William Reardon’s Blog

In late April, a small cadre of LA tech folks traveled to Beijing, to be on-hand for the start of real-time Olympic ticket sales.

On prior trips, terminal 3 of Beijing International was still under construction. Now complete, we got a chance to see it first day. It’s a night & day difference; impressive by any standard, especially in size. (It’s now the world’s largest.)

Game day was May 5th, and we headed into the Gehua-Ticketmaster office bright & early.

If you travel to China, one of the cultural differences you’ll likely first encounter is the temperature of your drink. Ask for a glass of water in the US & it’ll be cold, likely even with with ice. Ask for the same in China, and it’ll be warm, likely hot enough for a glass of tea. (After a prior trip, I mentioned it to a Chinese-American coworker & she remarked her Grandmother had always yelled at her for drinking cold drinks, telling her it would shock her system & make her sick.)

Now anyone in tech can tell you it’s not really electricity that powers technology, but caffeine. In particular cold soda. So one of the locals in the office was kind enough to get us a few bags of ice. Somehow, however, a “few bags” translated into a small army of men showing up with about 18 bags.

Fully caffeinated, the team was ready.

We suspected demand would be high. This was confirmed when another local employee of the office showed up. He’d passed by his local Bank of China (BOCs are acting as outlets for Olympics ticket sales) on his way in. Folks had been lining up since midnight & numbered into the hundreds. It’s not the best quality, but tried to snap a few photos with his camera phone.

How’d we do?

Well, folks got tickets. Scratch that. Folks got a lot of tickets — we sold over 320,000 that first day alone. As GLaDOS would say, huge success.

And, of course, what’s huge success without a few drinks?

A few days after the start of the onsale, I had a chance to travel down to one of the banks & pick up some tickets myself.

Beautiful, aren’t they?

What Rick walked into the other morning.

The full BOCOG press release.

I liked Driving Miss Daisy.

Earlier in the week, I needed to extract some performance data from our apache logs. Nothing too crazy, so I whipped it together in Perl.

The log files I needed were placed nightly on a server, so I whipped up a shell script to snag them & bring them locally as well. I need to delete files non-error logs (containing my metrics), and decompress things, but overall it worked well.

Only it required me typing in four commands.

Each day.

Being a geek, I was offended by this & decided to take the five minutes to automate all that as well. After all, I’m smart.

Only that part were I delete files that aren’t error logs?

Well, that included my script.

I had to run ls a few times before I could believe it.

D’oh. So much for smart.

Licking my wounds, a few hours later, I decide to suck it up & just set about writing it again. I fire up emacs and then remember — emacs automatically makes backups! I head over to my autosave-dir directory and — YES! — there is my file!

I think I need to fire-up doctor mode & say thank you.

I hate zombies.

It’s rare you’ll hear me use the word “hate”, but I use it here. I hate zombies.

I don’t like the concept, I don’t like that guttural noise they make, and I certainly don’t like zombie movies.

As a kid, like all kids, I had to watch Thriller, but man. It freaked the beejezus out of me.

I later saw Night of the Living Dead and had nightmares for two weeks. Two weeks!

So working the weekend to get ready for the Beijing Olympic ticket sales, what do I see walking down the street?

Why a pack of 200 zombies.

I don’t know if having a desk with a view of the the Sunset Strip is a good thing, but I do know I need a shotgun.

UPDATE: Explained.

When I took my first Spanish class in high school, the most interesting bits were the unexpected differences. It was just learning a different set of words for nouns, but nouns had gender? There’s a plural form of “you?” As well as an informal vs formal?

It’s been a similar experience learning how live entertainment & ticketing works throughout the world. Along those lines, a bit ago I set off for a business trip to Germany, Spain, Ireland, and the U.K.

In Germany, it’s fairly common to give someone a set of tickets for a gift. And despite being such a modern country, people don’t like to buy their tickets online. Instead, they’ll visit a ticket shop like Theaterkasse Schumacher.

The agents are friendly & helpful, and have an intimate knowledge of local venues. Tickets are extremely popular as Christmas gifts and around that time of year, lines will often be out door.

In Spain, our first visit was to fnac — similar to an upscale Best Buy in the States. Tickets are sold from a special counter in the lobby, and that Friday afternoon the line ran somewhat deep.

What caught me the most off guard was the popularity of pro wrestling — or as it’s called in Spain “Pressing Catch.”

It’s hugely popular with families and sells out quickly.

I don’t want to go on the cart.

So where are the pics from Ireland & London?

Well, there, my friend, is the rub.

When you read the history books, you get the feeling the Black Death was something in the past, and the plague is gone now. Not so.

I picked up a fairly awful bug. I’d swear it was ebola or bubonic, but my doctor says it’s more likely it’s just the flu.

I really didn’t even get much of a chance to see Barcelona. Instead, any time out of my hotel room was spent at various farmacias, searching for orange juice, and trying to find a store that sold humidifiers — all in a place were I only spoke broken Spanish. There was a lot of “Excuse me, Sir, do you have the machine that puts more moisture in the air?”

So sadly I ended up having to fly back a big early. But there I learned a very valuable life-lesson I’ll share tomorrow.

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.

UPDATE: Fixed link, this time hosted on nbc.com. Thanks for the pointer, Chris!

Be sure to watch the leading ad, people. This is what the writers went on strike for!

Like a lot of folks, I use a ‘toread’ tag on del.icio.us to keep track of things I want to read, but just don’t have the time.

The other day I noticed I currently had 270 items to read, the oldest going back to ~2005.

Clearly my eyes were bigger than my stomach. Er, than my eyes. Wait… nevermind.

Anyway.

Oddly the best time to catch is up on Online reading is when I’m offline. Specifically, when I’m on a long plane ride.

Instead of waiting for the airlines to figure out the whole Internet-on-a-plane thing, and since I have some pretty long flights coming up myself, I decided to hack something together using Perl & wget. After all, wget does a lot of the heavy lifting already, so really it should be just a matter of gluing wget together with delicious.

With that, I give you mirror-toread.pl.

You can run it as

./mirror-toread.pl <username> <password>

It’ll take a while to run the first time, as it throttles requests to 1/second.

Afterwards, you should have an index.html & a ‘Toread’ directory containing whatever you’ve tagged with ‘toread’.

I should mention a pretty gnarly hack, done in an hour or so. It ain’t pretty. And it ain’t perfect.

I had wanted to find the “next” link for articles paginated, but I realized it’s be easier to bookmark the “print” version in the future. Video and the like isn’t handled well. And so on.

But hopefully it’s good enough. We’ll find out next week when I head to Europe (where the history comes from).