I’ve been sitting here since before 12:00 trying to get into the Rockies’ ticketing site on two machines (a few others are trying too at different locations). Here’s what we see:

rockies ticket site

The countdown lasts 120 seconds then starts over. I’ve actually gotten to 1 second a few times since noon (it’s now 12:51) but when that happens, it eventually just goes to a ’server connection was reset’ screen.

So… I’ve found few reports of someone actually getting in to the ticket purchase area then being booted back to this countdown screen before he/she could pay. It’s hard to know what might be going on in real time, but it sounds like there’s not a lot of success so far.

And one of the Denver news stations has just started reporting that team spokesmen say that tickets are selling, just very very slowly, and they expect to have them all sold ‘by the end of the day.’

I think this is a process that would have taken a half hour or so, maybe, on Ticketmaster? I really don’t like Ticketmaster’s fees, but I would have been happy to pay a surcharge for a less frustrating experience. And I would have felt like I had a fighting chance at something with Ticketmaster, rather than having to wait in the dark not knowing if I’m really in a ‘queue’ of some sort or just being repeatedly delayed for one reason or another.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Rockies organization mentioned nothing on their website about any of the problems going on this morning during the ticket fiasco. It took them until 4:36 pm, over four hours after the press conference (which was on TV at 12:20ish), to finally post a short statement on their site.

In my opinion as a web developer and marketing person, this is ridiculous. This is what a website is for - communicating with your audience.

A five-minute effort on someone’s part this morning could have spared a lot of frustration for the hundreds of thousands of people (literally) that were sitting in front of their machines this morning wondering why they couldn’t get in and if the tickets were already sold out.

Why have a website if you don’t use it? This is a fantastic example I’ll be able to point out to my small business clients in the future of how to disrespect your audience and customers.

The Rockies organization was set to have a press conference at 4:00 today to discuss what happened this morning and when fans could expect the ticketing website to be back online and ready for sales. That time was pushed back to 5:00, then 6:00, and it just happened.

Basically, the Rockies spokesman apologized for the problem, stating that their system was overwhelmed this morning, and they hope to have more information before the 10:00 news broadcast.

There were a number of irate people in the audience and one got rowdy, asking why this wasn’t anticipated, as I agree it should have been; no more explanations were offered by the spokesman who apologized again and left. Perhaps we’ll know more later tonight, but I can’t see how tickets would be sold before tomorrow morning at the earliest at this hour.

So this morning I got ready to try my luck at getting tickets for the World Series. The Rockies have finally made it, and they’re playing in Denver on Saturday, Sunday and maybe Monday. The Rockies decided a few days ago to ditch box office sales and go entirely to online ticketing, which has turned out to be a minor disaster.

I and my husband and a few friends tried for more than two hours to get anything for any day, and never once got into the ticket sales site. While sitting here waiting around, I found the posts of many, many angry and disappointed fans in the same boat - plenty of tickets out there, if you’re willing to pay $650 and up. But not if you’re a person who doesn’t have a spare $1300 to burn.

There were literally 25 or so posts going up on Craig’s List every few minutes from people wanting to buy tickets at something approaching a reasonable price.

One of the local news stations reported at around 11:40 that no one had reported actually being able to buy a ticket online yet and another said that of 300 or so emails it had received, only three people had gotten through.

At around 12:20 a spokesman for the Rockies gave a short question-and-answer session outside Coors Field in Denver (with a backdrop of a hundred or so frustrated, booing fans). He reported that the server had been overwhelmed by over 8,000,000 hits in the first hour (and what did they think was going to happen?) and that it was now down. He asked fans to stop trying to get in, and said that the Rockies would ‘let people know’ when the site was back up again. How will they do that? Do we have to sit in front of the TV or computer all day and keep checking in?

He also said that virtually all of the 60,000 tickets were still available.

As of right now, 12:52 pm, the Rockies website (www.coloradorockies.com) STILL has no information about what’s happening with ticketing. According to their site, you can ‘buy tickets now!’

I’ll let you know if I happen to get a pair, but right now they can’t even guesstimate when the server will be back online. Today, tomorrow… all up in the air…

I have a client whose site was ready to launch tonight. I just logged into her admin area on a popular (at least in my town) domain registrar that offers one of those free website template builder systems.

My client’s site was built using one of these packages and has been up for months.

So I go in to repoint the DNS to her new host and I’m told that the DNS is ‘unmodifiable.’ No explanations… I’d never seen that before.

After about 10 minutes of hunting through the help section I found an entry for ‘Why can’t I change my DNS?’ at the bottom of a long list of DNS questions. It seems that you have to disable the templating package before you can repoint to an outside DNS.

And when you do that, their site disappears and you’re left with the registrar’s ‘This domain has just been purchased’ and ‘website coming soon’ page.

During the 24-48 hour transition period, this means that anyone who happens on her old site will get this page rather than her site. This is really a bad practice on the part of the registrar in my opinion - is it common for those that offer this kind of web templating system, like GoDaddy? This site was not on GoDaddy, btw.

I built a new computer last month, and downloaded a trial copy of Homesite (which I’ve been using for many years) thinking that it would have a link where I could register it using my serial number.

Nope.

The trial expired this morning, and gave me no options except buying the product (which I’ve already done) or contacting tech support.

I called tech support - this was a mistake. I went through three people - the first kept telling me I was trying to reinstall CS2, which I wasn’t. He asked me what Homesite was. I explained that it was web editing software, like Dreamweaver only text-based. He promptly transferred me to a Dreamweaver tech who had never heard of Homesite.

This tech transferred me to another person who, again, had never heard of Homesite and didn’t know that Adobe owns it now. He put me on hold and when he came back, got my number and told me to expect a call back within the hour.

They called back in about 50 minutes, and informed me that I needed to talk to customer service. They transferred me.

I have now just gotten off the phone with customer service. Here’s what I found out:

• Adobe has the record of my purchase in their files
• I have a credit card receipt to verify the purchase
• I have a live serial number for the copy from my old computer.

I was on the phone with the last guy for 50 minutes (including a lot of hold time), and he will not give me a link to an install file because he says I was shipped a CD and didn’t receive the software in a download - which I did. I’ve never gotten any CD’s from Adobe for anything except CS2.

So he’s ‘escalated it to his senior support team and they will try to get back to me in 1-2 weeks.’

I explained (pretty calmly I think) that I am a web developer and this is my livelihood. He put me on hold again, came back and said they agreed to rush the project and I should hear something in 4-5 days. He told me that since this product is so old (2005) they have to put together some kind of custom link just for me.

Why is that, when you can purchase it right from their site?

Plus they won’t provide a download link if they can’t confirm that I didn’t receive a CD in 2005 when I purchased it (no CD. Ever).

Not very happy at all right now. Extremely disappointed.

The company that manufactured my new computer case, NZXT, was offering a very nice poster for free that featured my case (I know that’s geeky - be quiet) so I ordered one.

FedEx just came with a large box. In it were three copies of this poster. That would have been really nice except that (1) whoever put them in the box folded them (!) two times rather than rolling them like, well, a poster and (2) the ends were all torn up like they’d been knocked around quite a bit.

Why even bother? They paid to ship these things via FedEx, and they’re in horrible condition, all cracked and torn. I’m disappointed.

I’ve been using Mozy’s online backup service for over a year now, I believe, and it’s been a nice service - the initial backup took days, but the subsequent ones all run in the background and never interfere with my work.

Thankfully have seldom had the need to retrieve anything from them; when I did this about six months ago, it went super-smoothly. But last week was an entirely different story.

My old Dell 2400 finally died last Monday. While I was scrambling to put together what I needed to rebuild it (which I was planning on doing anyway, just the timing was not that great) I logged into Mozy with my laptop to get the files I needed immediately.

No dice. I kept getting kicked out of the service, and when I could get in and stay in the screen that shows my files just churned. I let it go for most of the workday (I know it takes hours sometimes for all the files to appear) but no luck.

So I wrote customer support. I got the usual 24 hours response notice, and that was okay, I was busy anyway… but 26 hours later I had no response and still could not get to my files.

So… I have never heard back from Mozy. Not a word. Not in just under a week. Needless to say, I’m pretty unhappy with them. And I’ve asked for my money back and my account to be closed (no response to that either).

I suppose I’ll contact my bank later today and issue a chargeback for the annual fee they took out of my account a few weeks ago. I’m really surprised at this big change in the quality of their customer support - I’ve never had any problem hearing back from them before on the few occasions that I submitted a question. But when you devalue the customer relationship, customers leave. And I’m leaving.