Highline Ballroom Falsified My Signed Credit Card Receipt

A couple of weeks ago Melanie and I saw a fantastic musician at The Highline Ballroom (431 West 16th Street), Ana Popovic. When I got the bill, the "Amount" was $105.61. Below that was a line that said "Included Gratuity" listing $14.55. I took this to mean the "Amount" included a gratuity of $14.55, so I wrote $105.61 for the total and signed the receipt.

The next day I looked at my receipt and contacted The Highline via their web page to ask if I'd inadvertently stiffed the waitress of her tip. I said I'd gladly arrange to give her a tip if it hadn't been included, and I asked if I'd interpreted the receipt incorrectly. They never responded.

I now see on my credit card statement The Highline put a charge through of $120.16 EVEN THOUGH I'D WRITTEN $105.61 AND SIGNED FOR THAT AMOUNT! I'm pretty sure that's ILLEGAL, and I'm very very disappointed at the way The Highline does business. For me to ask The Highline about it, AND for The Highline to ignore me, AND for The Highline to falsify the amount of my signed credit card receipt really pisses me off.

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I got this reply tonight from The Highline Ballroom:

Hello Mr. Hughes

My name is Christian Morasco, General Manager of the Highline Ballroom. Ive been notify by Yelp of your review of our venue. After some research I was able to find your email and review your situation. I wish I was alerted immediately, I would have responded right away. 

I deeply apologize for not getting back to you the same day. In response to your initial question, the net amount of your bill was 105.61$ to that the included gratuity of 14.55$ was added. The total amount was 120.16$.

As of late we no longer apply auto gratuity.

I would like to invite you and your guest at our venue and Ill personally make sure you'll have a wonderful experience.

Please take a look at the calendar on our website, Ill be glad to comp 2 tickets for any of our shows. 

Again, we are sincerely sorry. 

You can also contact me directly on my cell phone at 917.207.0837.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Best Regards

Christian Morasco

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I replied with this:

Thank you for getting back to me. I had contested the charge with my bank and told them to reduce payment to $105.61, the amount I’d originally authorized. Now that I know the $14.55 is for an 18% gratuity, I’ll contact my bank and ask them to honor the full $120.16 charge.

However, there’s still a problem here. I wrote a total amount of $105.61 on my receipt and signed that, and The Highline had NO right to change the total and charge me more without my approval! A gratuity is not mandatory and it’s not the law. If I or anyone chooses not to leave a tip, The Highline has NO RIGHT to add the tip to my signed receipt and charge me for it, none. This is completely unacceptable. As I said, because I'd meant to leave a tip, I’ll let the charge go through, but I’m very upset about this.

The problem is in the confusing wording of the receipt. An “included gratuity” implies the gratuity has been included in the amount shown. If not, it should be referred to as a “suggested gratuity" or a “recommended gratuity," NOT an “included gratuity.”

Thank you for the offer of comped tickets, but I don’t want them. I don’t mind paying a fair price and leaving a fair tip (I usually leave 20%, not 18%), but thank you anyway. At the moment I’m not sure I’ll be going back to The Highline Ballroom.

The 100-Foot Journey

Tuesday night Melanie and I saw an advanced screening of “The Hundred-Foot Journey” starring Helen Mirren and a bunch of unknowns. Although the critics seem divided so far – it has a 59% rating on Rotten Tomatoes – I’d probably give it three or 3.5 out of four stars.

“The Hundred-Foot Journey” is a bit old-fashioned in its sentiments and, according to Melanie, a little corny. It’s a character film based on a best-selling novel whose literary pedigree is on display in the intelligent structure and clever dialogue. (Early in the movie a car’s brakes fail and a character says, “Sometimes brakes break for a reason.” That’s a real writer’s line, a clever line, and it gets repeated.) This is an effective, feel-good movie, well-motivated, with intelligently drawn characters.

Helen Mirren’s Madame Mallory is the standout, showing character growth through the film, something great actors thrive on. Or maybe they create it. None of the other characters has quite so developed an arc. Why? The screenwriters (Steven Knight and Richard C. Morais) have no reason to flesh out one character more than the others, so you have to conclude the character’s nicely executed transition is at least partly the result of Mirren’s talent. The other main characters are also shaped by events through the film, but only Mirren fully satisfies as being multi-dimensional; the other actors are a bit one-note in comparison. They’re not bad, but when you consider the depths Mirren pulls from her character, you understand a bit more what makes her so good.

The movie is about an Indian family whose restaurant is burned down during social and political unrest. They emigrate to Europe with no clear idea of where they’ll end up. While driving by a small French village, their car breaks down and they go into town looking for repairs. Serendipitously the town has an abandoned restaurant for sale, so the father of the brood – Papa, played with humor and warmth by Om Puri – decides this is where they’ll stay. They live in and restore the restaurant, which is across the road – exactly 100 feet - from a Michelin one-star restaurant. Helen Mirren runs the Michelin restaurant and doesn’t welcome these illiterate foreigners who dare to bring their lack of sophistication and vulgar cuisine to her town (not to mention the possibility of their stealing her patrons). Tensions soon spring up between the two factions and we get a lot of expected cultural biases and stereotypes, some mined for humor, and some depicted less pleasantly.

One of the sons in the Indian family - Hassan Haji played by Manish Dayal - has a passion for food and cooking. There’s a pretty young French woman working for the enemy (Madame Mallory) who attracts Haji’s attention, as you know she will from the moment they meet. Of course he’s attracted, look at her smile, she could be a movie actress. She’s the sunny Marguerite played by Charlotte Le Bon. We expect a relationship to form between the two attractive young people, and one does, though not exactly as we expect.

We follow as Haji’s skill grows to the point where Madame Mallory offers him an apprenticeship of six months at her restaurant. She sees a future in him and thinks they’ll both benefit from the experience, she by getting a second Michelin star with Haji on her staff, and Haji by learning French culinary methods to add to his repertoire. It’s a nice story development and feels organically motivated. From that point on the movie shifts away from the two factions and focuses more on Haji’s growth. The movie loses a bit of its warmth in doing that; I would have liked seeing more of Haji’s family in the second half of the film.

This is a “food” movie and it seems there’s been a lot of them lately. Like the others, this one gives you mouth-watering shots of food being prepared and eaten, something dubbed by critics as “food porn.” But that term, already a cliché, is too dismissive here. I’m not sure it’s easy to film food in a way that makes you desire it, almost taste it. For me, these shots, images, and montages of food work. And, like many of the other food-centric movies I’ve seen lately, this one isn’t about food so much as about life and love. That’s a metaphor we’ve seen before, yes, but it works here.

Of course we expect the initial animosities to eventually thaw, and they do, but it’s done well and you go with it. Melanie called the movie too predictable, and though I understand her point and could also tell where the major storylines were going, I took a lot of pleasure in letting the movie get there. We know in every movie there are going to be elements we’ve seen before. Certain devices are almost required to tell a story we’ll follow and be interested in. We know we’ll get conflicts of some kind, and romances will probably start, almost fail, then rekindle. But when these are properly baked (ahem), the movie works. 

This movie works. It’s charming with rich scenery and evocative cinematography (despite the cheesy Disney-animation fireworks). There’s a great tracking shot that weaves in and out and over and under the action as people work to restore the restaurant. I didn’t expect that kind of cinematic enthusiasm in a movie like this. The shot doesn’t call a lot of attention to itself, but moves along at a leisurely pace like the rest of the movie. Yes, the movie is leisurely, but in a good way, don’t confuse “leisurely” with “boring.” The movie has a steady, believable rhythm.

Most of the time. There are flaws. Haji’s rise seems to happen too quickly, too easily. Where and how exactly did he learn his techniques? We know his mother taught him Indian cuisine, and he seems to have had an innate understanding of food from a young age, and Marguerite does give Haji French cook books on the sly, AND he has his apprenticeship under Madam Mallory, but he's depicted almost as a bit of a savant; it doesn't sufficiently explain his rise.

Yes, the big relationships that form are predictable, but that doesn’t make them unsatisfying. I like the relationship between Haji and Marguerite. They’re clearly attracted to each other, but they don’t rush into bed together, this isn’t that kind of movie. The characters are thoughtful and deliberate. Actions and behaviors are measured and believable. Marguerite also yearns to become a successful chef. As they get closer, she clues Haji in on some of Madam Mallory’s secrets. Later, when Haji is offered the internship by Madam Mallory, he rushes to share his good fortune with Marguerite. But Marguerite is jealous and angry and accuses him of using her to get the position. He tries to console her, and in a lesser movie he’d win her over, but not here. It’s a nice moment. We learn she’s as driven to succeed as he is and won’t be reduced to being a supportive girlfriend – or any other kind of girlfriend, from the way things are looking.

There are other well-played scenes that help define the characters. At one point earlier in the movie, when Haji is rebuffed by Madame Mallory during an attempt at a truce, we expect Marguerite to offer consolation, but she doesn’t, and Haji is left to make sense of what happened on his own. Nice.

There’s another relationship that develops slowly with Madam Mallroy and someone. I won’t give it away, but there’s a nice scene at night where she walks away from her potential suitor, who feels rejected. The camera cuts away to Madam Mallory’s home and we see she's left the large bay doors wide open, her curtains billowing gently out in the evening air, a wonderfully suggestive and erotic invitation.

I enjoyed this one. It had great warmth, and if some of it is predictable, so what, it works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred-Foot_Journey_(film)

Drobo 5D Drive Array

I take a lot of digital photos and I’m always afraid of losing them to computer failure. During an upgrade of my operating system a few years ago, I lost about six months of photos including those I’d taken on a vacation in Egypt. I still had the lower-resolution copies I’d made for sharing, but all the masters were gone. At the time I had backups on an external drive, but during the upgrade I reformatted the drive thinking everything on my main drive was safe. Big mistake. The upgrade failed and I had to reformat the main drive and I lost everything. (I had backups on DVD of all my earlier photos.)

These days I store my photos on a 3TB external hard drive and back them up automatically every hour to a separate external hard drive via Apple’s Time Machine program. In addition I back up my photos to archival-quality Blu-ray discs, and Amazon.com’s standard DVD discs.

I still worry about losing my photo hard drive and the backup hard drive at the same time because those are the only “complete” sets of all my photos (I only backup to Blu-ray & DVD when I have a lot of new shots). Though unlikely, this is possible.

I’ve been aware of the Dobro line of drive arrays for a long time and finally took the plunge and bought a 5D. The 5D holds up to five hard drives in one enclosure which is seen by your computer as one big hard drive (or “volume”) up to 16TB in size. If you reach that limit, you can create another volume. You can install hard drives up to 4TB in size, so five of those gives you 20TB. You can also mix and match different-sized hard drives. If you want to replace a smaller drive with a larger one, simply pull the old drive out while the unit is running and slap the new one in, the 5D handles the rest. I’ve tested this and it works well.

The Dobro arrays have automatic data protection. Using something they call BeyondRAID technology, the array can be set up with “Single Disk Redundancy” or “Dual Disk Redundancy.” Under single disk redundancy, you could lose any one drive in your array without losing any data. That means if one of your drives completely dies, all your data is still safe. With dual disk redundancy, you could lose any two drives in your array and not lose any data. (The 5D requires a minimum of two drives under single disk redundancy, and three drives under dual disk redundancy.)

The 5D protects your data by storing it more than once on different drives. You give up some of your available space for that protection, but you gain peace of mind. Using dual disk redundancy, you end up being able to use roughly half the available drive space.

Dobro has a calculator to determine the usable space depending on the different drive capacities in the array. Let’s say you have five drives: 4TB, 4TB, 3TB, 3TB and 1TB. Sizes are always a little smaller than listed so this 15TB is actually 13.64TB. With this collection, you’d have 6.35TB of usable, protected hard drive space. Any two drives could fail and you wouldn’t lose any data. Under single disk redundancy, you’d have 9TB of usable protected space.

If you had five 4TB drives, that would be 18.19TB of space and 10.89TB of usable protected data under dual disk redundancy. Under single disk redundancy, you’d have 14.52TB of usable protected data.

This is perfect for the kind of storage, access and protection I need. With the drives I have on hand, my array will eventually contain (once everything’s set up) five drives: 4TB/4TB/4TB/3TB/2TB. That’s a total of 17TB which is actually 15.46TB. With dual disk protection, I’ll end up with a usable protected data capacity of slightly more than half that, 8.17TB. (Under single disk redundancy, it would be 11.8TB.)

I’ll keep backing photos up to Blu-ray and possibly DVD, but I’ll feel less urgency in doing it. It’s still a good idea because I could store those discs somewhere outside my apartment for added safety.

The 5D is visible to Melanie too when she’s on our network so she can copy her own pictures and anything else of value and know they’ll also be protected.

The 5D reformats the drives you insert so any data on them is blown away. That means you can’t take drives with data already on them, pop them into the 5D, and automatically have the data protected. The drives you put into the 5D must be empty or contain data you don’t mind losing. Once the drive is in the array, the 5D quickly reformats it and your total capacity increases.

I started with two fresh 4TB drives using single disk redundancy (the default setting). I transferred all my photos from an external 3TB hard drive attached to my iMac. I verified everything had been copied correctly, then reconfigured my photo editing software (Adobe Lightroom) to find the photos in the new location. After all that was good, I disconnected the external 3TB hard drive and added it to the 5D to increase the total storage. I then switched to dual disk redundancy. After that I started transferring my audio and video files from an external 2TB drive. When that’s done, I’ll add that drive to the array. The last thing I’ll do is take my external 4TB Time Machine hard drive and add that as well. I’d been using Time machine to back up everything; my iMac’s 750GB internal hard drive, and all my photo, audio, video and other files. Going forward I’ll back up only the 750GB internal drive with Time Machine to a separate external 1TB drive and let the 5D protect everything else. Over time, if I need more storage in the array, I’ll replace the smaller drives with larger ones. Likewise if drives fail, I’ll pop in replacements.

Another advantage to the 5D is instead of having five separate hard drives connected to my iMac (via USB hubs) and five different icons on my screen, I now have only one Drobo “drive” icon with the combined storage of all the drives. And the Drobo has a Thunderbolt cable which should give me faster transfer speeds than the USB cables I’d been using on the separate drives.

So far the device is working as advertised. I’m still a little leery about the long-term reliability of the system, but I think it’s a great solution. No it’s not perfect, but neither is analog photography. Negatives and prints can be lost in fires, stolen, damaged, or fade over time. Likewise digital devices can fail or become obsolete. The advantage to digital is you can make perfect copies of your data and store it redundantly and off-site to minimize your risk of disaster.

Cool device. Well designed, attractive interface, and fairly easy to use.

http://www.drobo.com/

The Sixties

Watching the very well done CNN mini-series “The Sixties.” My cable got iffy when the series started so I’m seeing these a bit out-of-order, but wow is Episode 5 spectacular, “Long March to Freedom.”

At first I was kind of, eh, another news program about civil rights in the 60s. Seen all the footage, know all the stories.

Yes and no. I’ve never seen the events of the time reported this well.

One example. George Wallace had a famous standoff at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa when he tried to deny admission to two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. JFK stepped in and the students were admitted. That’s a well-known incident. What’s brilliant about this episode is how CNN found new footage, from obviously disparate sources, and pieced it together, along with existing audio, to show the scene unfolding almost in real time. We get crude B&W TV footage, film footage on higher-resolution stock, color footage which I’m guessing comes from amateur film cameras in the crowd, and other footage of varying quality. It’s edited together seamlessly and in sync with the audio. It’s so well done, I didn’t realize how smooth it was until I watched that segment later again tonight with Melanie.

One more surprise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech at The Great March on Washington. Mahalia Jackson sang at the event and stood nearby while MLK spoke. According to Clarence Jones, Jackson shouted to King during the speech to talk about “the dream.” King then set aside his prepared speech and delivered his famous “I have a dream” segment, apparently off-the-cuff and from the heart.

Wow.

I get emotional when I see greatness, and watching that got me teary.

This series isn’t just an expert view of the Sixties, it’s simply a fantastically well done documentary of an era. Check it out.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/us/the-sixties