Yearly Archives: 2008

04/15/08

Ticketmaster is more evil then I thought

So here’s the email I sent to my season ticket holder account representative:

Hi [name redacted],

I’m very upset at what can only be seen as deceptive business practices by the Sharks partner, Ticketmaster against their best customers- season ticket holders.

My wife and I are going to be out of town for Thursday’s game so I went to sell our tickets last night on the Sharks Power Play Ticket Trader. Here’s what I finally figured out this morning:

1. Tickets I sell aren’t actually sold at the “posting price” which I enter, displayed on the confirmation page or in the confirmation email. After looking for 5 minutes, I can’t find anywhere in the process where Ticketmaster actually states the actual dollar amount the tickets will actually sell for.

2. Ticketmaster uses an intentionally convoluted and misleading algorithm for determining the actual sale price and how much profit they make:

If a ticket is sold, you will receive a credit for 90% of the ticket’s Posting Price. The “Posting Price” is an amount that you will be given the chance to designate subject to a minimum and a maximum reflected during the posting process. The tickets then will be listed for sale for 115% of the Posting Price. If the tickets are purchased, the buyer will pay that increased amount plus an authentication and ticketFast® fee.

3. Ticketmaster only explains this in a popup window under the misleading title of “How much can I sell my individual game tickets for?”.

4. Ticketmaster then intentionally hides your own tickets for sale when you search for tickets to buy so that you’re less likely to become aware of this slight of hand on their part. I literally had to use a different computer to see my own tickets listed for sale because when I looked for my own tickets they were filtered out.

The reason for this is quite clear- Ticketmaster is intentionally misleading season ticket holders to artificially raise ticket prices by %15 (the difference between the “posting price” and actual “sell price”) in order to make higher profits.

I understand that Ticketmaster should be compensated for the Sharks Power Play Ticket Trader service, but doing so in such an underhanded and deceptive way does not treat season ticket holders or the people who purchase tickets fairly. I can only hope that SVSE and the Sharks were not aware of Ticketmasters policy. I trust that SVSE and the San Jose Sharks organization do the right thing for season ticket holders and all the fans wishing to buy tickets to Sharks games and force Ticketmaster to stop their deceptive business practices by:

1. Clearly showing to people who wish to sell their tickets the actual selling dollar amount and how much Ticketmaster is actually charging.

2. Removing the filter which prevents people from seeing their own tickets for sale.

Regards,
Aaron Turner Sec 203, Row 7, Seats 5 & 6

04/15/08

SSL = Secure Sucky Layer

I upgraded from Apache 2.2.6 to 2.2.8 and found out it broke compatibility with SSL certificates requiring an intermediate signing certificate. Without getting too techno-babbly, cheaper SSL certificates ($30/yr vs well over $100/yr) that you buy require a slightly more complicated SSL configuration on the server- a so-called “intermediate certificate” so that web browsers will know to trust the website. And as of 2.2.8, Apache apparently broke that functionality, so now I’m hosed. Continue reading →

04/9/08

openpacket.org is open for business

So the gang at openpacket.org finally has made it to 1.0 and the website is officially open for business. Honestly, I’m quite happy to see that someone has finally made something like this available- Tcpreplay users have been asking me where to get pcaps for a long time. I’ve been talking about doing something like this for years, but never had the time, so it’s great that someone else ran with it. Continue reading →

03/12/08

Notes From Warren Buffett Meeting

This is a great report of a Q&A session that Warren Buffet gave to a bunch of business school students. While there was plenty of good business/economic discussion, my favorite quote had to do with Mr. Buffett’s outlook on life:

As Bertrand Russell says, “Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.” I won the ovarian lottery the day I was born and so did all of you. We’re all successful, intelligent, educated. To focus on what you don’t have is a terrible mistake. With the gifts all of us have, if you are unhappy, it’s your own fault.

03/4/08

Bush to Americans: The gov’t will keep spying on you

Cleaning up my drafts, here President Bush tells Americans and Congress to suck it– his administration has convinced the telecoms to continue to allow the NSA to spy on you without a warrant. Of course, just before this, he was telling us all that he couldn’t continue to do this unless Congress capitulated to his demands and renewed the so-called “Protect America Act”… funny how now his story changes.

Hopefully Congress will stand firm and not give the telecoms who worked with the Bush administration retroactive immunity so that the court cases can move forward and we can hold those responsible accountable for their actions!