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Using my new web hosting now, after my disastrous experiences with LunarPages.com. The server has been reliable, but the tech support leaves much to be desired.

Case 1: I want to be able to check my spam box, which is where BlueHost’s Spam Assasin is supposed to put your spam. I was told by two of Bluehost.com’s �experts� via chat (you can’t talk to anyone and the responses take five minutes each time you type a reply) that I could do this. It didn’t work. I finally discovered after searching the (self)help pages that it is disabled by default and you have to make a special request to have it enabled. You’d think they could clue their tech support people in on this so they don’t waste customers’ time looking for non-existent spam folders.

To add insult to injury, the help page states that you should email them to get the spam box enabled. So I did. Ten minutes later I got an email saying,”You can no longer create a new ticket through email, only through our Help Center.”

These people must think I have time to burn.

Case 2: I set up a mailing list through CPanel. (One nice thing – Lunarpages.com only gave you one mailing list. Bluehost.com seems to give you several.) It didn’t seem to be working so the chat support person told me to open a trouble ticket. That was on a Sunday night. Supposedly they have a 24-hour response time. Assuming they read my ticket Monday morning, I should have hear something by Tuesday morning. In fact that was the the due date/time their system “stamped” on the ticket. By Tuesday evening I had figured out the problem myself and I replied to the ticket complaining about the delay and informing them I’d fixed the problem. I checked back the next day and they had closed the ticket as resolved, which is fine, but an apology for the delay would have been nice.

Well, at least I’m up and running and none of my databases have been deleted, which is more than I was able to say for LunarPages.com.

Okay, what do I expect for $7 a month? I would pay more for better service, but my research seems to indicate that more money doesn’t get you better service, just more bandwidth or a dedicated server. I don’t need those things. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

I have already expressed my horror at LunarPages’ awful tech support and the fact that they deleted my blog files and did not care. Here’s the latest addition of insult to injury:

While I was in the process of transferring my files from LunarPages’ servers, I opened a support ticket asking if I could access my files through ftp even if my dns servers no longer pointed to LunarPages. After one full week, I received a form reply that told me everything about ftp except the answer to my question. I replied to this effect and received an apology from a supervisor and the info I had requested.

Today I received an email indicating that, at my request, they have agreed to give me a prorated refund on the remainder of my current year of service at my request. I thought it only fair to give you the full story, although I have no way of knowing if they would have issued the refund if I hadn’t been blogging the whole thing on a non-LP server. Maybe they would have just deleted my files as they did when the blog was hosted on their server.

In any event the issue is now resolved.

While I was able to save my blog and install it on the new server because I had backed up my files (note to everyone: BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!), to this day Lunarpages.com has not reinstated my blog files on their server which they deleted. (Two business days after my panicked message to them that they had deleted files from my account, they sent one brief message (in a slew of harrassing emails about my cpu usage) in which they casually mentioned they would try to find the files. They never did.

If anyone wants to see the nightmarish dealings I have had with Lunarpages tech support I have uploaded a pdf of the entire email exchange for your reading horror. Click here and it will open in a new window.

I never got around to discussing the other reason I decided, after about 5 years with them, that the service and tech support level at Lunarpages.com has gotten so intolerable that I can no longer use them as my hosting company.

I called Lunarpages tech support a couple of weeks ago because I could not get their server-side installation of SpamAssasin to filter a single piece of spam. It’s really simple for the end user (me) to configure Spam Assasin. There are only a few choices. Nevertheless I respectfully asked the tech to confirm I had set it up correctly and in about ten seconds it was clear I had. So I asked him why not a single piece of email coming into my account was being tagged as spam. Did he set up a filter and run a trace on a test email? Did he check the server logs? Did he verify in any way that the problem was not on Lunarpages’ side? No. He merely replied, “Spam has gotten really smart lately.”

Yes, that’s right. Spam is SO SMART that world-renowned spam software used by all major web hosts including you guys is unable to filter a single piece of spam!

He also suggested I purchase some spam filtering software for my computer, which is a reasonable thing for me to do but not a replacement for LunarPages configuring the features they advertise so that they actually work.

Of course as soon as I changed to my new hosting company and configured Spam Assasin on their server, it worked perfectly and my spam problem is now manageable for the first time in over a year.

Two days ago I updated my wordpress installation. It went very smoothly. Thanks WordPress! You are great. NOT so great is my web hosting company, Lunar Pages. I’m still getting apparently automated emails from them that I need to delete my old WP installation. And no help is available. So I’m cleaning out some old files in the WP directory and testing it to make sure I didn’t delete anything critical.

Fortunately (or not) the people at Lunar Pages are too stupid and lazy to find this post. (Plus I backed up my site in case they exhibit even greater incompetence or actual maliciousness and delete my files. (For more insight from people who’ve had even worse experiences with them than I have, please visit this web site.)

Isn’t this an interesting post? 🙂

I’m on the plane home from Germany (by way of London Heathrow. Oh My God – don’t ever go through Heathrow if you can avoid it. The lines and the logic are insane). I will upload this post when I return, as well as a couple of pictures.

(Speaking of God – I cannot believe I actually saw 3 of the Republican candidates for President raise their hands when asked how many of them believe that the biblical explanation of creation is the literal truth. How frightening. Just finished a great book by Richard Dawkins called The God Delusion. )

The most interesting thing about this flight (not the trip, just the flight) is my discovery that a Mars bar is apparently the same as a Three Musketeers. Maybe the bar was just mislabeled, because I believe Three Musketeers is also made by Mars, so that doesn’t make much sense. Can someone clear this up for me? Vielleicht Ich wilt googlen.

Here is a picture of Klaus Kugel and Christian Ramond setting up for our gig at SchauspielHaus, a very cool little theater in Bergneustadt which is near Koln.

Klaus and his wife Uta, who is an actress, live in the country near Koln. Here is the view from their terrace. As a New Yorker this is mind-blowing to me…like living in Central Park.

Klaus recorded the concert. We played a couple of tunes and some free. The gig went very well and I will post some mp3 samples soon. Watch this space or email me to be notified when the samples go up. Particularly interesting (or so I felt when we played it) was a deconstruction of Monk’s Straight No Chaser. We’ll see if my perception was correct. [EDIT: the recording didn’t come out due to technical difficulties. We’ll try again next time.]

I also had some nice gigs with guitarist Roland Heinz, who is a brilliant and creative improvisor. It was our first time playing duo togetther. I hope we will do more in the future and perhaps I will try to record it.

Now I’ve got to start practicing for the September 24th “21st Century Schizoid Music” concert. I have to relearn the Nabokov music I wrote about two years ago; at this concert I also intend to perform a sonata for violin and piano sonata written by my father, Frederick Piket, in 1932 when he was studying with Franz Schreker in Berlin. (Look for a web site about Frederick Piket in the future. I have reserved the domain name but haven’t had time to put anything up.)

The other half of the concert will be my trio with Billy Mintz and Ratzo Harris. So it should be an enjoyable evening showcasing the variety of creative music I am into. As Duke said, “there are only two kinds of music – good and bad.”

I almost forgot…this pic is mostly for the amusement of the West Coasters…

Time to hit the (piano) keys.

I stepped off the plane last Tuesday, looking forward to a week in Berlin – to playing with my old friend drummer Andrea Marcelli, and going to my favorite ice cream parlor; and I got sick immediately. I think the air on the planes is worse than ever. I am sure I got sick on my American Airlines flight. I was fine at takeoff. Anyway, I got worse as the week progressed, and although I did get to play a nice session with Andrea, by the day of the gig I was in no condition to do anything but lie in bed. Last Friday I went to the doctor, and today the antibiotics are finally kicking in and I am a little more myself. So hopefully the next ten days of gigs in Ireland, Innsbruck and Koln will go smoothly. I will keep you posted.

Since there’s nothing very exciting to discuss this week (the color of my phlegm being my main focus recently), I’ll tell you about a nice gig I went to about a week ago. Mike Garson played at the Blue Note for the after hours show a couple of Saturdays ago. Jazz fans may know Mike as a great West coast jazz pianist with a remarkable virtuosity and scary harmonic inventiveness. (There’s a link on my site to a duo we did at his studio a couple of years ago.) Rock devotees will know him as the long-time pianist for David Bowie. It was a pleasure to hear Mike in a piano trio context playing with a great rhythm section – Ratzo Harris and Billy Mintz! Mike and Billy’s friendship goes back to their teenage years when they played Bar Mitzvahs together. Mike asked Billy to suggest a bassist and Billy asked me and the only logical person was Ratzo. Who else in New York could keep up with these monsters? It was a true pleasure to hear them playing mostly standards but in a decidely non-standard way.

During the first set, a colleague of Mike’s from Bowie’s touring band, Gail Ann Dorsey, sang a stunning version of Alfie with the band. Everything about her singing was spot on – pitch and tone of course, but most importantly phrasing. I have never heard a better jazz singer live. Her intuition was flawless. She had a perfect sense of when to be true to the melody, and when to play with it without ruining it. So many singers miss that delicate balance.

(I had arrived at the club early enough to hear a couple of songs from the club’s headliner earlier that evening. For me, Gail’s singing further highlighted the tragedy of the incompetent Steve Tyrell singing to a packed house of (mostly) brainwashed spectators. Here’s a guy who doesn’t even sound like a wedding band singer. He sounds like the amateur family friend who insists on sitting in with the wedding band. Compare that with the exquisite musicianship on stage that night after hours. Something is really dysfuntional in the music industry.)

During the second set, Mike invited me to sit in. He said it was the least he could do since he’d borrowed my rhythm section for his gig. After a rather uptempo If I Were a Bell (I’d just had a cup of coffee to keep me up through the late night show and what I knew would be a hang after), Mike joined me and we played some duo. It was really fun. Watching his thunderous chops, I almost forgot there was an audience out there. It was such a kick trying to keep up with him.

Afterwards the four of us grabbed a bite and by the time I got home it was 6AM. Felt like the old days.

I’ve decided that, instead of waiting until I’m on the road to add to this blog, I’d use it to keep you posted on what’s going on with my music and career. If you’d like to receive these occasional updates by email, please contact me.

I’m so pleased at the fantastic review Love and Beauty received from Tom Conrad in the current issue of JazzTimes. To read it online, click here. For info on the CD, go to www.robertajazz.com.

The Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra (SWOJO) has offered to purchase three of my big band arrangements of my compositions, including two arrangements of tunes from Love and Beauty. I’m very encouraged by this and will try to write more for jazz orchestra. It’s so time-consuming to write a big band chart – but very rewarding when it gets played! I’ll also try to post some samples of these arrangements at www.robertajazz.com in the near future. I haven’t really publicized them before, but my charts have always gotten positive feedback from my colleagues, and now this aspect of my musical life seems to be gathering its own momentum.

In November of 2007, the trio will be returning to the West coast for our third consecutive year. One of the most important ingredients in music is playing with the same people consistently for a long period of time. This is a very rare thing in the jazz world now. I’ve had this trio with Ratzo and Billy for a few years now, and audience members keep telling us it shows in the music.

In New York we can be heard on August 19th as part of the Harlem Meer Performance Festival at the Dana Discovery Center Central Park.

In May and June of 2007 I will be in Europe, performing with several fantastic musicians including the drummer Klaus Kugel in Germany and the guitarist Roland Heinz in Austria, and the drummer Andrea Marcelli in Berlin.

My work, “Five Poems by Nabokov” will be performed in New York on September 24 as part of the 21st Century Schizoid Music series curated by Frank Oteri of the American Music Center. The work, composed for mezzo-soprano, violin, piano and speaker, blends neo-classical harmonic concepts and free improvisational sections. Also apearing on that bill will be my trio with Ratzo and Billy. Hence the term “schizoid”! I look forward to this opportunity to stretch in different directions on the same night. What fun!

I am sorry I didn’t do a better job of blogging this tour. Below are some photos to compensate.

Here is one of Masa and Billy at our performance at Jazz del Clot:

Here is one of the scenery in Innsbruck. I played there a bit with the guitarist Roland Heinz, his brother Elmar and Billy Mintz after our Spain tour:

In Berlin , I played at the A-Trane with the guitarist Jeanfrancois Prins. A few days later I visited the Hoschule Fur Musik at the University of the Arts. My father studied composition here in 1931-1932 with Franz Schreker:

We played the last two nights at Bogui Jazz, a beautful and relatively new jazz club in Madrid for the 23rd Madrid Jazz Festival. It went very well. Billy and I have both played with Masa Kamaguchi a lot. Masa lived in NY for many years and relocated to Barcelona with his wife Patrica about a year and a half ago.

Tonight we are playing at the first Jazz Del Clot Festival, which takes place in Masa and Patricia’s basement. I will try to post some pictures soon.

It is very nice to be back in Barcelona, which is as beautiful as I remember. As much as I liked Madrid, Barcelona is something really special.