Dan's Place

 

 

What a hassle! I have to clean up my Silver 1932 Conn Transitional tenor sax in readiness for selling it :(

 

I know, I was meant to do this months ago when I got my newer horn but I have been so busy with the change of jobs recently, and damn it, it has been really hard to coming to terms with parting with what is really an awesome sounding horn. I really loved the sound of that horn although I did find it a bit bright and ended up finding my love (in terms of horns anyway) in the ever-so-slightly younger and significantly more mechanically stable/reliable Conn 10M (1936). Not to mention that profoundly cleaning a saxophone is actually a bitch of a job. I have done it on this sax once before and ultimately it is really tough on your hands, not just from the hard, pressurised rubbing that I have to do to get the embedded grime off, but also due to the unavoidable reality of being pricked to the bone by the springs which get left after taking the keys off. Of course that is assuming you can actually get the keys off which in itself is no mean feat especially with an old neglected horn like this - more on this below. I also originally intended to put it all back together at the end of this cleaning session but I'm afraid this jigsaw puzzle is going to have be left to my trusty and well versed friend Conrad(a.k.a. Dr Sax) as I just don't have the time at the moment. For those that don't know, Conrad is a saxophone repairing genius who specialises in (or perhaps thrives on) vintage horns like mine and will be able to put it back together in less than 30 minutes most likely. I help Conrad with IT issues from time to time and he helps me with my sax issues so we complement each others services.

 

I've posted 2 photos in this blog (1 before, 1 after) showing how the Bell and bottom have come up and there are more photos up on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=12503&id=761312572) if anyone wants to see more.

 

 

 

It seems that the combination of several years of 1 - 3 gigs a week, the lack of cleaning it on-the-go, and then leaving it in the case for the last 6 months has rendered a lot of the rods/screws that hold the keys in place very difficult to undo. Anyway, I eventually got all the keys off and gave it a cloudy ammonia/water bath for a couple of hours followed by a good scrub in the same dreaded and foul smelling swill using a trusty (but well used) dish washing brush.

 

Following the bath/scrub I started on the Bell/bottom of the horn using a rag and a trusty metal cleaner solution that I have. Lots of hard work later and the result can be seen below. You see all that black grime on the rag right. Well you can also see that the real hard work remains! I now have to clean up the body which is actually the hardest/worst bit because I have to dodge the springs (which have razor sharp ends and really penetrate) while still applying strong pressure to the rub, *sigh*. I believe that Fran is going to help me too which is great because all of the keys have to be done as well and this will take a fair effort. I reckon we'll be lucky to be finished by the end of the week.

 

(NB: The apparent colour difference of the horn in these 2 photos is actually due to the fact that I used a flash in the first photo and not in the second, but anyway it is very obvious below where it has/hasn't been cleaned - as per the whole point of the exercise)

 

 

Anyway, its no use winging on as I'm sitting here by myself and not even Henry the dog is listening.

 

Off to bed, work tomorrow, ciao!

 

 

 

Man, I'm really loving this new Nokia E65 phone I got after Fran accidently machine-washed my older Nokia along with my jeans.

 

We were lucky enough to get out of the contract I had been in for just over a year without too much penalty. Paying the penalty was cheaper than it was going to be to buy a new reasonable-quality phone outright, and I was really sick of those $60 pre-paid jobs. I have had 2 of those since losing the original contracted Nokia on the Hume somewhere after a gig in Albury, and at least one of them ended up dying in the wash a while ago as well! This time round we forked out an extra couple of bucks a month for insurance so we're covered should it happen again.

 

The E65 has 802.11 b/g WLAN support so I can use it wirelessly at home or at work to browse the web, hook up with any pop3-enabled email accounts (such as gmail etc), retreive emails/calendar appointments etc from work's exchange server (via an onboard application called 'Mail For Exchange'), access Live.com mail (i.e. hotmail) - all without incurring the ludicrous data access costs imposed by Optus when accessing their 'Optus Internet' connection. The only thing that the 'Optus Internet' connection does give one is the roaming freedom I guess, but I can live without that on a day-to-day basis and will only use it if I have to.

 

The built in Nokia Web Browser is really pretty cool and it formats pages into a reasonably readable format. It has a 'Page Overview' type of feature that lets you see the page in mini format with a red box overlaying where you currently are within the page. You can then move the box around to get say from one of the page to the other without having to scroll slowly through it as you would in full view. You can zoom stuff from 50% to 125% as well which helps sometimes as well.

 

The E65's operating system is the Symbian S60 which seems to support Java/C++ or Python application. It comes with a suite of apps including some office stuff so you can read Word Documents etc in it which is pretty cool when you're receiveing busines email on the go. I might look into the world of Symbian dev if/when I (ever) get the time. Could be fun.

 

Battery seems really quck to charge (maybe 1 - 2 hours) and lasts quite a while, even when playing around on the web a bit but the phone lacks a bit when it comes to the 2 Mega Pixel camera (which supposedly can record video too but I haven't tried that yet). Its photo quality isn't great and the images seem to be 1600X1200 (300 dpi) 24 bit by default. It's ok for what I use it for mainly which is photographing the whiteboard at work for later reference. They give you a 256 MB microSD card with it but I can see that becomming full pretty quickly. With flash memory so cheap these days I'm suprised it was't at least 1 GB. Cheapskates! In short it is much better suited to web related stuff than media playing.

 

Of course the E65 also has Blue Tooth (BT) support and so I can sync my Outlook contacts and calander appointments via the work laptop at any time too. In fact, it seems to have decided to auto-sync every 5 mniutes or so, but I can't find the setting to change that. It may well be in the PC software on the laptop I just haven't sussed it all out yet. The Web Browser supports bookmarks and feeds and of course lets you sync those via BT as well.

 

The other great thing is that the phone supports VOIP over WLAN and I installed this application called fring which is very cool and allows me to use the handset to call Skype contacts (VOIP over WLAN or 3G). This is a really good feature as you are using your home (or work) broadband to convey the call data and you don't have to be at the PC while doing it. Very nice! It feels much more natural to talk on the phone than the headset with boom mike. Fring also allows you to connect to Windows Live (MSN messenger) so you can send/receive MSN messages (or ICQ messages if thats your fancy) on the phone rather than the PC. Obviously it's more cumbersome to type, but it does support the predictive text mode as per standard GSM text messaging.

 

Overall, the E65 is a very impressive business-enabled phone and worth the money - $0 on a 2 year $49 or $59 cap .

The other bonus is that now I'm on a cap we're also saving on the monthly bill. I'd highly recommend it to anyone thinking of upgrading.

 

See this for a review. They like the E65 overall, but are slightly upset by its 'Form Factor'.

Personally, I don't give a rats about any Form Factor. It's the features I like.

 

 

 

Are you LinkedIn?

 

If not, you probably should be!

 

 

 

Simple really, hope to build it into something useful.