Month: November 2005

On Friday evening we attended a taping of Rick Mercer Report down at CBC Television in downtown Toronto. It was a blast and an interesting experience. I’d never been in a real television studio before, so I was interested to go just to see what the inside of the building looked like. Both of us were stoked to see Rick Mercer live though. The show was great, and hilarious – even funnier than just watching the show, because half of the fun is Rick and the production crew keeping the audience amused while they change set pieces, setup new shots, etc etc. I’d never seen unionized stagehands move large glass desks to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance before. Also we got to see the full taped segments before they were edited for time. Many Sony cube monitors, namely PVM-2030s, were hung over the audience area. And boy do they pack’em into Studio 46 – the studio is much smaller than I thought it was. And the icing on the cake was that Sandy got Rick’s autograph at the end.

We’d go again in a second – but tickets are already all gone for the entire season! So the rest of you will have to tune in to CBC, Tuesday night at 8. See that bald guy in the blue sweater in the audience, on the left side, second row? That’s me.

From: chuma@chuma.org
To: CSEast@ticketmaster.ca, sales@ticketmaster.ca, info@coldplay.com
Subject: The garbage that is the ticketmaster system

When I sit on the toilet in the morning, I crap out better web systems than your pathetic piece of garbage which I have been suffering through as a member of the ticket buying public for years now. I’m talking about ticketmaster.com and ticketmaster.ca of course.

I want to throw up when I think about how after 4+ years of online ticket sales you still come up with ways to screw up people’s transactions. The latest effort being the “word verification” garbage currently coming down the pipe. When this system (wt.ticketmaster.com) obviously blew up around 10:15 AM EST today and stopped responding, and I was in the middle of purchasing Coldplay tickets – great tickets, I might add (Thu, Mar 23, 2006, sec 121 row 20 seats 16 & 17) – and suddenly I couldn’t load this stupid verification image – even though you already had my credit card number, via my account, and I had already solved one of these pieces of garbage – no, you couldn’t generate a 290×80 pixel image in THREE MINUTES, the timeout for my transaction.

Haven’t you people learned how to plan for a major traffic surge? Don’t you know how to run lean, optimized code so people can USE YOUR BLOODY SERVICE?!!

Oh wait, I forgot, you don’t care because you can make so much more dirty money by running auctions to inflate ticket prices, and besides, someone will buy all the tickets anyways and you’ll get your extortionist $9.75/ticket service fee and put it in your pocket and never actually improve your service. Bands are forced to enter into evil contracts with you because you run around North America bribing venue owners with envelopes of money, and when someone does try to do business without you you go out of your way to discredit and muscle them out of business.

Your monopoly on ticket sales across North America is disgusting. I hope that your sickening business practices cause you fester under the boiling hot sun of public opinion until you wither into a pile of dust and the wind blows you away into history.

The Xbox 360 motherboard in all its glory. Click image for full-size version. From AnandTech.

StevenF’s mobile phone pics never fail to amuse. Here’s two of the most recent hilarious ones:

You might remember that I think people who drive less than 2km to the GO station are stupid. I encountered a prime example of this behaviour this morning.

About 10 houses up the street from me, and along my daily walking route, lives a husband and wife who leave for work every morning in separate cars, at about the same time that I happen to walk by in the morning. I’ve seen the wife’s car in the GO station lot often, and she usually takes the same train home as me. This morning I left the house earlier than usual and didn’t see them leave, but I saw them pull into the GO parking lot – both of them. The wife parked her car and then got in the other car with her husband and drove away. So, she doesn’t even take the train to work in the morning, but gets a ride to wherever it is, and then when she takes the train home her car just has to be there for her to drive home. Most days, I arrive outside her house on foot at the exact same time she is pulling into the street. If I could just shake some sense into people…