Just another little personal reading story.
Back on 2nd Feb, I ordered the latest Glyphius software from James Brausch. I wasn’t sure whether or not to go ahead and buy, but when I asked Yi about the effect of using it I received Hexagram 2, line 2.
‘Straight, square, great.
No repeating, nothing that does not bring harvest.’
(There you go, James – how many people do you know who can lay claim to a testimonial written 3,000 years before the product was created?) I took this to suggest (amongst other things) that it might enable me to get good results without a steep learning curve, and went ahead and ordered.
Now, James is in the US, and I’m in the UK. It’s been my experience that it takes a week to ten days for post to get between the two, so by last Thursday (15th) I was wondering if the parcel had got lost. I dug out my Paypal receipt, and sent a very polite enquiry to his contact address. No parcel, and (more worryingly) no reply to the email either, by Monday.
By this point I was starting to fixate a bit. It’s a habit I have: when I get my teeth into a problem, I want to be able to make some progress on it. Occasionally this habit is useful; more often, it leads me to waste days obsessing about things that someone else could solve for me in five minutes. Shall I post to forums asking if anyone can help me contact James? Shall I try calling that phone number I found for him? Shall I…?
“Yi, what can I usefully do about getting hold of this product I bought?”
25, moving lines 1, 5 and 6 to 16. Disentangle your motivation.
I got the gist of this at once: drop it. Don’t expend a lot of energy on something you can do nothing about; straighten yourself out, don’t take action on the basis of false perceptions. (When Yi says ‘one who makes no corrections commits blunders’, ‘blunder’ specifically means the mistakes of clouded vision.) Hexagram 16 talks to me, especially in recent weeks, about managing my energy and motivation levels, and in this case it suggested where to direct them. Somewhere more productive.
This is just a quick post, so I won’t go into the moving lines in detail. If you look through them, I expect you’ll see what I saw. Get disentangled, and then ‘going on’ – ie moving on from where you are – means good fortune. Don’t run round looking for a ‘cure’ for your problem (line 5, ‘no medicinal herbs’), and you’ll be fine. And finally (line 6), you are in danger of messing up severely. Any of those options you’re thinking about now would amount to a ‘blunder’. Desist, or make an ass of yourself.
So I desisted.
The parcel arrived this morning.
Reducing the lines to one text using the Nanjing rules gives us the 5th line, which states the situation decisively: The delay is from outside factors, but resolves itself.
One commentary to the text makes me curious, though. Was the package by any chance slightly damaged in transit?
May Supreme Avatar Smile Upon You!
Br. Taras
The Avatarian Cloud Temple
Rieul, Second Life
No, the package was fine. What commentary are you looking at? (I wonder if you may be correctly anticipating some small ‘damage’ yet to come. We’ll see.)
It was just my idiosyncratic reading of a spot in Cheng Yi’s commentary on the line.
Haven’t looked yet to see how (and if) Cleary translates the sentence.
Grear post! Have a similar problem though, I purchased an ‘all in one’ package from James some months back. Loaded em on my new desk top. However, one will not load in my new lap top. Cannot get to him! Don’t have a receipt with the purchase. So support won’t let me in.
Thoughts?
Um… look for support elsewhere? How about the laptop supplier?
Brausch’s customer service sucks. And he is actually proud of that. If you ask questions or make comments or suggestions, you get “fired” as a customer. So I only order stuff when on one of his 24-hour reduced price specials (if at all) and hope no problems.
Clarification: Brausch thinks that his products and documentation are perfect. No problems as is. So if YOU have a problem, YOU are an idiot, and he doesn’t deal with idiots. So just take a refund and “go away”.
Wow, how did the James Brausch fan club find its way here? 😉 Let’s take this to email, though, as it’s a tad off-topic for an I Ching blog.
I don’t have a problem learning (or ordering) from someone who thinks I’m an idiot. If the product does the job, why worry?
Fred, I do agree with you about the lack of service and his arrogance!
I, too, ordered his Glyphius package (special discounted offer) and patiently waited 18 days for delivery.
Since I never received UPS tracking numbers and no response to the multiple emails I sent, kindly asking what the status was, I had to open a case with PayPal. Yea, they informed PayPal that the UPS tracking numbers indicated it was on the way. Real nice support… I never did get a personal response from ANYBODY from them!
I do dread having to buy his stuff, yet he does come out with some winners often. It’s just too bad he’s a cad!
“Wow, how did the James Brausch fan club find its way here? 😉 Let’s take this to email, though, as it’s a tad off-topic for an I Ching blog.”
It seems his poor notification, lack of visible support/status options, repeated non response to the email address provided in the receipt, and his link here is what brought people here.
I first saw your post while searching for others that actually received their Glyphius 2007 package. Even though I’m not as far away as you I still have not received mine.
I’m most likley a ‘time vampire’ in his mind. Oh well… His products are great. I’m just finding out that when he turned off the comments to his blog it did have a direct effect on my business activity.
I still have positive thougts about him. He’s definately cut from a different mould.
S.
With his “Statistical Copywriting” course Brausch has included Glyphius 1.0. I tried some headlines on it, but became suspicious of the results.
To put my suspicions to the test, I entered random keystrokes into the text field. Below are the actual keystokes and resulting scores:
PAOHAFOI9a8h9aes1h9srj9sr849r8 — SCORE: 132
10OIHGPOAINPOIRWEH10[09IUO[IKN’O[ASd — SCORE: 233
0ESTHAWERTH10EAHAETRHE10OIHGPOAINPOIRWEH10[09IUO[IKN’O[ASd1HTB25 25OWIGVHVA[OPWI 10 — SCORE: 285
Those of you who have this product, try it out if you don’t believe me.
Brausch is condescending, arrogant, ignores his customers, and Glyphius is worthless. Were he a better person and a decent businessman with a modicum of courtesy, his talents could bring him astonishing wealth. As it is, he will only earn a fraction of what he could, because he is such an A.H.
Your experiment doesn’t prove that Glyphius is worthless. More to the point, neither Glyphius nor JB’s character are topics of this blog, however well it may rank on Google for these terms by now. So – no more comments on the subject, please.