Blahg

28 October 2007

The Rockheads got precisely what they deserved. They were swept in their first World Series. Next time, try treating your hometown fans with more respect. If you still have any fans next time.

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24 October 2007 Part Deux

Another bit from KUSA.com: "Rockies spokesman Jay Alves, who is now in Boston, told 9NEWS in an e-mail: '"The World Series is bigger than the ticket story. I'm buried here in media.'"

Fine. Until the rockheads fire Alves, I'm done with the Rox.

They don't deserve another penny from me and their lease with the Denver Metropolitan Baseball Stadium District should be reviewed.

Don't forget, Alves, I - and all the other metro taxpayers in six counties - helped pay for that frickin' ballpark.

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24 October 2007

I came up empty-handed for the World Series. Yesterday was another ticketing fiasco, regardless of what the rockheads in the back office have to say.

If they're on the same ticketing system as the Yanks, Red Sox, and others, why didn't they use the same online lottery system? These days, it's even possible to limit transactions to those with local zip codes. Brilliant!

Instead, countless numbers of people wasted an untold amount of time trying to get what the Rockies full-well knew was going to be the hottest ticket in town. My enthusiasm for this ballclub has diminished drastically over the years. After 13 Rockies opening days through sleet, snow, rain, or shine, last year I went to the Mets home opener. This year, I went to the Yanks home opener. By doing so, I was able to see some "real" baseball with real fans who care about the game, not just being there. With this complete lack of regard for the hometown crowd, I'm pretty much done with this team.

Like a good baseball player who always follows through, here's one more story from KUSA in the aftermath of the ticketing nightmare.

Rockies tickets gone, angry fans come out swinging

DENVER – All the World Series games at Coors Field have sold out following two days of ticket headaches. Many empty-handed fans are seething over how the Rockies handled online sales.

After a first-day failure, tickets went on sale at noon Tuesday and sold out by 2:30 p.m. The Rockies say, at one point, tickets were selling at a rate of 1,500 per minute.

Dave Hanna of Centennial cranked up eight side-by-side computers at his software company and managed to score four tickets. However, he's not claiming he found the ticket to getting tickets.

"That's a good eight hours of nothing and one one-minute section where it worked," Hanna said. "It was dumb luck. I think five seconds in either direction and I would have lost it."

Like a foul ball lost in the stadium lights, some fans thought they'd caught tickets, only to find out otherwise.

Like Hanna, Scott Paradis deals with Web sites at work. If anyone could land tickets, he thought he could.

Paradis made it to the ticket selection portion of the process. He picked out his tickets, entered his credit card information and clicked "submit." Nothing. Then the dreaded screen telling him his online session had expired.

"My joy turned into disgust pretty quickly," said Paradis.

Two Web site wizards with two very different outcomes. However, both found fault with the Rockies online ticket selling system.

"For them to claim that there were no problems and that people were getting through is just untrue," Paradis said.

Hanna says he and his coworkers grimaced at what they call obvious poor planning by the Rockies.

"My business is monitoring other Web sites and I can say, they get a failing grade," Hanna said.

That comes from a man happily holding tickets.

9NEWS received hundreds of angry e-mails about Rockies tickets on Tuesday. A sampling:

"The Rockies should be embarrassed and ashamed." –Brian "They don't care about the local fans." –Mark "Tonight, I burn my purple and buy red." –Merlin "What a slap in the face to the local fans." –Carol "How many thousands of events are sold out every year in this country without the demonstrated level of incompetence being shown here?" -Doug

(Copyright KUSA*TV. All rights reserved.)

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22 October 2007

Since I haven't written anything in the blahg for a while, now's a nice time to bitch a bit.

There are plenty of reasons to despise IT people. They're arrogant, act like they're all knowing, and yet never seem to take responsibility when things go wrong.

The Rockies, in their infinite wisdom, decided to sell all World Series tickets online only (that's what other teams have done, after all). For the past week, the media here's been filled with stories about how online is the only way to go and the team is more than prepared to handle the demand.

Well, less than three hours into ticket sales, the entire site crashed. The site got 8.5 million hits during the first 90 minutes. Even so, only 500 tickets made it through the entire transaction process. As of this writing, fans are being asked to stop trying and the team will "let people know" when the site is back up. There's no timetable for that.

Amazing. Pinheads.

And for another bitch: WHY ISN'T SCALPING ILLEGAL? THAT'D HELP MATTERS AT LEAST A WEE BIT!

Here's the message on the Rockies' site: "This morning the Rockies' ticketing provider Paciolan experienced a system wide outage that is impacting all of their North American customers. They are working hard to resume service as soon as possible and apologize to their customers and all fans for this impact."

And here's a news story from KUSA.com:

DENVER – Amid an angry crowd chanting "We want tickets," Rockies spokesperson Jay Alves announced World Series ticket sales have been suspended Monday.

Alves says virtually all the tickets are still available, due to a computer system malfunction. He says only several hundred tickets were sold.

According to Alves, the Colorado Rockies will announce new plans to sell the tickets at some point later Monday afternoon.

Alves says they will not be selling the tickets at Coors Field. He says their goal is to get the computer system up and running again so that they can resume online sales.

Hundreds of Rockies fans have e-mailed 9NEWS complaining they were not able to buy World Series tickets.

Of the hundreds of e-mail messages to 9Wants to Know has received, only three people were able to get tickets.

One man from Westminster says he went online at 10 a.m. and got four $250 Club Level tickets confirmed at 11 a.m.

The second person says he used two servers and got four $250 Club Level seats.

A third person, from Wyoming, was able to purchase two tickets.

The tickets sold were for Games 4 and 5.

All the other e-mailers either couldn't access the page, were knocked off the Web site, got permission to buy, but then were knocked off before they got a confirmation.

A spokesperson for Paciolan, a company that provides the infrastructure to allow the Rockies to sell tickets online, says they are experiencing problems with ticket sales and they are "trying to assess and resolve" those problems right now.

The mad rush for World Series seats got under way Monday as 60,000 tickets went up for sale, but only online.

Team officials have said their computers were ready to handle the expected crush of traffic, but some fans repeatedly got a message saying the Rockies' Web site couldn't be displayed.

About 20 people lined up in near-freezing temperatures outside the Denver Public Library before it opened in hopes of using public-access computers to score tickets.

"If you can't get tickets here, you're going to have to pay $200, $300 above face value," said Clayton McLeod, a 26-year-old heavy-machine operator who took the day off to try to buy tickets in the online-only sale.

Tickets officially went on sale at 10 a.m. but season ticket holders had the upper hand Sunday with a four hour window to purchase tickets.

Many Rockies fan had hoped Monday's sales would go better than Sunday's. Although the Rockies say Sunday's sale was a success, 9NEWS received various complaints and concerns from viewers who had difficulty accessing the site.

"Every time I tried to sign up an account, I got an error on my screen," said Rick Young. "My computer won't accept cookies."

Cookies identify users of a web page. Some computer security systems are not compatible with them. That's the problem Rockies fan Todd Lovrien encountered when trying to purchase tickets during Sunday's online sale.

"We tried every different way, and it kept throwing up this cookies thing," said Lovrien.

After removing all of the security settings that could block cookies, Lovrien tried again.

"I said 'Let me try one more time.' Then, all of a sudden, it came alive again."

That same tactic didn't work for Young. He was trying to create an account, so that he can purchase tickets when they go on sale to the general public Monday morning.

Rockies spokesperson Jay Alves says the organization didn't experience any problems with its system.

"To our knowledge, the only people that had the 'page cannot be displayed,' were IP addresses that were blocked due to suspicious/malicious activity to our website, during the last 24/48 hours," said Alves. "As an example, if several inquiries came from a single IP address, they were blocked."

Lovrien was eventually able to get through and purchase tickets. He says it took about ten minutes.

"I'll be stunned if I know anybody that gets tickets tomorrow," he said. "That's how fast they're going to go."

About 32,000 tickets were set aside for season ticket holders, players and sponsors. The rest, roughly 18,000, went on sale Monday at 10 a.m. online at coloradorockies.com.

Tickets were only sold on a game by game basis and ticket buys were limited to four tickets per game. Denver public libraries opened early Monday morning for people who do not have Internet access.

"There's only a certain amount of tickets available. There's a limited amount of seats and there's twice the amount of people trying to get those tickets," said computer consultant Patrick O'Fallon.

If you plan on being among the thousands who will log on to try and get tickets Monday, Fallon says there are some things you can do to increase your odds.

First, he says, make sure you use a computer with high-speed Internet.

Second, get familiar with the Colorado Rockies Web site before 10 a.m.

And finally, use multiple computers or have family and friends also log on.

World Series Schedule: Game 1: Boston, Wednesday, 6 p.m. Game 2: Boston, Thursday, 6 p.m. Game 3: Denver, Saturday, 6 p.m. Game 4: Denver, Sunday, 6 p.m. Game 5*: Denver, Monday 10/29, Time TBD Game 6*: Boston, Wed 10/31, Time TBD Game 7* Boston, Thurs 11/1, Time TBD

*=if necessary

(The Associated Press contributed to this report. Copyright KUSA*TV, All Rights Reserved.)

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23 July 2007

Espamol: Spanish spam.

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10 June 2007

Here's a quote from Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, as told to Mark Wherry in the liner notes of the At World's End soundtrack CD: "Because Jack Sparrow always imagines himself as 'legend,' the music had to play as if it were coming from the character's head - his own personal soundtrack that accompanies his pride. It's more than delusion or arrogance, it's myth self-induced."

No wonder Cap'n Jack Sparrow fits in so well with the Mattopian culture.

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9 June 2007

I like watching shows on Discovery Times, History Channel, Biography, heck, even the Military Channel. But more and more, amidst the stories of Biblical archaeology and the downfall of great empires, the shows are becoming overloaded with commercials for... super weenies. All these commercials directed at a very specific, niche audience. The latest round is particularly annoying, with an over-eager wife (or girlfriend) leaving numerous voicemails for her man about how great he was and - ultimately - that she's basically going to drop everything so she can get back home and do it all again.

Sure, while I have no such issues personally, I can understand why a guy would be concerned if he was in such a condition to need these drugs. But do these commercials need to be repeated during virtually every commercial break?

At one point, out of disgust, I switched over to the Do It Yourself Network. It was informative, but I can't imagine going through the effort of painting a massive mural on my bedroom walls based on my latest vacation. That's not my bag. However, the super weenie commercials weren't there.

It's kind of ironic. No super weenies on the DIY Network.

While on the topic of super weenies, I'll take this opportunity to go on record: I don't give a damn about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. They need to get a grip on reality and stop acting like they're above the law. They are spoiled rotten and totally unsympathetic characters.

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