William Reardon’s Blog

Well, if your plans were to buy Olympic tickets, more than likely you’re out of luck at this point. There’s quite a few remaining for outlying cities, but inside Beijing things were gone pretty quick.

It was quite an experience. I had to wake up early to travel from Shenzhen to Beijing on the 24th. I was to land at noon, plenty of time to get to the office before things started rolling at 6, but checking my blackberry the morning of the flight, I found out at plans shifted to start at 2. I still made it there okay, getting to the office at 1:30.

What followed was madness from there. At the office, we started receiving reports of line lengths at the various venues. The onsale didn’t start until 9am the next morning, and here at 2pm some were estimated to be around 1,000.

Around 7pm, the Bird’s Nest box office request we come over to help if possible.

I don’t how to explain what it was like encountering The Line. The cab passed by & it was immediately obvious there were hundreds, with a constant stream of people flowing in from every direction. I later found what I had seen as a tiny bit, the line wrapping around the corner. Once I rounded that corner, I was shocked. There was easy a 1,000 people.

I tried following the line to find the box office, only to find I was, again, near a small (comparatively) piece of the line, watching it double-back on itself again & again. Only to discover after everything that was in front me, in continued into a giant parking lot. I’ve never seen anything like it.

At that point it was estimated 10,000 people were in line, growing to 50,000 when I left at 5am the next morning. Each box office seemed to have 1,000 people in line, and several now with 10,000. What used to be extremely large had now become the low-end of things.

Security was tight, but well managed. Around 2am I looked up and noticed a wall of police & military were standing shoulder-to-shoulder out front, covering a 200′ length, to block off our box office. The surrounding roads long having but cut off, police cars & military vehicles filled the scene, their the strobing light filling the otherwise dark sky.

There were a few incidents — with crowds of that size it would hard to imagine otherwise, but all in all, it went really smooth. Reports of stampedes in the media were a bit overblow.

All in all, it was success.

Things with the great firewall have changed a bit. Youtube & the english version of Wikipedia are unblocked, but pages such as Tibet & the like are still blocked. It looks like the filter is based on the URL as I could access Chicago, but not Chicago?q=Tibet.

A day after things had calmed down, a coworker arranged for us to visit a tea ceremony and see a bit of a Chinese variety act — magic, singing, kung fu, opera, all in one night. For the magic act, I was called on stage. Another coworker, JD, wrote about it on his blog.

I’ll post some pics of my trip when I can. (I.e., when I can find a micro-usb cable.)

In all likelihood this is my last trip to China for a long while. It’s been interesting. The overwhelming majority of time was work related, but we did squeeze in some fun here & there. I’ll post a follow-up of Beijing must-do’s in a later post.

I awoke this morning on time at 5:45am, for my 8:30am flight from Hong Kong to Beijing. I was staying at the airport hotel, one connected to the main terminal over a pedestrian bridge, so I assumed I had plenty of time.

I followed my footsteps back from the night before, and seeing a flight board, walked over to find my gate. Hmmmm… No Asiana 6118. Hmmm… and no 8:30 flight to Beijing at 8:30. WTF?

It’s then that I realize I’m in arrivals. Shit. Okay, how do I get to departures? I journey farther in, find the escalators, and head up to departures. Time check: 6:45am. Okay, not too bad. Good thing I skipped the breakfast, but damn, I’m starving. Maybe I’ll be able to get something in the lounge.

I ascend to about 8 different banks of check-in columns. Which one is Asiana? Ah, luck is with me, just one to my right. I walk over, find my checkin line, and look at the flight board. Wait. No flight 6118? No 8:30am departure? WTF.

I pull my flight info out my bag. Damnit, I flew LA to Hong Kong on Asiana, but my trip to Beijing is on Cathay Pacific.

I see a nearby airport information desk and ask them where Cathay Pacific is. Just two to my right. I head over, but again no flight 6118. Now this is starting to get annoying. I just double-checked my printout and headed to the CP customer service desk. Ah, code-share. They send me to Dragon Air… the first bank on my left. *sigh*

I check the time as I wait for the 2 people in front of me. Just after 7. Not too bad, but it is an international flight. And the airport is pretty big. Hopefully enough time.

“Welcome to Dragon Air, sir. Your passport, please.”

The frown on her face doesn’t bode well.

“What flight were you on, sir?”

“I’m not sure, but it was Cathay Pacific 6118.”

Type, type, type, type. “Ah, sir, that is a code-share flight. That flight is operated by Air China.”

And where is Air China? The last terminal on the right.

Air China ended up being the correct one, but my lucked continued when I asked if gate 64 was far. “Yes, a bit, sir.” And the lounge? The other direction in gate 16. No soup for me.

I ended up making it, but finding out I had to take a train for gates 33-80 and then the shift change at immigration right after the person in front me didn’t do much to calm my nerves and sorta re-inforced my half-suspicion that Beijing is out to get me.

Hopefully all my bad luck is out of my system. Tomorrow morning will be one of your last chances to buy tickets for the 2008 Olympics. One of my co-workers emailed me to say people are already lining up. Here’s to a smooth onsale.

Things I did on the trip to Hong Kong:

• Watched 21
  
• Ate dinner
  
• Read a chapter on Cocoa Programming
  
• Took a nap
  
• Caught up on email
  
• Read a few chapters of Dune
  
• Watched the last 6 hours of Shogun
  
• Beat Zuma, start to finish, again
  
• Played first 19 levels of Enigmo
  
• Watched first third of Fool’s Gold
  
• Took another nap
  
• Ate breakfast
  
• Played blackjack on my iPhone
  

Things I learned from Shogun:

• Don’t enter a basement full of Ninja
  
• The battle of Ninja versus Samurai is not a clear as you might think
  
• Editing for length was not popular in the 80s
  

I’m in Hong Kong now (free airport wifi!), headed to Shenzhen shortly. I’ll be there for a few days, then headed up to Beijing, and then, finally, back to Hong Kong for a few days of personal travel.

Sadly, my genuine fake Rolex has fallen apart.

On the flight back from Chicago, a screw suddenly popped out, landing my folex on the floor with a thud. The screw had loosened previously, giving a warning so that I could tighten it. This time it just went in one go, and while everyone was deplaning so I dismissed any hopes of finding the screw and fixing it myself.

I am, however, still debating if I should try to take it to a real Rolex store. The entertainment of that visit alone would be worth the $10 I paid for it. “Look at what Rolex sold me! You call this quality?! Fake? What, do you mean fake!? I paid ten grand for this!”

The lady at the Silk Market swore it was top quality too.

I think I may have been lied too.

If you grew up in the 80s a fan of PE, you need to check out their latest single, The Long and Whining Road:

I first came across My Yahoo! over 10 years ago. If I remember it correctly, I believe it’s why I created an account with Yahoo, and I’ve been a loyal fan ever since.

In fact, what motivated to join Yahoo, back in 2001, was a chance to join the My Yahoo development team.

For 10 years, eons by web standards, it’s been my favorite website & default homepage.

But apparently for only the next 5 days.

After 5 days, it looks like I’m headed over to Google Reader or something similar.

If you’re a fellow, long-time user of My Yahoo, for the past few months you’ve likely gotten this nag dialog:

Sadly, there never was a way to close or remove it. I even poked around ABP to see if I could block it, but as it’s a dev tag, there didn’t seem to be.

Even more annoying, they changed it frequently.

As if users weren’t converted because they hadn’t noticed it.

From the folks I know, the reason they (and I) haven’t converted isn’t because we don’t know about the new My Yahoo!, it’s because we don’t like it.

Today it seemed to have changed once again:

So here’s my question: whatever happened to the customer being right?

Why don’t I get to decide what I like, instead of having what I’m told is good forced upon me?

Isn’t having a passionate user-base, one enamored with a product, a good thing?

If people aren’t converting, the problem isn’t the people, it’s the product.

Harassment, nagging, and strong-arming are not good substitutes for good product development.

There’s two reasons I can think Yahoo is making this move & there both really bad reasons:

1) Simplify development & support, by collapsing two platforms into one. Now, this isn’t a bad reason in of itself. In fact, it’s a good goal, but it’s the implementation that’s wanting. If the goal is to simplify/reduce the code base, to support a single version of My Yahoo, that’s fine. But it should be done in a way that doesn’t affect user.

That is the onus should be on Yahoo to create “new” interfaces that replicate the “old.” In doing so, they wouldn’t even have to tell me there’s a change. Everything would still look the same — to new users & old — and the code base would be reduced as well.

2) It’s embarrassing for the creators of the “New” My Yahoo, to have such a large portion of the user base on the “Old” system. I can see this being painful. I wouldn’t want to have to give a presentation to Sue, Jerry, or Ash showing only 30% (or whatever) of users have adopted my new product.

But frankly, if this is the reason, someone should be fired.

I’m not joking. Putting the pain of bad decisions on the user base is simply unacceptable. Doing it to save face — doubly unacceptable.

In a good company, management should be the user’s advocate. Pushing against the inevitable lethargy of a bureaucracy to do the right thing. To develop the best product. Think of the horror stories of Steve Jobs getting upset when brought a shitty product. Maybe not the best people skills, but that’s great customer advocacy.

Yahoo says they’re listening. I hope they are.

Let the old My Yahoo be.

I think McAfee wants me to resubscribe sometime in the next 7 days, but I’m not sure. What do you think?