Posted on
by

It was fast. Anticlimactic, really. It took a few reloads to get the Comic-Con International home page up, but once I could click on the reservation link, everything went smoothly. I was done by 9:05.

The reservation page was actually optimized!

  • Just one image: a banner across the top.
  • Everything was on one page, including the list of hotels, the personal info, and the hotel choices.
  • Hotel selection was done by client-side scripting, so there was no wait for processing between selections (and no risk of typos confusing their processing system later today).

This is a huge deal, especially compared to Travel Planners’ horribly overdesigned 2008 forms — yes, forms, plural — that kept bogging down. (I never even saw last year’s, though I tried for an hour and a half to get in.)

On the downside, that one page does load a half-dozen script files, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed it down much.

In case none of your 12 choices were available, they asked for a maximum price you’d be willing to pay for another hotel that’s not on your list. I vaguely recall this being a feature of the old fax forms, but I don’t remember being asked this on the phone last year.

I was surprised to find that they didn’t want credit card info immediately, but that’s good from a streamlining perspective as well. The hotel choices, room type, and contact info are critical in order to make the reservation in the first place. Payment can be done later, so in a rushed situation like this, it’s better to handle it later. Plus, not asking for credit card information means that they could run the site without encryption, speeding things up a bit more.

I would have liked to have gotten a confirmation number for the request, or an email, just so that I could be sure that I was in their queue. And to be sure that I entered the right email address. And the right start and end dates. And…well, you get the idea. I’m a little paranoid about the process at the moment.

Here’s hoping that the back end of the process, and sending out confirmations, goes as smoothly as the front end did.

Update: Short answer: it didn’t. Long answer: I’ve written up what went wrong, at least from the guests’ point of view.

Posted on
by

San Diego hotel rooms for Comic-Con International go on sale tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. Because they’ve sold out in a matter of hours the last few years — or, more precisely, because they’ve overwhelmed the reservation system while doing so — Travel Planners is instituting some new policies and a new procedure.

Last December they announced that they would require a deposit at reservation time, and a cut-off point in May after which it would no longer be refundable. This should help cut down on some of the “just in case” speculating that always happens. (Previously you had to provide a credit card when making the reservation, but they didn’t charge it.)

As for the procedure, here’s what used to happen: You would search for hotels, get a list of those that have rooms available, enter your name and contact info, then enter your credit card and get immediate confirmation. At every step, the server would be slow, and there was a good chance that you would have to start over. Yes, it would even fail at the last step.

The new scheme is wildly different: Instead of searching for a hotel, you’ll be asked to enter a list of up to 12 choices, in order of preference, and submit it. A few hours later, they’ll send you an email to confirm what you’ve gotten.

My first thought: this is exactly how it worked for me last year, when I got through on the phone instead of online. It’s also how reservations by fax used to work.

It’s annoying not to have instant feedback of course, but I suspect one of the main reasons the system breaks down is that it’s trying to handle so many complete transactions simultaneously. This way, the only part running “live” is collecting requests. Once those are all in, they can process them at whatever speed the reservation system can actually handle.

Plus, if they really want to minimize the load on their website, they can put everything on one page and minimize the number of graphics and scripts. Every image you have to load slows the page down. Every new page you have to load is another chance for the process to break down completely. When designing a web application, there are times to emphasize looks, there are times to emphasize convenience for the user, and there are times to emphasize simplicity in the actual process. This is one of the latter.

I guess we’ll see how it goes tomorrow morning.

Update: The request process, at least, went surprisingly smoothly. ← I’ve got some thoughts here on the reservation form and how the process worked.

Posted on
by

One evening last week I looked to the west and saw a bright light above the horizon. I couldn’t tell whether it was moving or not, and wondered: was it an airplane, or Venus?

I couldn’t remember whether Venus was visible in the evening or morning (or at all) right now. It was roughly in the direction of an airport, so it could easily have been a helicopter or an airplane traveling at an angle roughly in line with my line of sight. By the time I got home, buildings and trees blocked the horizon, so I didn’t think much more of it.

I’m in California. Interestingly enough, thousands of miles away in Ohio, people have been seeing a bright light in the west every night for the past week and making UFO reports.

Last night I decided to see how early I could spot Venus, and caught it fairly high in the sky just after sunset. It was hard to see without really looking for it because the sky was still light, but it became a lot easier as the sky darkened. Not surprisingly, as it set and brightened in the dimming sky, it passed through roughly the area I remembered seeing the unidentified light last week. Mystery solved.

I don’t understand why, in a world full of airplanes, helicopters and the occasional blimp — not to mention a world where we see stars and planets every night (barring clouds and light pollution) — people jump past these mundane explanations when they see a light in the night sky and decide it must be an alien spacecraft.

Posted on
by

CBR’s coverage of the WildStorm panel at Emerald City Comicon yesterday includes a great bit in which, due to technical difficulties with the slide show, CBR’s reporter was put on the spot to ask the panelists a question:

“If you were stuck in an Office Max during a full scale vampire attack, what would you use as a weapon?”

They rolled right into it. Phil Hester would use a T-square, Kurt Busiek claimed that despite his best weapon foraging attempts he would end up with a stapler and go down quickly, Ben Abernathy would break some broom handles to use as stakes, Darick Robertson would use two drafting triangles as punching daggers, and Francesco Francavilla would assemble a cross out of whatever he found.

My first thought was actually the classic chair leg, but then I realized that Office Max would mostly have swivel chairs on plastic bases, and of course desks made up of sheets of particle board. Technically wood, but nothing you could easily turn into a stake.

Posted on
by

I’ve driven a 2007-model Toyota Prius for two and a half years, so you can bet I’ve been following the news over the recalls and reports of uncontrolled acceleration. Monday’s runaway Prius incident, which involved a car that looks exactly like mine, has made me think even more about the problem.

Now, I’m not overly concerned, because the number of incidents is still small compared to the number of cars out on the road. And in the entire time I’ve been driving it, I can only think of two circumstances in which the car accelerated in a way I didn’t expect, both of them when driving on an incline:

  • The transmission has been kind of sluggish a couple of times when starting, causing a slight lurch once it switches gears.
  • Hitting an incline with cruise control. The car has to work harder to maintain the same speed, so it feels like it’s accelerating.

From what I’ve heard previously, the acceleration problems have had to do with malfunctioning cruise control, and I don’t really use cruise control anymore. (Not since I realized that it wasn’t a good fit for actual driving conditions.) Annoyingly, none of the articles I’ve read about James Sikes’ experience say whether he was using cruise control at the time or not.

They do say that he wore out the brakes, but refused to turn off the car or put it in neutral (as the 911 dispatcher advised him during the 23-minute call), and finally got it under control when a CHP officer had him apply both the regular and emergency brakes together.

So, what to do in this situation?

  • Brakes aren’t enough, but they’re a good start.
  • Turn off cruise control if it’s on. Some reports of cc-related problems have said that tapping the brakes didn’t disengage it as it’s supposed to, but manually disabling it did.
  • Putting it in neutral should cut off the engine from the wheels and still leave you steering. Sikes’ reason for not doing this when the dispatcher told him to — that he was afraid the car would flip — doesn’t make any sense to me.
  • Turning the car off locks the steering wheel, or at least turns off power steering. Not ideal for 90 MPH, so I understand Sikes’ reluctance here, but if the computer has essentially hung, push-and-hold for a hard shutdown might be the only thing you can do. I’d rather skid to a stop with minimal control than slam into a wall at 90.
  • The parking brake can double as an emergency brake. It might not stop you completely (it didn’t for Sikes), but it should help get the car under control again.

I don’t expect any trouble, just based on statistics, but at least now I have an idea of what to do if I ever do find myself in this situation.

Follow-Ups

Update (April 14): Toyota finally settled on a fix for the Prius stuck-accelerator pedal recall beyond “remove the floor mat”…five days after I took mine in to get the alignment and 30,000-mile maintenance done. (Also: After driving a Prius for 2.5 years, driving a normal car is weird!)

Update (April 15): Prius recall dealt with. Free fix, free rental, and choice of a $50 service coupon or $10 Starbucks card. Easy choice there.

Update (July 16): A U.S. Department of Transportation investigation of Toyota crashes blamed on sudden acceleration has implicated driver error in nearly all cases. Of the 75 fatal crashes investigated, only one could be verified as a problem with the vehicle: the Lexus crash last August in which the accelerator was caught on the floor mat, leading to a recall. Of course, the court of popular opinion has already made up its mind.

Update (February 2011): Even NASA engineers didn’t find any electronic problems causing sudden acceleration in Toyotas. It looks like the sticky pedals and floor pads were it.

I’ve pulled in a few updates from my social media archives and from round-up posts I made here. It seemed the best way to consolidate the story into one place.