Philippine Airlines Midnight Madness F**ked up

Dear Philippine Airlines,

When you promote on your website that you’re going to have these great specials but only from midnight to 6am Manila time only on one particular Saturday night/Sunday morning (so that we have to stay up all night to get the special deal which we don’t even have details on ahead of time), maybe you should make sure your website is ACTUALLY AVAILABLE to handle the traffic. Like when your website said to the likes of “this time we’ll be able to handle the traffic so make sure you stay up all night for the great deals”. And what about the likes of “we realize we had tech problems last time we tried this, but this time we’ll be ready for you”.

Got a tip for you: You know why your website is down because of too much traffic? Because you ADVERTISED IT WAS ONLY AVAILABLE MIDNIGHT TO SIX AM MANILA TIME – so that’s the only time we could all try to access it all at once. Great marketing, make everyone hit your website at the same time so it crashes.

I’ve got three people that wanted to go to Puerto Princessa in Palawan Philippines and I stayed up all night for your deals (and several hours trying to access your website).

Are you trying to get us all to just book with Cebu? I don’t get it. This is not very “Mabuhai” of you. It really sucks. I’ll grant you that the Philippine Airlines “Midnight Madness” did indeed grant me madness, just not the kind I was expecting.

Your biggest fan,

Conrad Askland

Happy 60th Birthday to the People’s Republic of China

china-60-anniversary

Conrad Askland, from Mount Vernon, WA USA, is currently living in Macau (SAR) China while working with the Cirque Du Soleil ZAIA show at the Venetian Macao. In Asia he has also performed in Shanghai, South Korea and Japan.

October 1, 2009 – 中国加油,中国万岁

Happy Sixty Year Anniversary to the People’s Republic of China!

It’s a four day holiday for the locals here in China. When locals have holidays it usually means that I work more; doing entertainment shows to accommodate the tourists.

China’s last 60 years has been bittersweet with a unified people exposed to both hard living and the largest economic boom in modern history. At the end of my blog post there’s a link to a great CNN article by Jaime FlorCruz that gives an overview of China’s 60 years as The People’s Republic of China.

Continue reading “Happy 60th Birthday to the People’s Republic of China”

Cirque Du Soleil ZAIA Band 2009

zaia-band

The Cirque Du Soleil ZAIA band, June 2009 in Macau, China. A rare moment where all the musicians are together for a photo opp.

In this photo: Eduard Harutyunyan (percussion), Jay Elfenbein (viol, dare I say cello, strings, bass guitar), Darrin Johnson (drummer), Olivier Milchberg (guitar, Turkish banjo, plucked strings), Maria Andersson (singer), Steven Bach (keyboards – bandleader), Rose Winebrenner (vocalist), Racheal Cogan (recorder, EWI)and Conrad Askland (keyboards, assistant bandleader).

Freddy Fender in concert 2003

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj4ohpzU4vQ

Freddy singing “before the next teardrop” and “wasted days and wasted nights” New Mexico State Fair 2003. Conrad Askland is playing keyboards with Freddy in this video. Not a great video, but just happened to run across it while surfing YouTube. Augie Meyers is also playing accordion with us in this video.