The site’s 2nd busiest month ever! The busiest month came after this year’s Crazy88 which has been my most-hit post ever. Its fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of traffic – posts have a brief wave that peaks then lulls over 2-3 days, with occasional flare-ups for annual events or heavy linkage. The spikes and continuing traffic follow a general pattern:

• bike stuff especially with pics draws traffic from MTBR, RideAZ and friends’ site.   far and away the most popular
• Adventures and Rocky Point draw a similar pattern but less action
• kids posts get little traffic, unless there are photos, which get gobs of repeated hits from a few people – traffic tends to mirror the number of pics, which usually means its a more interesting post, or people have no appreciation 4 tha rittin wurd anymoor
• no one gives a crap about much anything else I have to say

There are plugins that show you live traffic stats, average time to clickthrough, where the incoming IP is located and much other geekery.   But I didn’t like how it looked on my sidebar, and it seemed rather a pain in the ass to css-enable it.

The search terms that land people on the site are absolutely faskinatin’.   Anything dirty, slangish, or vaguely sexual brings lots of random traffic.   People angry over DUI laws is a big draw – its amazing how many people search for the terms “DUI Laws Are Bullshit”.     If I wanted to artificially inflate my hit count I should make my titles like episodes of Law & Order or titles from letters to Penthouse.   Then there are the hits that make me fear the internet and want to take the blog private.   Phrases like “g@n@vi@v@ pr@tty littl@ pu$$y” or “L!ttle g!rl su(k and du(k” – both intentionally mispelled so as to avoid hits.   A female friend of mine who has developed a vaguely-stalker following on a message board kept coming up in the logs, and when i posted on the board what was happening, the hits stopped.   Eww.   Icky icky eww.

I caved.

I joined Facebook.

I initially tried to view FB as a blog, since that has been my main online passion the last few years.   Facebook can serve that role, if you’re a person not particularly interested in having a blog.   It allows you blog-like features such as posting and connecting to other posters, streaming updates, and links, but only within the Facebook application.   Comments all stay in FB and not to your blog, RSS feeds from someone’s “Notes” in FB all stay in FB, even if the Notes stream originated from an external blog. Size, presentation, and type of content are limited, customization seems restricted.   Anything I can do in a web page I can do in my blog – flash, javascript, php, but FB stripped down everything to one format and one font.     It does not lend itself to creating an environment by color, background, or layout. You have, as best I can tell no access to themes or CSS. It also doesn’t seem to be well-suited for writing a lot, as the editor is very simple. Perhaps these features can be customized by some of the many Facebook applications, but if you are going to that level of detail, you might as well have a blog and access to the source.     These are part of what I like most about my blog, that I can create my own space that is visually and behaviorally exactly what I want.     FB is simply not suited to play the role of Blog engine well.   It does handle photo albums easily, and would take traffic and size off my blog, likely requiring the use of a plugin for WordPress.   Whether or not that is better than a neutral 3rd-party site like Picasa will be something I will evaluate further. I quickly removed my stream from chollaball.net into my FB Wall. It might have been viewed more easily by people who don’t frequent my blog, but it was not the view I wanted them to experience.

Once I got beyond judging FB like WordPress or Blogger, I was able to evaluate it for what it does particularly well, and that of course is social networking.   It took about a week to get my head wrapped around this concept, since its like email or a message board in ways that initially makes it seem redundant.   Adding friends one-by-one is annoying.   Not easily seeing a long history is annoying.     But the way it takes these same building blocks and supercharges them is amazing.     Its like having conversations with all your friends, but better.   Its dynamic in the way email is not, self-selecting in the way a message board is not, and of more substance in the way twitter is not.   Put them all together and it blows these single experiences away.   I’ve found that in a short period of time I’ve become better friends with my existing friends who use FB, have funner and more satisfying conversations, and much more lively chatter.   I’ve reconnected with several old friends, and because each of us can package our image and does not face the awkwardness of meeting up live in a finite and immediate setting, it allows you to be much more at ease.   25% of friendship is common interests, 75% is convenience and habit.   Facebook allows you to focus on the 25% and make of the 75% exactly what you choose.

Aside from good conversations and chatter with people I see and talk to regularly, I’ve noticed a couple interesting uses for FB.   Blog lite – for folks who want to share, but not write too much or go too crazy with a more complex program, FB is a wonderful lightweight blog.   For some of my friends, its FB or silence, and I like to hear what they are saying.   High School reunions – totally remove the Gross Pointe Blank weirdness, and get to view your peers as adults from a reasonable perspective.   Political movements – the matching and recommendations could spread like wildfire.   I heard one site bashing Dick Cheney had over 50,000 friends in a single day.   Viral marketing – Lance Armstrong has combined FB with his livestrong.com site and twitter updates to tap into the incredible depth of passion and emotion that thousands of individuals have for him.   Lance’s appeal defies a niche, its personal, and he uses it masterfully for his anti-cancer campaign.

On a techy level, FB is very cool in its aggressive   matching system that latches onto anything about you that it can, and then constantly updates based on the patterns you match.     I wish I knew more about it, and working there would be the bleeding edge in “If You Like This, You’ll Love That” algorithms.   Within about 2 days, most of the people I talk to regularly by email and groups and blogs were my friends or suggested to be my friends.   And so were their friends, and their friends’ friends, and here is where it gets kinda creepy.     You can’t slip quietly into Facebook, as everyone who has ever been connected to you knows about it.   So people you might want to just casually associate with must become your friends, or be cast into purgatory knowing full well how they got there.   Gradations of friends is hardly better – its not that your info should be private, its that your access should be.   I don’t really want to talk to people that I don’t normally talk to.

In some cases the lack of privacy is just plain bad.   I can see all of Beckie’s friends, comments and activity.   She can see mine.   Relationships need privacy to be healthy.

The privacy questions get bigger and heavier when you realize that all your info…every post, every picture, every connection…is stored on Facebook’s servers.   An outstanding article in the recent Wired talked about FB’s future, how they strive to be the next Google, and the privacy concerns surrounding it all.   I’m not worried, exactly, but at the end of the day you always always have to remember that you are on the internet and anything you write is not longer your own.   Its harder to do the more comfortable you are.   Facebook lets you package yourself, best to do it smartly.

One of my test scripts was failing against a program that displays seat status information.     The test data was in German, translated into raw text for passing by perl.   The original bug report said the program puked when it hit an umlaut, and while it was not puking I could not tell what was happening since the 3 programs I had to verify the output were all showing different things:

• cygwin linux shell – TribA ¼ne
• Visual SlickEdit – Trib”ne, with a note showing the ascii chars U+00FC
• TextPad and Outlook – Tribüne

And my test framework, written by another developer, was saying it was all failing as invalid JSON strings.

hmmm.  

The solution, which I understood once explained but in no way could have figured out on my own:

We assumed the string above was the source of the error.   The raw data passed to our program from a perl-based client program was “Trib\374ne”.   \374 is perl’s octal encoding for decimal 252, which is u-umlaut in the charset latin-1/iso-8859-1.   In the previous release where the bug was found, instead of character 252 being generated, our perl interpreter was skipping the translation from decimal to octal entirely and simply passing   “Trib\\ufffffffcne”.   0xfc is hex equivalent of 252 decimal, and the extra ‘f’s were from an incorrect sign extension to a longword value.   Hence the bug.

So the fact that we were getting a 252/0374/0xfc character now indicated that the fix was in place and the characters were valid, and there was a bug in the test framework’s ability to parse perl encoding back to JSON notation.

Just another day dealing with the most complicated software suite I’ve ever heard of.   Just another reason to fear internationalizing programs.

Tim Armstrong – Wake Up

Fishbone – Lyin-Ass-Bitch

These songs are here for no other reason than I like em, and I stole em, i luv skapunk, and this post needs some background music.

I have never felt any guilt over getting all my mp3s online or copies from friends.   Its not that I believe stealing is ok, even if you can’t get caught.   I just have a hard time seeing it as stealing.   The items are out there on the internet with accessible and fast dl’s, available like sunlight, I am making a copy of a copy of an infinite number of copies, and my act is not harming anyone or taking a finite resource that costs money to produce.       Moral arguments say that I am harming the artist who’s work I did not buy, and I am using the copyright holder’s product without their permission.     But quantifying the actual harm I have done, convincing me that the internet is not the public domain,   and me using it only personally and not to make money cast significant doubt on these moral arguments for me.   I know its something I’m being asked not to do,   but getting from there to piracy is a leap I just can’t make.

The most convincing thing for me that “stealing” music is not wrong is that the record companies do not protect their software.   I’m not talking about not getting caught, which is almost impossible with P2P networks anyway, I’m talking about no security whatsoever. I’ve never worked on software that did not include some security measures, its just inconceivable that in the digital age you would sell a digital product that is unprotected.   The record companies   have made lawsuits the backbone of their business model, rather than adapt their product to changing times.     This has been the record companies’ strategy for years – from cassettes, to CDs, to DATs, and now to mp3s. Whine about the threat of new technology, make us feel bad about ourselves for using it, and then sue. This fight with technology has been 20 years in the making, and they have yet to evolve their product or strategy. Its not like all of a sudden ipods and the internet showed up – I got my first mp3 player in 1999! I just can’t abide by morality that is frozen in time while the notion of piracy struggles to maintain validity on the internet.

A recent conversation made me re-evaluate two considerations: is music such a different type of ware that it should be subject to different morality than other digital products, and, I have a long history of both music copying and wares piracy – perhaps this is just an elaborate justification for my selfish actions? Understanding the latter helps clarify the former.

As long as I can remember, I copied music. It used to be holding a tape recorder up to the radio, then duping tapes, then taping CD’s, then burning CD copies. These were all slow, burdensome, required borrowing the media, and still cost you $1-2 for tapes or CD’s. The quality wasn’t as good, and it was limited by the time, effort and expense of copying. My anecdotal opinion is that it was self-limiting, and not a big impact to the music industry. No one I ever met had a problem with the morality of it, maybe cause no one had a problem with the morality of it, maybe cause your one individual act had such a minimal impact on the industry and was kinda a pain in the ass. Piracy? Bootleg?   Whatever – it was just a copy to use for myself.   In the late 90’s Beckie and I had about 400 CDs, and probably 200   hundred albums on tape. A lot of the CDs were bought used, or from Columbia House 15 for a penny. My music collection doubled and tripled when I worked Tech Support for RightFAX, and we had a room full of 20 guys all sharing their music and making copies off each other. It didn’t feel any different than my college roommates and I copying CD’s. It didn’t feel much different than 1 guy choosing the tape we’d listen to for awhile, then someone else playing one of theirs, etc.

Gradually this led to membership or access-controlled sites that basically were an FTP download from a stranger, which gradually led to Napster. It felt no different than sharing with people you knew – the “criminal” act had not changed one bit, nor how I used it as a personal copy. These early file sharing networks caused a huge increase in illegal copies compared to the current number of illegal copies aka tapes, but my unsubstantiated hunch is it was still mostly by the geeks and college students, based on all the people I knew who still stuck with CD’s or mp3 versions of their CD’s, willfully turning down access to my now-huge collection cause it was too new too different too much bother. Whomever was doing it, it was not P2P, it was centralized and it was traceable. The copyright holders had a target, and they could prove the offense. Score one for the record companies. If you are one of those all-music-should-be-free crusaders, this is where you’d play The Emperor’s Theme from “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Over the next few years the file-sharing client programs came and went, morphing with different technologies and fighting different legal strategies by the record companies, so fast i don’t even remember the names. What I do remember is that it got harder and harder to get music, especially to find an entire album since you had to track down each song file individually. Those you found were often bogus, the sites slow or full of viruses, and you were left with mis-matched tags and frequencies. I’d say during these years 85% of my new music was hitting up friends and co-workers, having my own private FTP server that I let about 10 friends share on, or 50 free dls per credit card from Emusic.com, all nothing fundamentally different than I had been doing for years. The albums I did gank from the net were more a hobby cause I was spending all day on the computer anyway, getting them was not a cost-effective use of my time, I didn’t want em bad enough to pay $10 I just had more time and boredom than any thing else. I spent about 30 hrs one month just sanitizing and re-tagging our entire collection it was such a mishmash.

The death of Napster eventually led to more money for the owners of digital music, and less.   On the one hand, the average computer user who knew nothing about how to download free music began using the internet, enough people got tired of how much of a pain in the ass it was to go after free music, iTunes and similar started offering affordable and legal downloads that were easy and high-quality, and many artists started giving their music away on their own.   Price, convenience,   and value led to new products and services, new artists producing and distributing their own products, change and evolution, less piracy.     On the other hand,   true P2P networks also evolved where it was untraceable and easier than ever before to get whatever you wanted.   Complete temptation as one option, easy and legal and affordable music as the other option.

Up to the point of total free access via new P2P networks, I think this evolution of free music usage has many similarities to my use of pirated wares. They used to be easy to get, then the sites became so full of viruses and bogus versions they became hard. Cracks and licenses used to be easy and effective, then the programmer’s made the licensing tougher and more resilient in spotting re-used activation codes. The costs became reasonable, bundling things with new purchases and discounted renewals became commonplace, and personal licenses or comparable freeware version developed. For example, you used to be able to obtain copies of PhotoShop pretty much anywhere. Then it became harder to get for free, the cracked versions started expiring regularly and you could find copies of the almost-as-good Paint Shop Pro anywhere, which beget Paint.Net, and so on. (an aside: what I can do now for free with graphics vs. 10 years ago for free is the difference between 90% of Photoshop and MS Paint, but that is a post about trickling down technology for another day).   I once re-installed Norton AntiVirus every 3 months for a year while each time resetting my system clock, until that just became a total waste of time for the cost of a license. At least for me, it just became easier to buy things or find comparable with freeware.

The fact that I was making an effort to hack or pirate a program definitely entered my calculations of right and wrong, but not for any respect for a copyright.     Working in software development — or IT or Web Design or many other computer fields — you have so much access to software from vendors, suppliers, eval licenses, beta programs, user groups, tutorials, blogs, etc that using whatever whenever is part of your daily grind.   You’re not reselling it, or using it commercially for very long without a license, or are particularly wedded to one thing or another.   There is always another tool, often this just happens to fit your need at the moment and your convenience.   Seeing how your own products are passed around, evaluated and demoed makes you see how a few free copies are not significant – the real money is selling a product over and over to people not able to make it work on their own, not fighting the geeks going above-and-beyond to use an unlicensed and unsupported version.   This is how I end up with lots of programs I didn’t pay for. Eventually you need the tool again, and now you’re used to using it, and you don’t want to waste time learning or searching for a new tool when it’d be easier to track down a crack or a license, or pay for it when you’ve been using it for free already. Somewhere in here it either continues to be easy to use for free, or you realize that you are working too dang hard to steal something to tell yourself anymore that you are not stealing something.   So you find a new free tool or pay up. The morality against stealing is brought to life by the security.

The model is the same on a corporate level, but the bite of security is felt far more.   Companies were the first to realize they were big fat targets for disgruntled employees if they did not license their software. The best conspiracy is a conspiracy of one.   Most network users nowadays can’t do a whole lot to their machines, which puts control and risk management in the hands of the SysAdmins. Even in most of the software companies I’ve been at, where the users need flexibility and control to kick around their systems, unauthorized products don’t last past the first few nightly system audits anymore. The SysAdmin for a computer company has to have enough finesse not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so instead of locking out your privileges he will give you a nudge nudge wink wink submit a PO for the software at your earliest convenience please. An example: I wanted to use a free virus scanner that I use on my machines at home, that our SysAdmin uses, and that was less intrusive than the McAfee suite that is our corporate standard. I was told after an audit revealed it on my machine I could not use it since it was a work computer, that my usage violated AVG’s license agreement for the free version.     Self-enforcement and adhering to licensing became cost effective for companies.   But at the same time, products offered eval periods, pricing became competitive and budgeted for, time delays and ramp-up periods were built into schedules.  The corporate culture evolved to provide better alternatives to piracy.   The licensing that was a pain in the ass for me avoid for personal usage, which forced me to acknowledge my unapproved actions, found a lukewarm champion in the corporate SysAdmin and all his Dilberts that sneak posts up on glassdoor.com

So as a continuous music dl’r, and a recovering pirate, the lesson i take from my history is something that is too easy and too insecure will be stolen, because it does not impose a morality on people by force.   It is a ridiculously Nietzschean thing to say, that morality can not exist without will.   It presupposes that stealing in and of itself is not wrong.   This metaethic conflicts with my personal ethic that stealing is wrong, especially since I am one of the geeks that have in a way contributed to enabling this theft.   Now maybe its me being a cheap bastard, or maybe its being a software guy and having an unusual view of wares, or maybe its that I studied Nietzsche…but the metaethic colors the ethic, and my ethics continue to lead me right back to asking what have I stolen? 0’s and 1’s? Someone’s efforts? Well why didn’t they just work a little harder to secure their shit and take any ambiguity out of the picture?     The internet has reborn the morals of intellectual property rights by freeing products from media, while the old notion is grounded in a tangible harm: taking a finite thing, selling someone else’s thing.   You can’t say I’ve punched you in the concept, and if you do, I will give you a concept back.   All the benefits of the digital age and the millions of jobs it has created by the new landscape of consumer goods its spawned come with their own new costs of doing business and necessary inputs.     And I guess the cost of doing   business is a morally-flexible cheap selfish prick like me.

I’m not exactly proud of it, though its kinda cool to be a super villain.   I’d like to copy from the net with a clean conscience, but then again, I like free stuff.   And it just feels too free to turn down, when its just not that hard to secure it and make me believe in the crime.   Pirate Bay and similar P2P sites allow you to get an entire collection in just a few minutes. Its so easy, kids and their e-retarded parents know how. Telling your kid stealing is wrong is one thing, but its a whole nother thing convincing them the bits and bytes of the new paradigm are property when they’ve never known a $15 CD, when a friend gives them a copy just like they’d borrow a CD, when the same songs they can play over and over from a website are just a click away.

The old model is winding down to its last gasp.     Yet my logic is still somewhat circular.   At an ethical level I am justifying something because I can get away with it even though someone asked me not to, and instead of finding justification within my ethic I am reaching down into my metaethic.   I can’t make this point any further, I’ve been struggling with this post for weeks.   I just can shrug towards the reality of changing technology to make my point.   The closest I can come to bridging the gap between a tangible and virtual idea of theft is this:   if you had a buddy with a 5k bike who left it unlocked and it got stolen, you’d all be ready to jump in and lynch some dude for it. But if it kept happening again and again and again and your buddy didn’t buy a lock, you’d stop riding with him and get bored with his complaints.

The lawyers could be considered the defense of the mp3, just like a license is to a program. By their presence i should acknowledge they are making efforts to protect their wares, and my own logic says this should command respect.   But my own logic also says they are not very imposing, and therefore do not command respect.     My feeling is this model of charging ~$10 for inventory without securing it is all the record companies know, or they still think its the best option for them.     The record companies are clinging to relevance when an artist can self-produce and distribute their own wares, and if an artist had a paypal link and let me dl an entire album in a click for about $2, I’d do it.   $2 for an album may not seem like much, except that means 2M if the album sells a million copies, in addition to all the tour and merchandising money.   But this cuts out the middle man, the record company.   I’m not saying there is anything wrong with the record companies, or that they are hurting the poor artists, just revealing the model and why perhaps the record companies feel they must stick with it.   Either way, the lawyers and threats and guilt are their weapons of choice in this scenario.   They see the new paradigm, and choose to fight it using old weapons.   If force does not work or can not be used, then guilt becomes its own will to power.

Guilt does not work on me, especially when it surrounds things I deal with everyday.

If the crime of piracy can only be applied to something that is stolen, and theft on the internet can not be proven, and the model will not change and add security, then for me to see the dl’s as stealing the record companies must convince me that music is a fundamentally different product that merits sanctity while remaining insecure.     The want us to believe the process of securing music so fundamentally changes its usage and affects its users that it is not feasible, the copyright should be sacrosanct, that the alternative is no music.

In looking at things I’ve worked on, I find no close comparison   to music files.   My products have been for internal customers with no one wanting to steal it since it has no external application, unstealable like a website, or a business product which does not get stolen much in the legitimate business world anymore (see above).   Music is really an end-user product, so needs to be compared to something with millions of units that are basically turnkey for the average consumer: virus scanners, photo editors, games, mapping tools, and OS’s or Office products. I have stolen all these at one time or another, and stopped for all the reasons I’ve stated above.   I think to really evaluate software-based music as a “class” or products, I need to compare it to video games, movies, tv shows and books.

Video games are a no-brainer — you never see video games where the media or the activation key are not essential to their usage. Games can be bought on iTunes and never see a CD, but they still require an activation key.   Its clearly piracy, you are clearly stealing.   I guess the only difference is you don’t have thousands of video games.   The licensing overhead is just an occasional thing, not a constant repetitive annoyance.

Movies are similar to music in that they are entertainment, in demand.   A certain level of copying has always existed with movies, and professional pirates reselling illegal copies should be stopped.     But copying   to your Tivo or VCR has always been tolerated sine the license only cares about commercial rebroadcast.   Downloading an unauthorized pre-copy or recent copy seems is the point of contention with movies, since it cuts into theater attendance and dvd sales\rentals.   I have no idea how significant this is to the bottom line, movies are not something I typically dl or copy.   I know folks who do, but IMO, the quality and time are not worth the payoff – I have access to other movies and will have access to this soon enough via Netflix   and cable.   You can copy DVDs or slingbox a broadcast to your computer, and we’ve put copies of movies on our computer when we’re going to Mexico with no cable.   But that’s just another way to tivo – its something I will watch once, and its more about my convenience for using something I have already paid for.   That is close to the model of paying for music downloads.   But I think the size and non-repeatability of movies compared to music separates the amount of piracy, I really don’t know.

TV is an interesting cross-case. Almost every show is now available streaming, and TV has never tried to enforce taping or Tivo. But the networks all make you watch the shows on their websites, and they make it very convenient, so they still get their advertising dollars. Their business model has not changed, only the means of delivery.

Books are something I think will always stand on their own to some extent, and if not, it means that Kindles and similar products will make fortunes.   Wired had a great article about how books that have gone digital have found new ways to make money encouraging comments and online book clubs which lead to advertising or purchases of the hardcopies.

None of these example are just like a song, where you want to hear it over and over, on all your devices or players, at your total convenience. Radio stations do not offer songs on demand like TV stations, so the moneymaker in selling a song is in the complete flexibility the user is offered. The physical media had been the one limiting factor to infinite usage, and now the internet’s ability to propagate a copy has destroyed the model.     At the same time, many artists ranging from small indies to top-name acts give their music away, or use it as a teaser for the whole album. And they do it in a way that introduces you to the band and their website, so that they are more selling the experience of being a fan. But value add or not, they devalue the model of   music as a commodity.   Again, what if an albume was $2 and it went right to the artist – that sure changes things!

The only way the current model can survive – buying the media – is with security. DRM and locked media did not go over because it sacrificed portability, but why not create a new lock? Include a public key in the music file, sell the user a private key, and mandate every time they make a copy its while the device can talk to the internet where it pings a server with its license.   This would require new programs and new hardware, new innovations, and they are simply not being tried. Every other media is going through this in their way, and all are evolving and shrinking and changing, but they are not standing still.   Meanwhile people blog for free, and develop thousands of readers.   People want to read, they want to hear music, they want to create these things. If they stop getting paid, it will all be free. If its all free, will anyone worth a damn do it? Money is being made in new ways, it will happen. The lawyers are making tons of it now, jobs are out there.

None of this is totally convincing, I am struggling with it myself.   This long-winded post was an attempt to get a lot of random thoughts into a semi-coherent argument.   I can’t for the life of me elucidate a justification for stealing, all I can do is recognize the new paradign.

We could end ticket scalping.   And while not as cool as ending ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it would be sweet to have been a part of something that makes a fundamental innovation in the way of things.

A PR win would be good for a change too.

Vimeo has a system outage where videos spent hrs waiting for conversion, and at the same time, as part of their default coding they fill their available space with  a promo for their enhanced service.   Seems reasonable.

Posts from Vimeo’s support staff explain the issue and diffuse concerns of a conspiracy:

We had a network glitch earlier that caused a lot of videos to be
delayed. We've since patched it up and resumed encoding. All your
videos should be available in the next few hours!

Trust us we are not intentionally causes errors for our free members,
the technical difficulties that began last night have been affecting
both free and Plus members.

No need to reupload. We are powering up our systems to run through the
backlog of files that accumulated due to this glitch. We have your
files though and are working on running through them all.

We have an outage, on the other hand, and get pressured from Senators and Attorney Generals to remove an integration feature that helps users.   StubHub continues to do what they want, accept pre-listings, and not offer the kind of guarantees to customers that we can.

I’m in the process of this very boring, very tedious, very important project at work.   I need to build about 100 test scripts that exercise an API and can be tested by automation against a known response set.   The requests and responses are both in JSON notation, which is very precise in its use of syntax and very dense with arrays nested in hashes nested in arrays nested in hashes ad nauseam, and the responses are pages long.   The cut\paste and general detail of the work in painful.

So i’ve been easily distracted by the blog as a flightly little pleasure toy.   I wanted to add some more functional plugins to the site that would show latest comments and latest posts on my blogroll.   This always involves fiddling with a few sample plugins, tweaks, and spelunking through code from developers around the world.   A few hours of effort led me to Get Recent Comments for the comments list now on the sidebar. Its got a very easy interface for formatting which allows you to use preloaded macros and combine them with freehand html.

After 2 hrs I was kinda rolling, so moved onto a recent-post streamer for my blogroll. This took a lot of fiddling to get what I wanted and in the format I wanted it, and after another 2 hours I was still evaluating and prototyping. I was liking one plugin called Feed Reading Blogroll but it required the use of widgets in your sidebar and the use of WordPress 2.7.1.   I’ve stayed away from widgets since they overwrite a lot of manual plugin code I’d built into the sidebar where I could control the formatting, and under WordPress 2.5 widgets seemed a little flaky.   You can only resist progress for so long, and I was a year behind on my version of WordPress, hanging doggedly on v2.5 since it was good enough.   Sooooooo…

I got sidetracked into upgrading.   This first required a full dl of all my code and a diff against the 2.5 default code to track all my edits.   Then a lot of fumbling about with my ftp client since it kept locking the connections to my ISP every 50 or so file uploads, was choking on recursive deletes, and I forgot to disable all my plugins when I started the upgrade process so the new version of WordPress blew up initially.   This meant falling back to the old version, more flumbling with the locking connections, until I found a management page in my website’s admin suite that let me kick ftp connections.   So I basically camped out on the page kicking connections as fast as I could while the ftp client kept establishing fresh ones, and eventually got the 1,000   v2.7.1 files uploaded.   Modify the DB to support the new version, edit the sidebar.php where it choked on deactivated plugins not wrapped in if statements, reactivate the plugins, and then begin the process of comparing all my v 2.5 tweaks to the v 2.7.1 code to see which ones I had to re-add.

It was about 5pm when I went to work on putting back my smileys, again.     WordPress once again redid its implementation of tinyMCE, and the code looked like it was written in linux so appeared as one ginormous line instead of formatted.   This was a search\replace\reverse-engineering PITA.   My emotions plugin code from v 2.5 was solid, but I had to figure out how to get it initialized by the new implementation of tinyMCE, and how to load its buttons into the WYSIWYG editor.   So I picked one plugin with a small code block (fullscreen) and manually formatted 4k of javascript code to confirm it was comparable to my emotions javascript, which it was.   Then I searched the whole WordPress install for the term “fullscreen” and figure out where I had to add my plugin name “emotions” to get it initialized.   Next I hacked through the whole code base to find its button.   After striking out on the buttons, and whittling down the list of places where “fullscreen” was called to relevant hunks of code, I realized that the buttons were picked from one large image, and that tinyMCE already had the smileys “button” in its library.   It was ready to be called by my changes above.   The files I modded were /wp-admin/ includes/post.php and/wp-admin/gears-manfiest.php.   It was now close to 8pm.

Back to the widgets to get my site widgetized and see how it looked.   I mostly got it to look right, figured out some code pieces I could pull outside the widgetizing block in sidebar.php to not be overwritten, screwed around with putting them in elements to get them correctly formatted in their new div, etc etc for a couple more hours.   And tumbled to a bug in the Recent Comments code where the title got fubarred due to any change in the widgets panel.   This took about an hour of trying to fix it on my own, until I finally figured out a workaround (resave your options for the plugin after every save to the widgets panel) and left a comment on the developer’s blog in hopes that they might fix it.   Paying back the community, as it were.

It was probably 9:30-10ish at least when I dialed in completely on the blogroll features.   It was a nice plugin, but I did not like the format.   The code was very dense and used the <abbr> html tag a lot which I did not know how to use.   The embedded php was also super-thick, and I struggled mightily to figure out where the inline styles were used vs. the optional css file.   About 3-4 more hours went by where I fiddled with it, tried and rejected a few other plugins, blew off taking out Kila, blew off working out,   and got it kinda sorta good enough when I left a comment on the developer’s site.   He was in Germany, and it was now daytime over there, and his reply helped me see the simple thing I’d missed – what I thought was a link from which I could not remove the underline was actually a bottom border.   Mixing that with some inline styles that I’d sorted out,   i quit about 2am.

My giant pile of work is still there waiting for me.

This was the plan when I quit Aligo after 3.5 years for a better offer.   More stable, more resources, bigger stakes where my skills could scale and I could be compensated accordingly.   I remember hesitating on the initial offer, and them coming back with 10% more.   I remember showing up on Day 1 with my hand in a cast a day after surgery for the displaced fracture I got snowboarding at Sunrise the previous weekend.   I’m kinda still stunned I haven’t lost my shit at least once over some ridiculous challenge and drummed myself out a job.   Somehow, some way, after starting as a corporate trainer for RightFAX in ’97 cause I taught myself how to fix my crashing install of Windows 3.1, now I sit in weekly brainstorming meetings with honchos and Directors, my main developer is one of the most expert Perl guys out there, I set my own schedule, and I take off early to ride National.   And it just doesn’t seem all that hard.   Someday I will move to a mountain town and work as a lifty, but today I’m happy to be fun-employed.

So apparently there was a problem with an onsale for Bruce Springsteen, one of about 4 concerts he does a year, and this came about a day after he did the halftime show at the Superbowl. LiveNation messes up an onsale for Phish and the only people who care are stoners, but problems with Bruce Springsteen during a depression is worse than the Beatles dissing Jesus. The problem was — in simple terms — a feature that was used with an incompatible feature. In simpler terms, a system error. In simplest terms, no RTFM. I must admit I am glad that my team’s software performed correctly. In a worldwide company with thousands of employees that sells about 150,000,000 tickets a year, its pretty impressive that this was the first onsale problem I recall in 2 years. A couple years ago I worked on a product that represented 1/3 of our event programming features, and it had a module that validated the data against over 200 business rules! But, that is what we get paid for, and we should rightly get called out on that.

What has happened in the media and in the blogosphere, however, is just amazing — expressing such an incredible amount of rage and ignorance i kinda get what it might have been like to be black in Alabama in 1950. The self-righteous hatred mixed with the unmitigated stupidity…blowhard Senator Chuck Schumer is even piling on, and quoting “Born to Run” while promising an investigation into our monopolistic, gauging practices. I am feeling sympathy for the people who work at the DMV or the IRS or policemen or my health insurance’s billing department. It made me think about why these are such disliked organizations: these people all stand between us and something we want, and to varying degrees think is our entitlement. People are pissed off that concerts cost a lot, that they have to compete with 40 million other people for 10,000 seats, that season ticket holders and fan club members and people who know people or have the connections or money to hook themselves up are doing so and they are not. They hate that live entertainment isn’t On Demand, that all seats aren’t as good as the view on TV, and that you can’t just press a button and see the show you want. They hate that we are better than anyone at ticketing so blast us as a monopoly, they call the contracts we sign coercive when like any business we give better deals to higher-volume, exclusive clients.

So much of it is just plain irrational and outside our ability to educate, its tragicomic all the spray we get. Ticketmaster’s situation reminds me of the character Hancock, which was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while. And like Hancock, a lot of my coworkers are shaking our heads trying to make sense of it all. I have worked there for 5 years, after working for 4 startup companies in 6 years – its a great place to work. My coworkers are as smart and innovative as any I’ve had, and the atmosphere is better since we know that having an extra can of soda is not going to bankrupt us. VPs play ping-pong with junior engineers in the break room. Often a big company is criticized for not displaying enough brilliance, but brilliance in a bottle is easy, consistently good software delivered to a customer who pays for it is brilliant. I am humbled daily by some of my coworkers, more so by those who are left after a 10% force reduction. I have met our CEO and CTO; my standard for evaluating a person’s raw ability is by what kind of dialog they conduct and the quality of the questions they ask — our execs both excelled.

Most people do not understand Ticketmaster’s business model. Venues, artists and producers are our clients, and they are the ones who dictate the use of our features; the public is our customer. We provide a full suite of ticketing services to our clients including: marketing, distribution, collections, settlement, auditing, inventory control, and access control all available in a ridiculously flexible feature set. This is what the service charge covers, and these are necessary items to put on an event. Be it Ticketmaster or Jethro’s Tickets and Crab Shack, you are going to pay for these services in the total cost of your ticket. We are in business to provide a service and get paid; we’re not killing babies, or terrifying you with audits, or even demanding a $500 copay.

People completely do not or choose not to understand our fees. Some are outside of our control: facility fees, parking fees, fees the venue adds on because for whatever reason they did not get enough money from the act or the promoter. Some fees come with your level of service – the service charge is the base fee for our normal range of services, the processing fee if you talk to a phone rep, the convenience fee if you order ticketfast and print it at your house, and there are fees to use our Exchange product. I don’t see the problem, or see this being different from all the fees you get with a plane ticket, a hotel room, or using Ebay. People bitch about $9 on a $150 ticket, how is this different than Ebay taking a percentage of the sale price, with larger fees on pricier sales? If it weren’t for Ebay, I couldn’t have sold a ton of my crap far easier than on Craigslist or sitting in my driveway at a yardsale. If you don’t want to order online, want to stand outside a window, want to drive across town and wait in line to pick up your seats, if printing your ticket with no worry about lost inventory or the US mail is not worth $2 – $5 to you…go for it.

The fact is the stadiums are not as good at sales and will call – it is slow, prone to human error and theft, requires an employee who could be generating more revenue seating people or selling drinks, and is just a difficult exercise in customer service. On a small scale, they lose a little money providing these services in conjunction with using us and we lose a little by not taking our fee – its a loss-leader to everyone and part of the business. On a large scale, our clients know they are grossly inefficient compared to having the public use us, and would absolutely start charging fees if they handled all the inventory simply to cover the additional personnel. Movie Megaplex Sleepy Box Office Guy + Movie Megaplex Pimply-Faced Ticket Tearer Guy; Ski Resort Friendly Cashier Chick + Ski Resort Groovy Bra Lifty…you see where this is going. Fees = service. Epic Rides used to have terrible event registration and once their fuck-up cost me $20 or Beckie and I couldn’t ride 24OP after driving 2 hours, and they mandated a $5 donation to the event’s charity…eventually they contracted registration to Active.com for about $4, and got much better local support cause of the charities, and their events have been running wonderfully…when you go to a live event, you expect it to cost money, its an EVENT.

Some of the features that are available to the public from your service charges: fan clubs, auctions, exchange, lost ticket replacement, pre-sales, over 32,000 types of discounts and price levels, a full-service website, inventory authenticity, gift cards, any form of payment, alerts, updates, iTunes credits, and the machine at the gate that goes “PING!” Its easy to take this stuff for granted, except when you sit in a Will Call line for 30 minutes missing your show, have the website crash, or have the slightest concern about sitting in your very own seat. To the best of my knowledge, we have never sold the same seat twice. Bitch all you want, for the hundreds of millions of seats we sell a year there are an infinitesimal small number of mistakes. Compare that to the airlines or a hotel, compare that to a rental car company, compare that to your order at a restaurant?

Ticketmaster does not set prices. We do not determine what inventory goes on sale when, or how access to seats are prioritized. These are all decided by the clients. Some people hate us because they were unable to obtain seats, but this really goes back to the teams or the artists. If Bruce Springsteen wanted everyone to see his show, he would play concerts every night until he stopped selling out, and he’d be like CATS with a 15 year run on Broadway, he’d be Wayne Newton in plainer clothes playing MSG and the Stone Pony on alternate weeks if he really loved his fans. If artists were truly concerned about scalpers, they would use our new virtual ticketing like Metallica just did – a way of entering the venue via swiping the credit card used to buy the ticket and completely eliminating paper inventory. If teams were fundamentally upset about season-ticket holders reselling, they would scan StubHub for seat locations and void those customers’ tickets, like the New England Patriots did not long ago. The horrible things the public thinks Ticketmaster enables is out of our control and completely explained by understanding our business model – we sell seats, we serve our clients, we don’t make policy.

The flashpoint for the Springsteen blowup and the hatred in general is the secondary market, and the 10x markup for in-demand tickets, which appear on StubHub sometimes a minute after an onsale opens on our website. A scalper used to be a dude outside the stadium, who got his tickets by waiting in line or having bums wait in line for him, and he seemed a little sketchy and you worried about the inventory (ooooh snap), but he was still just a guy selling something you might want. Sometimes you wish you had enough to buy his tickets, sometimes you laughed when the game started and that greedy bastard was still hawking seats in the parking lot. But he was just a working guy, not really hurting you with business. The internet has enabled the reseller to reach a mass audience, and turned scalping into a big business where the scalpers develop contacts with season ticket holders, multiple memberships in fan clubs with access to presales, brokerages and other personal contacts. The scalpers pay people in India to bang on our website, and have invested in bot software to slam our site and generate more requests than any person could ever do. Some days 80% of our website hits are bot traffic. The listings that magically appear on StubHub at the start of an onsale have been ready for a long time prior to the public onsale, they just weren’t allowed to be publicly listed until the onsale began.

The internet has highlighted just how much inventory is resold, and how hard it really is to get for the average person by the average means. This is obviously just supply and demand at work, but the sense of frustration and entitlement overwhelms people’s basic notion of economics. It seems fair to everyone to be able to re-sell a couple seats they didn’t want since its their property, and it seems fair to make some money if its a popular event — but multiply that by thousands of users and wildly popular events and professional dealers, and people lose their fucking minds and start pointing fingers. We have an auction product, which has not really caught on, even though its enabling the same market forces in a more trustworthy manner with fewer fees – but teams and artists don’t like to be seen as selling to the highest bidder. How would that make Bruce Springsteen look, if only wealthy people could afford his events? Or rather, if he condoned it?

Last year during the Hannah Montana craze, we sued a software company that makes bots which bought tickets for brokers claiming they violated the usage terms of our website, many district attorneys tried to push anti-scalping laws, and for a brief window everyone liked us. From our business model, we make the same service charge either way – add firewall and anti-bot efforts to the services we provide for your fee. The clients and public can remove scalping tomorrow if they want to and instruct us to, by combing laws with client mandates and technology. The will is not there.

Like any good business looking to remain competitive, three years ago we developed our exchange product – a completely managed and trustworthy secondary market. Its officially endorsed by most of the major sports teams and is called Team Exchange. Rules can be set for markup percentage, and in some cases those markups are mandated by state or county laws. StubHub, to the best of my knowledge, does not enforce these laws. Last year we purchased TicketsNow, an established secondary market website like StubHub. As a competitive point and service to the public, we can 100% guarantee any inventory because its cross-referenced against our records. StubHub and their like will refund your money, but can’t guarantee your ticket is valid. Would you rather get your money back 6 weeks later after filling out forms and laying down the cash and going to the venue and explaining to your daughter why she couldn’t see the Jonas Brothers, or would your rather go to a concert? We also link to TicketsNow on our website when you search for tickets, along with links to a re-search using different parameters and links for email notifications. These seemed like good services to give the public more options and utilize our page space, but after Springsteen the public is convinced we had a conspiracy to push people to our own resale channel so we could make more on the marked-up prices. We do not post inventory on that site – its all posted by individual resellers and dealers just like StubHub.

Another popular conspiracy theory is that rogue Ticketmaster employees are scamming seats and reselling them. A question I always get when I tell people where I work is if I can get them seats. Its illegal, and just the hint of it would get me fired in a flash. Supposing I could, I sure wouldn’t sell them to people who knew where I worked, or who expected some kind of bro deal when I could get 1000% more selling them online after I risked my job for it! And I would just do a few per show, not enough to get noticed, so as not to kill the golden goose. This can not explain the thousands of seats for resale, since we have detailed auditing records and our settlement procedures are rigorously reviewed – promoters tend to notice 10% of their inventory gone missing like cops notice cars drenched in blood. The free tickets I do get I obtain just like anyone else gets through work perks – the marketing guys have some extras, vendor goodwill, or corporate promotions for under-attended events. If you want mediocre seats for WNBA games or indoor lacrosse, GA tickets to a Horse Show, or last minutes seats to the Phoenix Ballet I can be your sugar daddy. I’ve gotten 4 sets of 4 $80 Phoenix Coyotes tickets this year and have had to practically drag friends out with me – Genevieve has seen more hockey games than most people in Phoenix have any desire to see. The only marquee ticket I’ve gotten that was a genuine work hookup was a day at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, and we were there to support the rollout of our new ticketing kiosks which let you buy a ticket just like a subway token. People loved it – the lines flew along, and the venue needed fewer cashiers so had more staff for beer sales. While I was there I got to see Robert Plant on the main stage.   It was awesome, I have wanted to see him for about 25 years – if I had to choose only one artist to listen to for the rest of my life Plant and Led Zeppelin might very well be the pick.   But I didn’t really see him, I was about 50 yards from a giant screen that was about 200 yards from the stage crammed alongside about 10,000 other people. Instead of doing the same to see the next headliner Sheryl Crow, I saw a small band named Ozomatli from about the 5th row and had a fantastic time dancing and jumping around. Ironically, Ozomatli was playing again the next night at a cool little venue around the corner from our hotel.