Month: November 2005

I joined the madness at Computicket on Friday evening to wait in queue for a chance to get my hands on some Robbie Williams tickets on Saturday morning. Fortunately luck was with me and I was not one of the many disappointed fans who missed out on tickets when they sold out at about midday. Yes, it apparently took all of three hours to sell every ticket that was going for the Pretoria and Cape Town shows.

Of course the call centre was unavailable and their website – predictably – went down (they want to run Dell hardware, what do they expect?). I covered every angle with a spot in the queue, an internet connection and a cellphone call to the ticket booking centre. I’m actually lucky I decided to stay in the queue and not simply try over the net, as that would have been disastrous. In the end the queue paid off.

Despite the sellout I do suspect that there will still be tickets available as time passes – most people in the queue bought the full quota of 6 tickets, probably with a view to get rid of them later at a premium. I even have a couple of spare tickets myself – what with the concert being about six months away, you never know what could happen in the interim. Hell, in six months I could probably convert someone into a Robbie Williams fan and then sell them a spare ticket!!!

So if you’re reading this and you want a ticket, contact me. I promise nothing, and you’re gonna need a good reason for not being with me in that queue, but you never know, you may catch me in a generous mood.

Tags: music, pop, robbie williams, world tour, tickets

I spent Sunday in the sun on the grandstand at the inaugural Grand Prix Masters race which was held at Kyalami.

What a show it was! Upon arrival, the exotic cars were already screaming around the track, laying down some rubber in anticipation of more excitement to come.

Shortly after that we decided to go on our pit walk, which was something new and interesting – a chance to see these speed machines up close, and perhaps even get an autograph or two from any drivers who may be lingering in the pits. We spent a good half hour to forty minutes taking photos and watching the goings on, firstly at the Grand Prix Masters’ cars and then the F1x2 two-seater racing cars.

I eventually managed to drag my mother away from the pit lane and we headed back to the main grandstand to see the masters come out for their morning warm-up session. Watching these guys flying down that start/finish straight was awesome, and as it happens we were sitting right in the middle of a gear changing zone, so we got to hear these guys chunking their gearbox around, some a little smoother than others.

Shortly after the seniors finished their lap quota, the two-seater F1s came out to play. Boy do these cars scream! They are by far louder than the engines the masters were using. We watched closely as excited and nervous passengers got strapped into the back seat and soon they too were careening around the track, hanging on for dear life in places I’m sure. Kyalami has corners that can pull up to two and a half Gs in those cars. And of course some of the passengers were sticking their heads as far out as possible on straights, waving to the crowd if possible.

After this, there were photo opportunities and other antics during lunch. More photos to come soon.

Following lunch, it was time for the highlight – the first Grand Prix Masters challenge, with Nigel Mansell on pole position, and Emerson Fittipaldi alongside.
They started with two laps behind the safety car and a rolling start in classic style, with the pack tightly bunched. The noise as they passed was incredible. Mansell manged to hold position in first, but every other lap they screamed by with Fittipaldi tickling Mansell’s gearbox. Derek Warwick consistently hunted down Andrea De Cesaris with some hair raising driving and left-right darts down the main straight. Thirty laps flew by in no time and by some luck Mansell was able to keep Fittipaldi behind.

All in all, it was a spectacular race. The drivers entertained all with their extreme competitiveness and their obvious sportsmanship. There was no runaway victory and most of the pack kept a similar pace. These old-timers still have some mettle and I’m looking forward to the next GP Masters race. Alain Prost missed out sorely by not appearing.

After the podium ceremony there was still a lot more racing to come with another F1x2-seater race and a few other formulas after that. Eventually the noise died down, the crowd faded and we decided to leave, our clothes filled with the odor of petrol, perspiration and sunscreen, our ears buzzing to the roar of Grand Prix engines and our teeth smiling at the entertainment enjoyed.

Categories: motorsport, grand prix, f1, race, kyalami, mansell, fittipaldi

I spent Sunday in the sun on the grandstand at the inaugural Grand Prix Masters race which was held at Kyalami International(yeah, whatever) Raceway. They don’t even have a webpage to link to.

So let me get the bitching over first:

1) Kyalami is a great track, surrounded by crappy facilities.
There are no bathrooms anywhere to be found around the track.
The grandstands are not covered, not even on the main straight.
There is no “parking”, it’s just open grass/left over space.
There is no big-screen TV facility to anyone watching at the track.
The audio system is shitty and tinny.
The commentators (mostly) suck.
The entire facility is dilapidated and run-down, giving the feeling of entering an 80’s timewarp.

2) “Eyethu” Events Management would not be able to manage folding a piece of paper in half.
There were no signposts directing ticket holders of various classes to certain areas.
The traffic control was appalling.
The green sticker, which meant nothing, is still stuck to the MIDDLE of my windscreen.
The gatekeeper nearly ended up under my car because the parking was supposedly full.
The attitude towards paying spectators is shit.
The attitude towards paying spectators is really, really shit.
No customer service, whatsoever.
These guys make Dumb and Dumber look like Einstein and Da Vinci.

3) Computicket/Eyethu/whoever arranged the seating arrangements is dumb. Platinum tickets (one of the best almost-affordable tickets) (which I had) were separated into Stands A and B, both at the same price. Stand A was miles away from Stand B. If you had a pass for Stand A you could NOT go to Stand B, and vice versa. Computicket simply sold tickets for Stand B until they ran out and then sold tickets for Stand A, never telling you that you had a *different ticket* which should be sold in a *different category*. I had three tickets – two for Stand B, one for Stand A. So I must sit a kilometre separated from my family, yet the tickets were the same type, in the same grade and class?

Well that’s what Einstein and Da Vinci at the gate were telling me. Fuck that.

I gave them a few choice words, got my brother and mother through the gate and then took a B ticket from my brother, giving him my stand A ticket once he was through.

And five minutes later I walked up to the fools and showed them my B ticket so they let me in.

I’ve been privileged this week to be able to test a new search engine to be launched for South Africa soon. (Ok, actually I bitched about how it was indexing my blog like crazy and then Alistair Carruthers from Jonga contacted me about a tweak they made to correct the issue and offered me the chance to check out the service.)

Unfortunately, I can’t divulge the url of the test servers, so don’t ask.

Here’s a screensnip:

What I liked:
* AJAX/DHTML (or something similar) allows you to preview search results by opening them inside the search window. Way cool.
* Search history (without needing a login)
* Dictionary results in a side pane
* The option of going direct to the hit page or to the main url

What I didn’t like:
* The placement of search history bar means you can’t have it open and conduct a new search.
* Navigating to result pages was tricky if you’re a “middle-clicker” like me – the “open in new window” link was just too small to navigate quickly (and lazily). This may just be a font config thing on my side.
* The actual search result gets highlighted, but the highlighted portion is not a link, forcing use of the “open in new window” link as mentioned before.
* Microsoft’s IIS or equivalent is serving up the pages.

So I took a quick look at the competitor search engines in the South African space:
aardvark: slow like an aardvark, and yellow, and just a google wrapper.
ananzi: more yellow (wtf?), icky – I feel dirty just browsing to it.
funnel: better, cleaner, but few pages and far too google-ish, no creativity.

From what I’ve seen, I think Jonga can own the search space in South Africa.

Bitch bitch bitch.

How can one be expected to be an effective support engineer, when the only access one has to customer systems is via email and phone. Software is far too complicated to be able to provide effective support in an offline manner, especially with foreign language customers.

But hey, the model works in the States (all english speaking) so it must work in the rest of the world.

Bah humbug.