Life: April 2006 Archives
After receiving a tremendous amount of comment spam last night, I have decied to temporarily disable all comments on my blog. I am going to be out of town this weekend, and thus I'm not going to have the time, connectivity, or energy to keep things cleaned up.
Hopefully I'll have time next week to implement some better anti-spam solutions, so that I can have comments but keep the spammy ones out.
-Andy.
Ticketmaster (oh how I love these guys) put tickets on sale at 10:00 AM this morning for most of the dates on Tool's mini-tour (to follow Coachella). Normally, Ticketmaster's website gets crushed under the load of tons of fans pounding the site for tickets as all of the shows go on sale simultaneously. Surprisingly, that wasn't the case today, but they did sell out extremely fast.
I was hitting refresh in two browsers, and got my first "no tickets are available" message before 10:01 AM. Trying repeatedly, I actually managed to get the page offering me tickets one time, but trying to proceed from there produced an error.
Bastards.
Checking Craigslist, it seems like I'm not the only one to have this problem. So, now the question is, do I pay an insane amount for one ticket, or shall I just be satisfied with their Coachella performance?
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Tool, 10,000 Days, Ticketmaster, Coachella
Just bought some concert tickets online via Ticketmaster, and it was as disheartening as always. The service fee, per ticket, was nearly $12! That is an amazing amount of money, when I sit and think about the actual work that Ticketmaster had to do in order to earn that $12 (hint - it is very low). These guys are just printing money.
Even more amazing, however, were my options for receiving the tickets. As always, it is "free" to receive the tickets by standard US mail (the cost is built into those service fees), and dramatically more expensive for faster shipping options. But what really shocked me, is that Ticketmaster now has a delivery option where they e-mail you the tickets, and print them out. Actually, that isn't the shocking part. The shocking part is that this service costs $2.50!
Ticketmaster is charging me more money, to provide a service that costs them less money. When delivered over the web, Ticketmaster is absolved from having to:
- Print the actual tickets
- Stuff them in an envelope
- Pay to send the envelope through the US mail
All of those things cost real, actual money. Compared with e-mailing me the tickets, where all Ticketmaster has to do is assemble some bits, and send them over the Internet. Sure, that isn't technically "free" either, but it is dramatically less expensive than printing and mailing tickets.
Amazing.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Ticketmaster, Ripoff
After work today, I drove into San Francisco for dinner, making it three nights in a row that I have headed into the city for dinner. Normally, I'm not super-city-guy, but some friends from CWRU are in town (Chris and Karen Ishida), and since I haven't seen them in a long, long time, I have felt compelled to make the trek to the city three times in a row.
And let me say this up front - San Francisco has been great. On Sunday night, for example, it was raining both on my trip into San Francisco, and on the ride out. Both times, however, there was an accident on 101, but in the opposite direction that I was travelling. This means that I avoided not one, but two major traffic jams.
And it got even better today. I slipped out of work, and got on the high right around 6:00 PM. At the height of the evening rush hour. But the rain had stopped, and the big game was on TV, so I had one of the best rides into San Francisco on a weekday, ever. I made it from Sunnyvale to downtown in right around 40 minutes. Absolutely zero traffic.
And when I got to my destination in the Mission, I found a completely legal parking spot after only about 10 minutes of searching.
Totally amazing.
I had the feeling that I was burning through some serious "driving karma", especially for that amazing drive into SF. And, as it turns out, I was right, as I found out on the way home:
My Saturn is a bit lighter now, thanks to that bumper paint that got scraped off.
It was around 11:15 PM, and I was driving in a middle lane south on 101, minding my own business. The road wasn't very crowded, and it was clear sailing in front of me. I don't know what caused me to check the blindspot on my left side, but suddenly I saw a car that was coming up from behind, in the left lane. It was driving a bit erratically, I suppose, but all of a sudden it got really close to me, like he was trying to merge into my lane without seeing me.
I popped off the cruise control, and veered a bit to the right (out of my lane), in order to avoid him. But in so doing, I lost a bit of speed, and didn't get the separation that I needed to. Because he swerved again, much harder this time, and then I felt the "pop" of our bumpers touching.
What happened next was really amazing -- the guy breaked super hard, spinning his car out. Looking in my rearview, at one point he was perpendicular to the flow of traffic, before righting himself back into a lane. But I think that he came nearly to a dead stop in the middle of 101 -- which is a huge mo-no, no matter what time of day it is.
Luckily, all of the other drivers on the road managed to avoid this guy, and he was able to pull over behind me so we could exchange insurance information. But all said and told, we were both pretty lucky. My car just has a scrape, and we couldn't even find the equivalent on his bumper.
But now, of course, I get the hassle of getting this fixed. But, at least the driving scales are balanced, and I don't have to live in fear of having taking more driving karma than I have given.
-Andy.
