My first experience with Brown Paper Tickets

A few weeks ago, I hosted the ninth edition of my little reading series, Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. For the very first time, I decided to make it a paid, ticketed event, with the proceeds going to Frontier College.

During school, I had a part-time job in school at the now-closed Empire Theatres in Bedford, Nova Scotia. Sadly, none of the ticket-selling experise I gained there was applicable to this situation. So, based on a recommendation from Ariel (of Salon of Shame fame), I turned to Brown Paper Tickets. They’re based out of Seattle, but sell tickets in Canada, too. BPT calls themselves “the first and only fair-trade ticketing company.” They work on a Not-Just-For-Profit model.

Essentially, they’re like TicketMaster, but not evil. Overall, I was really impressed with the service from BPT.

Pros:

• Very easy-to-use website
• Willing to do small events
• They handled all the payment stuff
• Prompt customer service
• Super-cool, official-looking, high-quality printed tickets (with gold foil!)

Con:

• Bulk ordered pre-printed tickets showed up late

Easy-to-use website

It was a breeze to set up the event on BPT. The site walked me through everything. My event was relatively simple, but I got the sense that there’s a powerful backend to their system, with lots of configurable options.

Willing to do small events

Part of why I wanted GRTTWaK9 to be ticketed was to keep it small. Past events had grown too big, with too many people crammed into a small venue. I knew I wanted to sell 100 advance tickets through BPT, hold 20 tickets for readers, and 20 for rush tickets. Total: 140 tickets. It was great that there’s no minimum event size. BPT was willing to sell 100 tickets for me, or 10,000. Nice to see a service scale like that.

Payment

Honestly, I was worried about the added complication of dealing with money. But BPT handled everything. Everything. I simply pointed people to my event page, and they managed the money side of things. Less than a week after GRTTWaK9, a cheque arrived in my mailbox, and the proceeds were off to Frontier College. Easy peasy.

Customer service

I had to deal with customer service twice. Once, via email, I asked how to set a per-person ticket purchase limit on the event. I got a prompt response from a human being named Jon:

Setting the per ticket limit is something that we will need to assist you with. It is very quick and easy, but it looks like that is not currently one of the tools that is available on your end of the site. Hopefully that will be added to your control in one of the next few website updates. In the mean time, let me know what you would like the per purchase limits to be, and I would be more than happy to assist you with that.

I replied with the limit, and Jon set it for me. Awesome.

Later, when my pre-printed tickets didn’t show up (more on that later), I telephoned the toll-free number, and reached another actual human being (sorry, can’t remember her name) who was also very helpful.

The tickets

BPT offers a few options for ticketbuyers. I chose two: you could have a printed ticket, or your name added to a will-call list at the door.

The printed tickets were super cool. I mean, just look at them in the photo above. For a tiny little event like GRTTWaK, it was a real thrill to have a physical momento of the night. Gold foil! Barcodes! Perforations! Mysterious alphanumeric codes!

My one problem

This probably has more to do with living in Canada than BPT, but I’ll mention it for the benefit of anyone ordering bulk tickets outside the US. I wanted printed tickets for the rush ticket-buyers and the readers, so I ordered 25 pre-printed rush tickets, and 25 pre-printed reader tickets. They were ten cents apiece, but the shipping was $15. They shipped USPS Priority.

I ordered my tickets on September 21, and the ETA was September 24. Unfortunately, they didn’t arrive until October 5, the day after the event. Maybe they got stuck at the border. Maybe they were abducted by aliens. Who knows. Anyhow, if you plan to do a bulk order of pre-printed tickets, I suggest you order them well in advance.

Overall

I was really, really pleased with Brown Paper Tickets, and would recommend them to anyone who wants a one-stop solution for a small event. Great service. I’ll definitely use them again.

Exactly why is this video so cute?

Jenna and I both love to watch this video of a slow loris:

So, why do we like this thing so much? Check out this chart:

According to “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse” by Stephen Jay Gould [PDF]:

Humans feed affection for animals with juvenile features: large eyes, bulging craniums, retreating chins (left column). Small-eyed, long-snouted animals (right column) do not elicit the same response.

So let’s examine the slow loris. Large eyes? Check. Bulging cranium? Check. Retreating chin? Check. Cutest animal ever.

With apologies to the Goo Goo Dolls

Once, as thebeastieboys, Tristan and I covered a terrible/awesome mid-1990s top 40 song.

And thrice now, as TheBARSandTONE, we’ve done the same. Most recently, we tried making what Robin Sloan calls a production-as-performance video:

The song is “Name.” There are 11 separate video tracks, each recorded individually. We made the whole thing in ScreenFlow, which is pretty hilarious, because ScreenFlow is screencasting software, and not particularly suited to this sort of thing.

So, within the genre of terrible/great mid-1990s pop songs, I ask you… what song should we try next?

Update: looks like we covered the wrong Goo Goo Dolls song.

An open API for public media

So, according to Poynter, all the big US public media organizations are getting together to work on an open API:

“I really err on the side of openness and inclusiveness,” [CEO of PRX Jake] Shapiro said. Public media, he said, is uniquely suited for this work because of its public service mission — “to make sure content that reflects public dollars is accessible in the most broad and relevant way possible.”

Amen. This open API, or “Public Media Platform” as they’re calling it, brings together American Public Media, PRX, PRI, PBS, and NPR.

Notably (but not surprisingly) absent from this list: a certain large Canadian public media company.

More on password security

An excellent hypothetical scenario that underscores just how important it is to use different strong passwords for everything:

You have email account x@y.com, which is your main email. You have the password XYZ, which you use for everything. You register at paypal with your email address x@y.com and use your normal password. You then register at some obscure webforum using your normal email and password.

Obscure webforum keeps new member details in plain text on their site. Hacker hits obscure webforum and takes thousands of email addresses and site passwords. Hacker then feeds these emails and passwords into paypal, a good proportion of which will actually work.

[Via a comment by Bert9000 in Charles Arthur’s post on recent iTunes/Paypal hacks]