weird as this using iTunes before, so my only idea is that iTunes was somehow "Google bombed" via a flood of incorrect artwork. I don't know. The only thing I know for sure is that Delicious D is awesome.

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