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4-26-2005 - Latest Report - Folks... please accept my sincere apology if you are one whose emails seem to have been ignored. About the end of 2004, it was looking like we were "finally" going to have some troublesome times and situations behind us. A huge amount of my 2004 was diverted to my elderly mother's health problems. So far, 2005 has been nothing but a continuation of last year's problems and the unanswered email backlog continued to build instead of diminish. In fact, some things are worse. I won't bore you with details but the past few weeks have been extraordinarily stressful.

A couple weeks ago I began what should have been some fairly routine computer upgrades. In no time at all, I was perilously close to losing access to 15 years of accumulated data files and 3 GB of current and archived emails. I didn't pull out all my hair though I surely felt like it. The various problems not only refused to respond to my normally adept computer skills, they kept compounding. Because of some recently new developments with my mom and 'now', with my dad, I was not able to get everything all "put back right" till this afternoon. During this time, I had no access to our email, and hence couldn't even process some website direct purchases. I am sorry! I'll address the website purchases immediately and begin once again to do email replies.

3-24-2005 - More of the same old story - Way too much of our time has been unavoidably diverted from responding to emails over the past 3-4 weeks. The backlog has grown substantially. However, a couple days ago we (family) made a new commitment to knuckle-down and make an intensive effort to get some "over-the-hump" problems out of our way so that some things will run much more smoothly. So many things this past year (see various items below) hindered our progress, but things are looking better all the time in spite of that. I will be pushing hard to keep up with current incoming inquires as much as possible first, and at the same time, attack the backlog (in no particular order) as much as humanly possible.

A quick note about my mom's situation for those that are interested... Much as changed, but overall, she is doing better. Something happened about 4 weeks ago that finally has me encouraged about the possibility of her recovering functionality from those devastating strokes .
 

2-16-2005 - Catch up Announcement - The past several weeks have been tough. Numerous (won't bother you with details) unexpected things just seem to keep coming and coming. They keep us from getting and keeping (mostly) current on email inquires. As always, this overload of email inquiries is caused by not having the website completely done, especially the Manuals Catalog section.

Since the beginning of this site, getting the manuals data 100% sorted out and posted on site has been 'THE' major hindrance that has caused us to not provide superlative service to all who write to us. Overall, we do for about 80%, but we just haven't been able to eliminate that remaining 20% (who probably think we are uncaring jerks).

Frequent site visitors hopefully have noticed that there have been major site navigation changes made recently. There is 'far less' clutter and confusing info now. Many visual clues have been added to help people know where they are in our site.

Due to all the things mentioned below, there are currently about 650 inquires backed up in our inbox that have accumulated the past 6 weeks or so. In spite of this, we've been making a major push to finalize the very large and complicated Pioneer lists. I promise you will be impressed when you see it... massive amount of work.

And FINALLY... something we've been working toward for a very long time. As we have begun replacing some of the company lists in the Manuals Catalog, we have also completely updated the Terms/Purchasing section and the FAQ/Contact page and some other other areas. They now reflect the fact that Paypal users can now Buy It Now with Paypal without contacting us first when they find items with Price Codes and descriptions. Lots more company lists with lots more Price Coded items coming very soon!!
 

2-3-2005 - Factory Original Manuals listed for sale... covering nearly 3000 models. It's been nearly two years of hard work (off and on... on and off), but finally they are listed.

1-31-2005 - I've seen a couple places where some folks are wondering if we died or something. Man, the last two weeks have been super frustrating. After the 'no internet' for a week, the knee problem, the dad stroke, I thought I could make some serious headway at catching up on emails. Wrong!

I had my mom back in the hospital two times. Sad situation. Oh, more website server problems. (Tom of TRK Hosting is super. He moved it immediately to a new clean server.) Plus now, I feel like I'm dying... the flu hit me over this past weekend and I am really feeling under the weather.

But Good News too. Last summer we spent a lot of time fixing the underlying structure of our website to prepare it for the expansion plans I've had for a long time. We were unable at that time to fully implement the changes due to my mom's stoke situation that consumed my time for much of 3 months. I was FULLY AWARE that the site looked like a wreck in progress to many folks (especially depending upon their browser version and settings). Some have decided that it was their job to write and tell what a jerk I am. (Just what we need.)

During the first couple weeks of January, I was able to get back to fixing some of it while the office /network /knee problems had me unable to do business. We are so far behind on emails already, that I decided a few more days of not answering folks would be worth it if I could finally clean up the site. So I did. It is virtually all done now with the exception of replacing the Manuals For Sale pages. And now, I have discovered a method to greatly help in transferring the info from our database to the web pages. So I expect to be doing them on a regular basis now until completed.

I hope some regular site visitors will spend some time looking around and let me know via email if the changes have been positive ones.

1-20-2005 - I received a call from one of my brothers saying my elderly father just had a stroke. As of now, I have no idea how this may impact our manuals operations. If anything like with my mom this past fall, it may be a severe impact.

As stated in the 1-18 message, we began again to respond to emails and processing business. But before much headway was made, the email server at our website developed some problem so that we could not send emails. As of noon today, it appears to be fixed. We will begin again.

1-18-2005 - We have been without an internet connection (and email) for almost a week. For various reasons (long story), I have been running StereoManuals out of a room addition on the back of my home that I had previously stripped out to the bare studs (old house, lap siding under vinyl siding, no insulation). For the past three winters, I have been paying to heat the great outdoors while still freezing my ass off. We were recently able to create a fair amount of open space elsewhere. So moving a great deal of the huge amount of "stuff" that was in this room was finally possible. I removed the balance to "finally" get it insulated, get some interior walls reinstalled, get some counters and desk space created, etc. This required tearing down the computer network for the home and garage systems (no email access).

Unfortunately, an old "carpet-layer's knee" that had been only an occasional annoyance in the past became a MAJOR problem. I believe I injured it during the garage roof job and kept on re-injuring it while working on other projects. But now, it got so bad, I could barely stand up at times and could not stand at all some of the time. So my little office teardown job ended up consuming almost a week instead of a day or two at most. When the network got reassembled and connected to the internet, it took almost twenty minutes to download the accumulated email over our 3000Mb/sec cable modem. That may give you an idea how much behind we currently are in emails and processing business. I begin "right now" to attack that mess. Wish me luck, I'll get to yours as fast as humanly possible.

1-7-2005 - At the beginning of October, we updated the Pioneer Spec Bible to the New 3rd Edition even though we never found the time to update the descriptions for it. NOW!!! we have updated it to the New 4th Edition! A large amount of material became available that we had not expected to find. This continual updating we have done since it's inception is probably over with now. We think the vast majority of information available has been found. The 4th Edition is now about 280 some pages instead of the 3rd Edition's 242 pages and the 2nd Edition's 158 pages.