Category: Entertainment

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It took more than 8 hours, but I finally got my hotel confirmation for Comic-Con. It wasn’t one of the 12 I’d requested this morning, but it’s in my price range, relatively close, and was actually #14 on the list we put together last night.

All this despite the fact that I put the request in within 5 minutes of the system going online. That part was smooth, and judging by the comments on Twitter and at The Beat, it went smoothly for most people.

Then came the waiting.

On one hand, it was better because I could actually do things — like, y’know, work — instead of sitting there hitting refresh on the browser and redial on the phone for two hours. On the other hand, instead of two hours of active frustration, it was eight hours of wondering whether they had lost my info, or whether I had mistyped my email address, or whether they had actually run out of rooms in the first five minutes and hadn’t gotten around to telling me. A confirmation number for the request itself would have gone a long way toward making me confident that I was in the system.

Later posts on Twitter, and later comments at The Beat, reflected the growing sense of frustration among congoers — and anger as they were assigned hotels that weren’t even on their list.

Order

It seems that not everyone’s requests were handled in the order received. I saw people who had received confirmation hours before I did, but who had submitted their requests a few minutes later. My guess is that Travel Planners was taking two passes through the queue: one pass to handle the requests that they could fill based on people’s actual choices, then one pass to handle the requests where all the preferred hotels were full. Even that doesn’t quite track, though, so I’m not sure what was really going on.

Edit: Katie suggested that they might also be prioritizing based on how many nights you tried to reserve. I was only reserving three nights, so it sort of makes sense that they might give more weight to someone trying to reserve four or five.

Lessons to be Learned

As with the convention’s struggle with crowding, every year they solve one problem only to discover another lurking behind it. A lot of people have compared this year’s process to a lottery, but really, it actually shifted the advantage from luck to typing speed.

Think about it: For the last few years, everyone has had to try to get through, repeatedly, over a period of several hours. Those lucky enough to make a solid connection would then make a reservation and leave. You could start at 9:00 and get through at 9:05 or 11:00, but there really wasn’t any sort of strategy you could apply other than trying multiple avenues at the same time.

Now? Everyone logs in at 9:00, fills out a form immediately, and submits it. Whether you submit your request at 9:05, 9:10 or 9:15 has nothing to do with luck. Instead, it has to do with whether you made up a list beforehand, how long it takes to enter your information, and how much time you spend verifying it before clicking that button.

In that way, it’s actually less of a lottery than it used to be!

Update: I’ve posted some ideas on what to do if you couldn’t get a room.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ever since J. Michael Straczynski started selling his Babylon 5 script book series, I’ve been hoping we’d get a book with the scripts from the spinoff Crusade. Especially the scripts that were finished, but never produced, and would have set up the real story. That whole thing about finding a cure for the Drakh plague before it wiped out Earth? JMS strongly hinted at the time that it wasn’t going to be the main arc, but rather the mission that got the Excalibur out there and exploring, at which point they’d get caught up in the main story.

Two of the scripts were made available briefly on an e-reader site, using a Java applet that was specifically designed to make it as hard as possible to copy and paste anything (and incidentally made it a serious pain to, y’know, read it, which may be why the site is long gone). As I recall, they included a project to reverse-engineer Shadow technology, and the first hints that the Technomages used Shadow tech (before Jeanne Cavelos’ novels fleshed out that connection in detail.)

Anyway, we’re still waiting for the Crusade scripts, but here’s the next best thing: Crusade: Behind the Scenes [edit: dead link].

Characters, story, world-building, production issues and design, executive meddling, interviews with the cast and crew, photos, etc.

There’s a note at the end of the write-up:

CRUSADE: Behind the Scenes does NOT contain any of the show’s scripts. It is a compilation of interviews and images. The Crusade scripts, including those that were never filmed, will appear in J. Michael Straczynski’s forthcoming 3-volume series, “CRUSADE: What the Hell Happened”

Sadly, given the title, I suspect the script books are a joke. But who knows? Stranger things have happened with B5.

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Remember that mall mystery from a while back? There was a storefront under construction at the Irvine Spectrum with an “Opening Soon” sign, but no indication of just what store might be moving in. They opened in December, and I keep forgetting to post a follow-up.

As you can see, all is revealed:

Storefront with three symbols above it, but no words.

…or maybe not.

Unless, of course, you recognize the logos for Hurley International (middle), Converse (right) and…what’s that on the left? With the Nike swoosh on top and the…skateboard? Sunglasses? Something on the bottom?

It’s kind of a throwback to the old medieval-style signs that showed an image instead of a name: the Prancing Pony, for instance (to pull an example from LOTR). Only instead of recognizable images, they’re symbols. Pictograms, if you will, only decipherable if you’re familiar with the symbols already, and they’ve actually thrown an obstacle in the way by muddling the most-recognized logo (Nike).

It seems odd to deliberately use a sign that would make a store hard to name (never mind figuring out what they sell), but I imagine that their target audience is quite familiar with the logos and wouldn’t have any trouble finding the store.

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