Author: Jonathan

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Getting started

The schedule for Tokyo 2020 was announced on April 16, 2019, with ticket sales in Japan via lottery starting on the 9th of May through the 28th of May. On May 17th, we took a little “staycation” in Hollywood and part of the plan was to develop our strategy for tickets and spend a few hours looking at the schedule and coordinating what we wanted.

Then we looked at the schedule. The schedule on the official website is cool, but not that easy for planning. The English website has the following table, where you need to drill down to get the details.

The US supplier of tickets provided a PDF of the schedule, which, when downloaded, was 78 pages. Here’s an excerpt of the CoSport PDF… note the header is only on the first sheet. Everyone knows to “repeat header.”

Clearly a “few hours” was not going to be enough. How would we coordinate this?  We started writing down what we were interested in on a daily basis, and thought we’d go back and compare our notes to get a compiled list. In the early days of the competition period, the number of events is a lot. We also knew that any ticket request would have a low success rate, so we needed to choose multiple events and have a strategy on overlaps. It didn’t take long for us to realize that a quick review with notes was not going to work. I thought what every good engineer who occasionally has to manipulate data thought – Excel.

Around this time a British guy working for my French supplier on a project in the UAE introduced me to Notepad++. He told me it would change my life. Little did I know at the time how right he was. Converting a properly formatted table into PDF is not that hard, but this was not a well formatted table. Somehow, though, I was able to manipulate the PDF into an Excel spreadsheet with Notepad++ tools and some manual fixes. Thankfully this gave us a method of reviewing and strategizing.

I created a column for each of us to note whether or not we were interested in an event, then I was able to sort on those that one or both of us were interested in, then we jointly agreed on the tickets we would pursue, assigned a priority, and then designated whose application would request the ticket.

Then we applied that to our proprietary ticket purchase plan and started our journey. If we had “won” every ticket we requested, it would have been about $19,000. We knew we would not get every ticket. In the end, we didn’t come close. Tomo continues to monitor a site that announces ticket releases, and so we’ve been able to add events over time. Still no opening or closing ceremonies, but we will have plenty to make the trip worthwhile.

 

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And now the reason for the blog

When Tokyo was announced as the host city of the 2020 Summer Olympics on September 7, 2013, Tomo and I decided that we would go to the Olympics. We’ve held that promise to ourselves, and we are going. Airplane tickets are purchased, event tickets have been lined up, and somehow we’ll figure out where we can stay. We have a backup plan, so that’s good.

I want to document the experience, and considering my previous post about social media, I don’t really think Facebook is the way to do it. I have a specific Instagram account just for the Olympics, but I want the narrative. Like my previous blog, I can imagine that this blog will help me collect the memories and then help me recollect them later. That’s the plan. You can join us as well.

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The modern blog challenge

My first blog, which was seriously damaged in an uncoordinated software upgrade, chronicled my life in Japan from 2008 to the end of 2011. I loved creating it and continuing to add content.  Yes, I did feel the pressure for content, and there were months where I was ashamed that I didn’t produce much (May 2011, why was there only one post the whole month?). The last sentence in my last entry says, “So sit tight, more to come.” More never came.

I still love the look of that blog, and I still refer to many of the things I documented. It has become my journal for that time in Japan. If only I could make it available again on the web (I will, some day, and it will be linked – sit tight, more to come). As platforms have changed though, a blog optimized for someone reading at their desktop or laptop doesn’t really work for the person reading on their iPad, or especially their phone. It seems blog design and maintenance has become that much more complicated and the design is compromised to accommodate multiple platforms. My old design doesn’t scale to a phone, unless you want to read everything like it is a desktop on your phone.

This design has a lot of white space. It is clean, for sure, maybe a little too clean. It is a compromise, but in the end it is all about the content, right?

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Welcome to 2005

Blogs were really cool, in 2005. Then iPhones were released, social media rolled out, and everything changed. It didn’t change right away, but the change started. Facebook debuted more broadly in 2006, Twitter joined the fray in 2006 as well, and Instagram came along in 2010. Everything became an App. Now you had a computer in your hand and you didn’t know it and you could check something “real quick” and then get back to whatever you were doing. And blogging sort of withered. Why write to an audience who doesn’t react when you can show your highly curated life to friends and acquaintances (the people you want to show off to anyway) via social media? The interfaces for social media were easy. Just type, add a picture, and hit “POST.” Done.

Unfortunately, blogs take work. They take designing your theme, or going through any number of existing themes to determine the look and feel of your post. Attempts have been made to make blog management easier through various tools, but then that just constrains the look and feel. It has taken me hours of configuration to get to this level, and it isn’t that special. Blogs can be long form too, how much do people want to read about something that might be really interesting to you but kind of meh for them? And those food bloggers – do I really want to see and have each course explained to me? Scroll, scroll, scroll. Content matters.

Then the run up to the 2016 election happened. Social media became a minefield. People you were friends with shocked you with their opinions. Hate spewed everywhere. We learned just how much influence social media had on the election. People were unfriended, bubbles grew, and all the while I kept feeding the machine. I still feed the machine – don’t forget to click on my social media links below or in my title bar!

Suddenly, blogging seems pretty cool again. I can focus on my interests. People aren’t forced to read something on their timeline. I can do things together that I really enjoy – design, writing, and photography.

So here I am, starting up blogging again. I hope you will enjoy it. And don’t forget to click on my link in Facebook to my blog site!