The other day my friends and I wanted to check out an upcoming DJ show in San Francisco, so we followed the link from the site and it took us to ticketmaster, ok thats fine, i’m used to a bit of extra charges and I can usually add in few bucks here to get my ticket mailed to me or printed out, but low and behold, a $35 show ticket ended up costing me $52.30.

WTF is that about?

Thats an additional $17.30 extra added onto my ticket price. Holy outrage Batman, what the hell are they getting away with here. Ok let me look at my order again to make sure I didn’t accidentally order the gold plated ticket.

Here is the break down:

Main Ticket: $35
Total Convenience Charge: $9.56 (wtf thats not a convenience)
Order Processing Charge: $5.15 (you know processing feeds for cc’s are about 2-3%, thats about $1.05 buddy)
Ticket Fast: $2.50 (oh sure, I just wanted to print my ticket, so you charged me more than a stamp, envelope, paper and mailing it)

I could drove from my house, across the Golden Gate Bridge, paid the $5 fee to go across the bridge, then went down to the Warfield ticket office probably paid $37.45 (im taking into consideration 7% tax), That still leaves me almost $10, where I could of went to this cheap Thai place for some good ass spicy drunken noodle.

This is a complete outrage as to what these companies get to charge now. I mean things on the web are supposed to be cheaper. WTF kind of rip off is this Ticketmaster?

Sasha and Digweed, I need to have a nice chat with you guys at the show, this is really crazy, at least if they threw in a free drink or two I would be happy but I sure feel ripped off.

I heard about this on a weekly tech podcast I listen to, and it recently came up on digg and it reminded me to write a little blurb about this on my blog.

Flickr Vision is a simple website that takes photos that are posted in flickr that have been geo tagged (gps data embedded into the photo) and displays them on a 2d or 3d map. Its pretty neat and you can find your self just watching the 3d version for quite some time. I do want to point out this isn’t real time, meaning that the photo posted could of been taken a day ago but someone just decided to add it to flikr, what is real time is when they add it.

anyhow head on over to Flickr Vision and check it out for your self. I prefer the 3d view personally.

I just noticed at the Sony Store on my PS3, that in the top downloads is a free theme from the creates of Lair, this new theme is entitled Lair: Asylian and is a great new addition to my ps3 background. I have some screen shots from the various themes you can add in, not to mention a lot of cool icons come with this theme.

Here is a quote from the playstation blog site.

“Lair: Asylian Theme (free)
Customize your PS3 system with a cool Lair: Asylian theme. This theme allows you to change up the look of your background and XMB icons.”

Kudo’s goes out to Factor 5

Well as some of you may know I used make games back in the 90’s then switched to web development from 2000 to 2007, and have recently jumped back into creating games again. I was recently at the Game Developers Conference here in my home down of San Francisco and wanted to write up a small preview of what I saw.

Why games again you ask? Well as some of you may know I love technology and was able to work with some of the top 3d game engines back in the 90’s and now have a chance once again to work on projects pushing the boundaries of game development.

What did I see at this years GDC 2008? Well for once think I went to a lot of talks and sessions one of them being about BioShock and its story, I thought this was quite a good session, and it covered the bases of empowering player to care about your stupid story. Well thats the title of the talk that Kenneth Levine gave at GDC this year. I don’t have my notes in front of me since I left them at work but to recap they really scaled down what BioShock was originally. They wanted to span a great time period but scaled it down and also scaled back the number of characters in the game. One thing that stood out was the evolution of the little sister.

Pictured below is a few slides from the session, I missed one concept and sorry for the blurry photos but I didn’t want to be rude and use a flash during someones talk.

You can it changed quite a bit from the original design, and they eventually settled on the little girl, which worked out well since they Big Daddy was sort of a father figure type of monster that would protect the little sister like it was his daughter.

Next up…

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