Paul Hammond's Blog

I am going on holiday with my family in August, and the last part of our trip will see us in Boston.  Being a big Red Sox fan, I wanted to take my family along to a Red Sox vs Toronto Blue Jays game.  A few weeks ago I searched on Ebay for tickets (since all home games at Fenway Park are sold out for the season), and through that stumbled across a link to StubHub.com.

StubHub has loads of tickets available for the game I want to attend.  The site has some great security features for the wary ticket purchaser, including guarantees that you will get the tickets you pay for etc.  It all seems very professional.  With tickets hovering around $250 each, I wanted to feel confident that it was going to be a genuine purchase, and I was very pleased to have found a great looking solution to my ticket-purchasing desires.

Well, I finalised my travel details today, so decided to choose and buy some seats while there was still a good choice.  I found some excellent seats in the right price range, and proceeded to the checkout.  Now, as part of the checkout screen, there is an option to select your country of residence (and billing address) that includes the following items:

Naturally, I selected “United Kingdom”, entered the rest of my address details and pressed “Next”.  At this point, the page reloaded with the following error:

Just in case, I tried re-entering the post code without a space; this sometimes works.  Same error.  I was pretty much blocked completely!

I called the helpline to ask what I should do next.  The helpful lady on the phone informed me that I cannot order anything off the StubHub.com site unless I use a credit card that has a US billing address, and I have a US address to ship the tickets to!  I asked her why there were options for other countries, but she didn’t know.  All she could do was repeat that I needed US-based shipping and billing details in order to proceed.  So that is it.  The end of the road for me and StubHub.

I’ve looked everywhere on the site, and unless I am being useless (which is, of course, completely possible!) I cannot find a single reference to the fact that you can only purchase from the US.  Not even deep in the help files or the FAQ is it mentioned.  Why didn’t the error just say “I am sorry, you cannot purchase from this site unless you are in the US”.

Sites that restrict sales to “US only” generally frustrate me to a point, but I do recognise that there are often reasons for doing so – perhaps licensing laws (in the case of iTunes or radio services), or shipping difficulties for bulky items etc.  What annoyed me about this situation was the fact that the website lists the UK (and other countries) both during account registration and purchase, with the direct implication that I am perfectly fine to go ahead and spend a large amount of money with them.  I spent probably an hour in total checking out tickets, looking up the view from the seats on various other websites etc.  That is a wasted hour.  To get to the last hurdle and be presented with a particularly cryptic error message that required me to make an international phone call to address is completely unacceptable to me as a user.  To have wasted an hour on a site that could have told me up front that I was not able to ultimately use its features is doubly unacceptable.

Oh, and it means I don’t really have any options for buying Red Sox tickets either.  Which is going to upset my kids more than this experience has upset me!  Any ideas on where I *can* buy tickets from the UK, blogosphere?

I am wondering if it is only me that was confused by this, so I thought I'd post a picture and ask everyone out there what they think.

My satellite TV DVR has been playing up the last few weeks, often marking a programme as "not recorded due to no signal".  I went in to the settings of the system, and check the signal strength.  The screen is shown below, click for a larger version of the image.

Without thinking too much about it, what do you think my "Input 1 Signal Strength" is?  Is it high or low?  Please leave me a comment with what you thought.

Apparently, the very light gray is the "positive" colour, and it turns out that I have a very high signal strength for input 1.  However, for days I was fiddling around with the dish and the cables, because I believed I had a really *low* signal strength as indicated by the small dark blue portion of the box.  The dark blue colour was a much more obvious "positive" colour to me.  The predominantly dark blue areas for the Lock Indicator, Network ID and Transport Stream drew my eye to the dark blue of the strength and quality scales.  Without any cues as to the correct way to read this, I got confused.

My wife tells me I am being pretty daft, that reading the bars "left to right" is totally obvious, and that the light gray is obviously the "content" colour (see the 07d4 on the Transport Stream for example - the background is blue, the content gray).  I've asked two other people, and they also said the gray was the measure colour.

Even knowing the correct way to view this, I *still* see the dark blue of the indicators first.

So what did you think?  Is this easy, and I am just nuts?  Or is this a confusing UI?  Leave me a comment, let me know!