To Whom It May Concern,

My wife and I stayed at the Radisson hotel in New Rochelle, NY this past weekend (Friday November 26th and Saturdan November 27th).

I am writing to express our concern and dissatisfaction with the hotel and the way that our complaints were handled.

When we initially arrived we were told our twin bed room was ready, which was concerning since we specifically requested (and confirmed) our reservation for a room with a king bed. We waited for a half hour in the lobby until we were we would be assigned to a new room, and my wife and I were given key cards to Room 516.

That Friday evening we found out that the hotel’s restaurant (City Chow House I think?) functions as a night club with extremely loud techno music. My wife and I attempted to go to sleep at about 10 pm but were unable to because the music was so loud that the pounding bass frequencies could be heard extremely clearly in our room.

We complained via telephone once and were told that the manager of the restaurant would be alerted.

After 20 minutes the music could still be heard clearly so I got dressed and complained to the front desk employee personally. He explained that he had already asked the manager if the music could be turned down and that it was in the hands of the restaurant’s manager, but that he could certainly talk to them about it again.

After about 40 minutes, I went downstairs to complain again. The employee (Gabriel, who was extremely nice and courteous) let me know that he had spoken to the restaurant manager twice and there was nothing that they could do. I asked when it would stop and he said that typically the music goes on until about 3 AM. I expressed my concern and told him that on Saturday we would need to be moved to a different room where the music could not be heard.

Sometime between midnight and 1 AM, my wife had become very upset about the situation and dialed 911 to file a noise complaint with New Rochelle police, however the officer that answered told her there was nothing they could do and that they could not file a noise complaint against the hotel, and then hung up on her. At that point my wife went downstairs to speak to the manager of the restaurant and the employee at the front desk about the situation. When she returned to the room she informed me that the manager of the restaurant told her there was nothing that she could do except offer my wife some warm milk or a Xanax. My wife requested a refund for the evening’s rate based on Radisson’s “100% Guest Satisfaction” guarantee written on the back of our key cards (also discussed on your website – http://www.radisson.com/worldofradisson). The employee rejected that request, saying that they actually did not have the ability to do that, and that if we really had a problem we should take it up with corporate and credited a partial amount.

The music at the nightclub continued until 3AM and was shut down just as the guests of the Funk wedding party were returning and making all manner of noise including revving motorcycles in the parking lot, running in the halls, and singing and chanting.

The following day was extremely difficult and unpleasant since we were only able to get about 4 hours of sleep that night.

On Saturday, we were moved to Room 510 (which was a bit further away from the elevators) with the idea that the noise would be less noticeable in that room. On Saturday evening we returned to the hotel at 11:30 PM and the music could still be heard clearly from our new room.  Again, the music did not stop until 3 AM Sunday morning.

On Sunday, my wife and I requested a late checkout time (based on the policy listed at http://www.radisson.com/worldofradisson of allowing late checkout for no extra charge until 6 pm) so that we could attend an additional family activitiy (family brunch in the very same restaurant) without having to worry about checking out until after the brunch ended. When we requested late checkout we were told that the only way that would happen would be if we paid an additional charge (I believe that was somewhere around $60-$70). Instead we interrupted our time at the family brunch to check out on time since the hotel was unwilling to honor your advertised policies.

Needless to say, we were not very impressed with our experience at the Radisson, and regret having given you our business. Being kept awake until 3AM every night due to pounding techno music coming from the nightclub kept us from enjoying our stay and the family activities that we attended while in New Rochelle do to our extreme lack of sleep. I find it ludicrous that a hotel that’s supposed to provide a calm environment for sleeping would choose to alienate its own paying guests with by making it a challenge for them to sleep until early hours of the morning.

The fact that the hotel personnel chose not to honor policies that are clearly stated on your website is also disturbing. But what disappointed me most of all was that these disruptions shortened the amount of time that we were able to spend with my family, who we seldom see, and that these disruptions kept us from being well-rested in order to enjoy the time with our family.

I would like to request a full refund for our stay in accordance with your satisfaction policy.

Sincerely,
<my name, redacted>

I still can’t believe it all. Hopefully someone with the company reads this.

If this sounds fucked up to you in any way, I encourage you to contact the good folks at the Red & Black with a letter to the editor. Or if not, you could drop the author a message (one Adina Solomon, LinkedIn profile here) letting her know what you think of her groundbreaking reporting.

Now a little bit on my history with Lizard… once upon a time, when I was a wee young boy taking guitar lessons and carefully forging calluses on my fingers, my sage Berklee-trained instructor Waldo Ortiz somehow got the idea that my budding musical intellect would somehow be turned on by… King Crimson records, of all things.  I’m not sure if this had anything to do with his perception of my musical tastes at the time or if it was just him trying to pass on his own love for the quirkyness that is Crimson.  Of course, Casa de los Tapes (“The House of Tapes”) did not stock a single copy, so I special ordered my very own copy of Lizard, based only on the cover art in the catalog.  A week and a half later, I forked over my allowance and ran home with a brand new CD to pop in my boombox. And to make a long story short, I was hooked. Lizard remains my favorite Crimson record to this day.

Fast forward to this morning, when I queued up my freshly downloaded remastered copy and played it in my car on the way to work.

I was blown away. The stereo separation in my car’s stock sound system was SO clear… until today I had never realized how much work and thought went into track panning on this album.  During certain parts of Cirkus and Indoor Games, I felt like Robert Fripp was actually sitting in my passenger seat.  With the drums panned hard left for parts of those songs, minute little details of his guitar lines that have escaped me for years suddenly revealed themselves, and I remembered just why I love this album so much.

So, long-time Crimson fans, find this remastered edition and give it a listen if you’d like to rediscover this underrated classic. And if you’ve never heard of em, now’s the time to start, and there’s no better introduction than this.

If you know anything about the state of the art of guitar effects, you may have heard about Strymon in this past year. A reswizzled, rebranded son of Damage Control (who brought you the Timeline and Glass Nexus tube-equipped pedals), Strymon has spent most of 2010 releasing new an unbelieveable number of new and exciting digital modeling effects for guitarists: the Brigadier analog delay emulator, the El Capistan tape delay emulator, the Orbit Flanger, the Blue Sky Reverb… and each sounds better than the last.

For all those who thought the output would slow, Strymon has kicked off 2011 with some new offerings, including a rebranded and updated revision of the Timeline delay with MIDI control (which I MUST have), and the Lex rotary speaker emulator.  At some point, I remember trying to draw out the physics of a rotating speaker cabinet on paper, but these guys have done a much better job by putting out a whole white paper on the matter – it’s definitely worth a read for musicians and geeks alike.

Check it out!

In the meantime I wanted to leave you with a link to a cool little article I found about BitTorrent. It’s a write-up from Bobby Owsinski’s Music 3.0 blog about another article on the state of BitTorrent and what it means to music today. I found it interesting because the author of the original article clearly does not thoroughly understand the technology that they wrote about, making for some interesting conclusions… I believe the main reason for this confusion is a failure to distinguish between BitTorrent the company or the software client, and BitTorrent, the protocol. Also it’s interesting that BitTorrent stats are invariably interpreted from a sort of pessimist perspective – if music downloads are up, people say it’s bad because the industry isn’t cashing in on them (which is actually NOT necessarily true and reflects confusion about what BitTorrent is and how it works), and if music downloads are down, it’s bad for the industry because “music isn’t worth pirating anymore.” Isn’t it also possible that lower music download numbers through BT could mean that the industry has figured more and better ways to monetize their content?

By the way, if you’re looking for a good BT client, look no further than uTorrent, preferred by geeks everywhere.

Thanks for reading. I’m glad to have you back.

I don’t think either of them realizes they are proving his point much more thoroughly than any two-minute debate they could have…

It’s here.

Enjoy!

I’m calling it the Red Eye because of the art on the box and my clever LED configuration. Of course since this was my first project, it doesn’t work.  The red LED’s light up and it works in bypass but nothing else, so I guess I’ve got some troubleshooting ahead of me.

Once I finally get it working, my hope is to use it to run my Boss DD-6 through it semi-permanently.  You see, the DD-6 is a great unit with a lot of possibilities and potential, but one fatal flaw – it’s tap tempo control is activated by holding down the footswitch for 2 seconds.  While you hold down the switch the effect is already engaged (at the currently set rate). Once you’re in tap and you set your rate, then you have to hold down the switch for another 2 seconds, which disengages the tap but leaves the effect on, and once tap is disengaged you can stomp the switch again to turn the effect off.  So tapping with the effect disengaged is impossible, which means if you don’t want a mess of ill-timed repeats while you set the effect you pretty much have to stop playing for 10-15 seconds.

Adding the Red Eye will let me leave the effect in tap mode semi-permanently (or at least for most of a gig) and turn the effect on and off independently, so I can then tap out the new tempos with the effect turned off.  Then the additional switchable variable feedback loop would let me conjure up infinite repeats (and hopefully induce DD-6 self-oscillation) on command.  That is if I can get it all working (hopefully that happens before the next 3052 gig)…

In other news, I’ve just received my Tube Screamer clone kit from JD Sleep’s General Guitar Gadgets site, and I’ll be trying to tackle that soon.  Hopefully I won’t screw it up.