William Reardon’s Blog

As I mentioned on twitter a few days ago and alluded to the other day, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave Ticketmaster. My last day will Halloween, Friday, Oct. 31st.

(Rumor has it a horrible surprise will await that day. I am roughly aware of the plan & the parties involved. To those foolish enough to contemplate such an endeavor, I only remind you of 1) my history with pranks is longer than all of yours combined, and 2) my willingness to always go one step further than the other guy. You have been warned.)

It was a tough decision to leave the ticket mines, but I was approached with an opportunity that was just too tempting to pass up. I’m actually really excited about it, but I’ll save that for another juncture. The hardest thing in the type of situation is saying goodbye with the people you’ve been working with day-in & day-out for the past few years. A hardship/challenge can split a group apart or pull it tightly together. I’m really proud of how the team — both mine & Ticketmaster as a whole — rallied together to overcome anything put in out way, even in some pretty difficult spots. Bitch all you want about Ticketmaster service fees, but you won’t be able to find anything bad to say about its people.

One thing that does make it easier to move on is knowing everything will be in good hands. It’s hard to not get emotionally invested in things over the course of two years, and handing things to over to competent caretakers certainly helps physiologically.

There is one other thing that helps too: Any transition brings some pain & turmoil and most of mine will be cast upon one Khayman Walker. Yes, it will be the delight I can take in his suffering. His pain is my joy. I like to think of being a Kahn to his Kirk. (Only in a parallel universe where Khan wins, of course.)

Unfortunately, Khayman is sorta smart, so he has some idea of what he’s in for, but I still like to think that several months from now, he’ll be sitting at his desk, all of it fully setting in. He will lean back and scream “Bill! BIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!” Man, I’m getting all tingly just thinking about it.

iPhones went on sale in Hong Kong the other day, which reminded me of my own iPhone experiences there a few months back.

Walk through pretty much any market & you’ll find loads of knockoffs. Knockoff watches, knockoff video games, and knockoff everything. Passing a stand with a bunch of phones, I was particularly surprised to find a knockoff iPhone! While obviously fake, I was sorta curious how well it worked.

Playing naive, I walked over and asked if that was the iphone. The scent of blood in water exited the salesman, exclaiming “yes!” and, as expected, pulling it out for me to see.

Me: “Oh, it’s in Chinese. I thought the real iPhone was in English?”

Him: “Sir! This is real iPhone! I change language for you.”

A few taps and it’s in English. Poking around, I confirmed what the bottom-right icon suggested. It was a fake written in Java, though not a bad one.

Me: “So this is a real iPhone?”

Him (annoyed): “Sir! I tell you already! This is very real iPhone.”

Me: “It is? But it doesn’t have an Apple logo back on the back”, I say as I turn it over.

Him (more annoyed): “Sir! Real iPhone not have Apple logo on the back!”

Me: “I thought they did?”

Him (annoyed/exasperated): “Sir! Ones with logos are fake! This one is real iPhone!”

Me: “Really?”, I ask, pulling my own iPhone out of my other pocket, “Because mine has the logo.”

Him (eyes wide, excited, and without losing a beat): “I pay YOU six hundred American!”

At this point 3G phones were $300 in the states, so I was stumped as to why anyone would pay me double that for the older phone. It turns out, those were easier to unlock, and, as our coworker-guide explained, they’d be able to turn around and sell it for at least $900, easy.

I couldn’t believe it, but later I saw this sign.

(For reference, one US dollar equals about 7.7 hong kong dollars, so about US$1,182 for the 16gig 3G.)

As promised, some pictures of what a line of 10,000 people looks like:

The crazy thing was people were still streaming in from all directions. By the time tickets actually went onsale, it was estimated some 50,000 people had lined up.

It was a crazy 36 hours or so. We were busy through the night and somewhere around 2am we noticed the security forces that had assembled to protect our box office.

One part of the process involved counting batches of 250+ tickets. Around four in the morning, I realized people count sheep to fall asleep. Here I was trying to stay awake, having to count tickets!

With such high demand, things sold at a fairly brisk pace. So when things calmed down, Hui & I decided to head to the Olympic Green, and check out a few of the venues. Unfortunately, the entire area was blocked off by security fences, so we could only take pics from afar.

The last thing I’ll mention involves the elevator of our hotel. In the West, it’s not uncommon to skip the 13th floor. But I still can’t figure out why this particular hotel skipped not just 13, but 2 & 14 as well. I hope it wasn’t a cheap knock off of an elevantor — sorta how a “Rolex” in China might be missing a 5 or 9.

UPDATE: By coincidence, youtube just featured this AFP video about the final onsale.

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.

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.

Many have written about how difficult it is for humans to understand numbers without everyday meaning. We can put into context 10, 100, even 1,000, but things get hard us for when we hit numbers without reference points in our daily lives.

Before it was Innumeracy was a book, Ronald Reagan noted the phenomenon manifesting in response to speeches. He could talk about how a particular piece of legislation had saved $7.4 million and people would hardly respond. But if he talked about how a bill saved $324,000 the crowed would applaud enthusiastically.

Sadly, the same is true with human tragedy.

From early reports of 10,000 dead, eventually rising to 50,000, then 60,560, now 69,016… It’s hard to put something like the earthquake in China into perspective because (thankfully) it’s so foreign to us. We lack context. Most of us will live our entire lives and it will be a complete shock to us if more than one person close to us dies on a single day.

For tragedies like the earthquake, we lack context. Try as we might, all we can really understand is that a lot of people died.

Maybe then, instead of trying to understand the whole, we try to understand what we can. The stories of individuals.

Without gore, and in bitter-sweet fashion, an Chinese artist named Coco Wang managed to depict just a handful of stories.

I suggest you read them all.

For me, more than the countless news articles, more than the tv coverage, these ten stories brought home the tragedy. That behind each one is a shattered family, irreparably changed. That in the midst of pain were beacons of love, bravery, selflessness, and kindness. Things that give us that rare opportunity to take pride in calling ourselves “human.”

Kenndy said “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.”

Take a moment to reflect on the individual stories, to send them your thoughts, your help, and most importantly your prayers.

What Rick walked into the other morning.

I liked Driving Miss Daisy.

When I flew into Hamburg this weekend I knew it was windy.

What I didn’t know was how windy it had been earlier that morning.

Today, I saw a homeless man, ragged shirt, jeans not just torn, but missing left leg fabric from the thigh down, crossing the street in front of my car, listening to an iPod.

When I completed my journey to Subway, a group of metalheads, clad in dark, demon-laden, metal shirts, sat at the table next to me debating & proposing new potential categories for Wheel of Fortune.

In other news, my car was broken into (again) this morning.

I was awoken by the landlord informing of the situation & asking me to check my car. As I drive a Jeep Wrangler, it looks more like it was a “unzipping” than a break-in. Luckily, as part of leaving for China, I stripped my car of various gadgets — notably my GPS — and had yet to put them back.

All-in-all, it looks like they rummaged through my backseat, stole some burned CDs & some loose change. Perhaps happy with their loot, they ignored my radio. Honestly, the biggest pain of it all was re-attaching the side & back window.

With similar rationale, I’m going to hit a CD store. I’ll stock up on a dozen or so $.99 CDs and leave them in the car. Hopefully, future thieves will be happy with a score they estimate at $100+, decide that’s enough & leave, leaving everything else alone.