Merry Christmas!!

As has been tradition here for many years (but apparently not last year), I give you some Youtube Christmas Cheer (tm):




And just because 2018 was the Year of Total Suck:

[Video removed; dumb move, people.]

Christmas plans are minimal; we'll start at my parents place in the morning with a few gifts, have lunch at the clubhouse, then crash back here and try to escape in mindless TV or books. We really just ain't in the mood....

Ticketmaster and Other Scams

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

Well, nothing horrible happened the last time I tried this, so why not try it again?
One thing using Evernote to write drafts did that I didn't notice right away is change the font size on the post. I wouldn't have expected that to copy over, but it did and I think it makes things a bit more readable. [So of course this time it didn't.] Why everything on the web has to be in 8 point type (and usually light grey text on a white background) has always baffled me since some dweeb started that crap back in 2003. It's even bleeding into real-world printed material. The last channel line-up we got from Spectrum was in maybe 6 point non-sarif text. Really guys?

Anyway, what I was going to talk about was our adventures today trying to buy Bob Seger tickets for his third? fourth? farewell tour. They added a show down here in Tampa, so we thought, "Why not? Now that neither of us have jobs, we have all this money to burn!" Step one was to pay to join the Seger fan club so we could get in line for tickets a couple days early. That was relatively painless and nothing unexpected happened with that part. Then today we attempted to buy the tickets. We made it through the entire waiting-in-the-virtual-line crap, found seats that didn't completely suck, then tried to buy them. According to Ticketmaster, we were not allowed to complete the transaction because we were using a "shared device". First of all, so what if it is? Secondly, it's a PC sitting in my house. It isn't "shared" by anyone. Several attempts later, we switched to my PC to give a try. Same result. Debbie did a complete reboot/reload on her computer and finally managed to buy a couple tickets. Then about ten minutes later, an entirely different section of much better seats started selling. Since when do the shit seats go on sale first? [Update: per Debbie, the cheap seats are shown by default and you have to click twice on the link to show better tickets, because reasons.] Anyway, Debbie tried to grab two of the better seats only to get that damn "shared device" error message again. At that point we decided to say, "Screw it."
Another fun bit was trying to figure out how to determine what the total cost of a ticket was going to be. There isn't a way, at least not before purchase. We found out what was being charged to our credit card only after the fact. Isn't there laws about this sort of shit? And it's not like the fees are immaterial:
Ticket cost - $95 x 2 = $190.00
Order processing fee - $5.00 (Now just what do you think I'm going to do on a ticket ordering site other than order tickets?)
Facility charge - $3.75 x 2 (Huh? What facility? You telling me Bob isn't paying rent to cover the cost of the "facility"?)
Service fee - $19.60 x 2 (I assume this is Ticketmaster, but let's not just say that....)
Standard Mail (10-14 days) - $5.00 (Last I checked, a first-class stamp cost $.50 and arrived in a few days. Ticketmaster must use the Pony Express.)
Total Fees - $56.70 or about 30% of the cost of the damn tickets.
On the upside, we got to watch this really cool animation of a dude walking while repeatedly being forced to stand in the virtual line because we were on a "shared device".
Speaking of assholes, more Moose shit going on. Governor Richard Riddling thinks he fucking Jesus Christ or something, going behind the bar and threatening bartenders and running the bartender meeting last Sunday. This is absolutely prohibited by the General Laws that govern all Moose Lodges, but as he himself has said repeatedly, he doesn't "give a fuck what the General Laws say." I'm giving the state and Moose International until the end of the year to fix this, then I'll be fixing it myself. I'll be damned if I stand by and watch the lodge get flushed down the toilet by some ego maniacal prick.
OK, now lets copy this over to LiveJournal and see what kind of mess it makes.

Off line Editor Testing

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

 

Trying something different; instead of doing my rough draft in the on-line editor; I'm trying out writing at least the first draft on my computer, then copy over to LiveJournal. That way, no matter what happens, I at least have a draft. I've been using Evernote pretty much since the day it was first released for any and everything. I like the editor and it does most everything I would ever need it to do for a blog post. I noticed that LiveJournal has some "off-line" editing tools, but I figured why go to all the trouble of installing and learning yet-another piece of software when I already had something that will probably do the trick. What will be interesting is to see how formatting copies over to the LiveJournal editor. I assume at this point, everything uses some form of HTML for text formatting, but these things never seem to work 100%. Excuse some testing:

This is bold.

This is Italics.

This is a link to some random web page.

This is just some regular text:

And then a quoted text block. (Oops; can't seem to do that in Evernote.)

Let's give this a shot.

Not horrible. There may be some clean-up, and I'll have to do some poking around on the block quote deal, but I think we have a winner!