When flying, most cellists are faced with either buying an extra ticket or getting a flight case, paying oversized baggage fees, and praying. Experiences vary widely and are in places well documented and full of useful advice, e.g.
My situation is different because I have a Luis and Clark carbon fiber cello which is incredibly robust and generally does not even go out of tune when checked in as normal baggage and placed in the hold of the aircraft in a normal hard case. My case is a Bam Hightech measuring 54.5 × 21 × 13.75″. It seems virtually all airlines policies regarding oversized baggage operate in “linear” or total dimensions, which generally means by summing up the 3 separate dimensions together (although in some cases the wording is so confused, even that’s not clear). This means my case has a linear dimension of 89.25″ which unfortunately is outside the 62″ standard limit, and even just outside Delta’s second tier limit of 80″. Having said that, so far I have always managed to get it treated as normal sized baggage just by behaving exactly as if it was a normal suitcase, or even need be simply by confidently pointing out that the height is 54.5″ which is under 62″. In my experience, most staff at the check-in gate are not familiar with the exact terms in their airline’s policies, so having the right attitude (confidently knowledgeable and up-front but non-confrontational) can go a long way.
I’ve done some research on the policies of some popular airlines and referenced the relevant extracts below, with one section per airline. The quotes I’ve taken are focused mainly on national flights within the USA, because despite being from the UK, I’m currently flying around the USA a lot. However the policies for international flights seem similar, although sometimes with higher fees.
Continue reading 'Flying with a (carbon fibre) cello'»
It continually astonishes me how often I see facebook status updates / group invites / tweets / emails from friends and acquaintances saying something to the effect of “ARGH my iPhone / Blackberry / Nokia phone has been stolen / lost / eaten by my pet donkey and I lost everyone’s numbers, please can you all send me your numbers!!”
People, it’s 2011 already! Whilst technology is still far from perfect, it landed a man on the moon 42 years ago way before mobile phones existed, and certainly solved this particular problem of disappearing phones several years ago. So for those of you who still haven’t figured this out, without further ado I will outline a solution which should only cost 10 minutes of your life and ensure you never have to broadcast a panicked message cursing your pet donkey and asking everyone to send you their numbers.
Continue reading 'How to never EVER lose your phone contacts again'»
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Dear Sir/Madam,
This is absolutely appalling support – all FIVE methods I tried for contacting BT regarding this issue failed:
- I responded to the email regarding incident number [CENSORED] providing a time and method for calling me as requested, but noone ever called back.
- I rang 0800 731 0286 and selected option 1 – it rang for several minutes with no answer then hung me up.
- There is a bug with your login process on btvoip.custhelp.com where the password dialog box is not shown alongside the username dialog box, so I could not log in. Additionally requesting a new password failed, as did re-registration.
- Clicking “Contact Us” on btvoip.custhelp.com does nothing.
- Clicking “Live Chat” on btvoip.custhelp.com results in the error “There was a problem connecting to the Chat Server”.
All this is in regard to attempting to switch my landline back from Orange to BT. Now I am beginning to wonder why I should bother. At least I can talk to Orange, even if they get everything wrong.
If this ever reaches a human being, please call me as requested in my original email!
I’m currently on a musical pilgrimage around the USA. I brought my Digitech JamMan Delay unit with me, because I was attending Christian Howes‘ phenomenal Creative Strings Workshop in Columbus, Ohio, where I knew I would learn how to turn this gadget into a hugely useful practice tool. (Incidentally, I was not disappointed, and will blog more when I get time about how awesome Chris’ various educational offerings are. Until then, click the links!) Unfortunately at some point after leaving Ohio, the JamMan stopped working. I guess it didn’t like being surrounded by a bunch of smelly clothes and then getting thrown in the hold of a plane. (UPDATE Sept 22nd: actually it turns out that it was fine – the power adapter just needed the UK standard of 240 Volts, and the US standard of 110V wasn’t sufficient …)
So the other night I found myself desperate for a replacement. I do have a Boss ME-70 with me which has a built-in phrase looper, but it only stores 38 seconds which is barely enough to get to the bridge of Cherokee. Even worse, there is no way to undo/redo loop layers or store the whole thing after you power the unit off.
Then it occurred to me that I could potentially combine my laptop (a cheap Samsung N150 netbook) with a microphone, headphones (as a poor man’s substitute for an amp), and some software to achieve the same thing. At this point, those of you with a Mac will exclaim “sure – use GarageBand!” However, as shiny as Macs are, they are expensive and I also can’t stand Apple for philosophical reasons. (I can’t stand Microsoft either, which is why I use Linux, but I digress.) If you are interested in an alternative approach to looping with software, read on!
Continue reading 'Audio looping with Free Software'»
Back in November 2010 I blogged about how I was chasing my dream of catching up on all personal mail, by automatically measuring my progress. Well, it worked – I finally made it! For the first time in years, I finally have an empty inbox. It turns out Google even hid a little Easter egg in gmail to reward people who reach this state of bliss:
This feels good. Next up is to purge my massive TODO list of out of date entries and then re-evaluate what’s left …
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