I made some changes to the DNA Lounge store today.

We often get email from people who don't understand how will-call tickets work. Questions like, "I bought this ticket with my mom's credit card, how do I get in?", or "My friend paid for our tickets but now he's not going, what do I do?", or "Dear Beloved in Christ, I am the widow of the Minister of Finance of Malaysia." We get these questions despite the fact that no less than three separate times during the checkout process it tells you that to pick up will-call tickets, you just need to know two things: the name on the credit card used; and the confirmation code.

People don't read. We know this.

So I figured, well, if there was something on the screen that looked like a ticket, maybe these non-reading people would make the intuitive leap from there to, "I should print this out and take it with me."

So that's what it does now. It looks like this:

Technically that thing on the screen isn't really a ticket, it's just a pretty piece of paper that has the correct purchaser name and confirmation code on it, and when you hand that to the folks at the front door, they will give you your actual tickets, which are the little raffle-spool-looking ones.

I had to upgrade the store server to a faster machine to do this, because apparently using ImageMagick to do such simple font scaling and placement takes a ridiculous amount of CPU.

Also, the confirmation email you get when you place an order is HTML now, because it is the Twenty-First Century.

Please let me know if anything appears to be broken.

By the way, in anticipation of those of you who are about to ask, "Why don't you mail tickets?", the answer is that it's a really expensive hassle at every step of the way: the printer, the thermal media, and the person to stuff envelopes in a timely fashion. It's just not worth the effort. It wouldn't speed up entry, anyway: ID-check is always the bottleneck, not will-call.

You may notice that I've sprinkled a bunch of Facebook "Like" buttons all over the web site. You'll see one in the title box of this blog entry, on the flyer pages, and next to each calendar event. I guess it's a low-key way to tell your friends what events you're attending without making the commitment of actually posting about it, or something. It's kind of ugly and cluttered, but all the cool kids are doing it.

There's also a thing on the ticket checkout page that exhorts you to post about your planned attendance to Facebook and Twitter. I've seen a few people using that so far, so I guess that's working.

Meanwhile, here's a really dumb War on Fun article in the New York Times:

Patrolling Near Clubs Carries High Cost

But the police argue that closing clubs will not stem the violence, or the department's mounting costs. Kitt Crenshaw, a police commander who oversees the North Beach patrols, said the burden should be shifted to club owners.

So which is it? If the closing the clubs won't stem the violence, doesn't that imply that the clubs are not the cause? And if they are not the cause, why do you want them to pay for the excessive, commerce-destroying (and, apparently, ineffective) police presence in North Beach?

Mr. Crenshaw plans to propose regulations, based on practices in other cities, that would require clubs handling crowds of 100 or more people to enlist their state-certified security guards in unprecedented police-led training, install video cameras, improve outdoor lighting and install identification card readers that would allow the police and club owners to track patrons.

He said he would also like to see certain clubs pay a fee for police services.

So which is it? Are these "based on practices in other cities" or are they "unprecedented"? I think you do not know what that word means.

Forcing clubs to further invade their patrons' privacy by scanning their IDs on the way in will do nothing. If you've been following the press about the recent shootings, the common thread is that these people were not customers of the clubs! This was gang violence happening on public streets.

Then the article wraps up with the harrowing tale of a guy who was sitting on the sidewalk, and may have made a gang sign. Then the police told him that they were considering the possiblity of telling him to move along. Wow.

Isn't "sitting" illegal now, anyway?