Bet you Jack Bauer doesn't own a Gerard Darel "24 Heures" bag!

The following takes place between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. This week, I attended the opening of the first Gerard Darel store in Canada at Ogilvies, Montreal.














While sipping great champagne, I browsed the collection, and was quite surprised to find that I really liked the wearable look his collection had (when I say wearable, I mean my wife!). You sometimes see these fashion shows with a models wearing something similar the the Bjork "swan" look, but Gerard seems to actually make clothes that you can wear.

The big hit of course is the "24 Heures" bag, pictured above with Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose music was heard during the event. Unfortunately, I did not win the "24 Heures" bag as the door prize, but had a good time nonetheless. What I did find ironic, is that the ones serving us the "Scooby Snacks of the rich and famous", were sometimes better looking than the models!

So maybe Jack Bauer should think about getting himself one of these bags, where he can stuff a few items such as guns, cel phone, toothpaste, etc...before going after the bad guys.

Mozart VS Marilyn Manson

I went to the Louis Pasteur Canadian Foundation benefit at the invitation of Normand Lebeau from Mandrake, one of my clients. The event raised over $260k to help develop new vaccines and fund research. The event theme was homage to Mozart. Now, as you can tell by my previous posts, I'm not what you call a Classical music enthusiast, but I do enjoy it on occasion.

Yannnick Nézet-Séguin & Suzie Leblanc gave us a great sampling of some of the more obscure Mozart selections. What I enjoyed was a small explanation before each song of some of the lyrics, to help us understand the theme or style of the song. What a minute...lyrics...Mozart? Speaking to Harry Trihey sitting next to me, we both were surprised that Mozart even had lyrics. Now Harry is much more educated than me in this type of music, but nonetheless, we were even more surprised to learn that Mozart composed a few French songs, which were sang at the event.

Now here is the deal with Classical music, and remember that I am in no way an expert. In contemporary music, artists will often cover another's song. I thought of a good extreme example: Marilyn Manson covering Sweet Dreams from the Eurythmics. It is almost a new song it is so different. But when it comes to Classical music, I just don't see too much room for interpretation/improvisation. It seems that to be a great artist in Classical music, you must reproduce exactly the sounds of so long ago, getting every nuance, tone, pitch, and so forth. True it takes much pratice and discipline and those who do it, are remarkable. How many languages did Suzie have to learn before being able to sing all these songs? So with this line of thinking, all these Classical music bands are in reality cover bands.

Now let's see the Montreal Symphony Orchestra remake a Marilyn Manson song...that I would pay to see!

Logitech - A new hope.

So the saga unfolded finally with another call to their support line. I gave my case number, and mentioned how I brought my dongle to the office (I have 2 of these Bluetooth Keyboard + mouse combos) and swapped it with the working one, and I got the same detection issue as at home, but if I put the working one back in, it worked fine.

In the matter of a few minutes, they had my shipping address to send me a replacement unit. No explaining what a "firmware" was...they understood.

How important is customer service? With that one call, I almost stopped selling Logitech products. I influence the choices for such items to my clients, and not only would they have lost CompuQuest as a client, but all the clients we sell to. But, I gave them a chance, and I got the good service that I did not get on that nightmarish call.

Logitech...you are back in my good books.