Mix CD - Trains

Every time I come across a train song in my collection I think to myself "I really need to make a mix CD for Audrey" who is the biggest train geek I know. Finally got around to it , abetted by iTunes (I can search on the word TRAIN) and memory (a bunch of these were on CD, not MP3). I avoided a few "easy hits" (Springsteen, Johnny Cash) and I am sure I missed a bunch. But it's a pretty eclectic mix, IMHO. 

Last Train	Abigail Washburn
Train In Vain	Annie Lennox
Night Train	Bill Morrissey
Train In Vain	The Clash
Train to Jackson	Jeffrey Foucault
Trains	Jill Sobule
I Don't Feel Like A Train	John Gorka
Morning Train	Nanci Griffith
Southbound Train	Nanci Griffith
This Train	Nerissa & Katryna Nields
Me And That Train	Patty Larkin
Ghost Train	Rickie Lee Jones
Night Train	Rickie Lee Jones
The Train	Roches, The
I'm Like a Train, My Lord	Sarah Blacker
Chasing A Moving Train	Sorcha
Sleeping on a Train	Susan Werner
The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home	Iris Dement

Ticket to Ride

I do not often bring my work life over to my blog, but thought I'd blow my own horn this morning.

One of my clients is the Essex Steam Train & Riverboat. I've been web-wenching for them since 2001; I'm not really a graphics person so their in house person comes up with the "look" and I write the code. They recently had someone in trying to upsell them on social media and webwork, and were told "your website looks and works great, no need to do anything different" which is nice to hear.

Anyway, this year, we've been implementing a new web based ticketing system. They found a shopping cart kind of company that they wanted to work with, messed around with it for a year, and finally turned it over to me. It's up and running now, and two weekends into the season, is working great.

It's been a big, complicated project. It's not simply selling tickets - each ride consists of several segments, each of which needs to be inventory controlled. So an 11:00 am Steam Train ride consists of a northbound ride on the train, and a southbound ride on the same train. But an 11:00 am Steam Train & Riverboat ride consists of the 11:00 am Northbound, a Riverboat ride, and a southbound trip on the next (12:30 pm) train. Each of those segments has a fixed number of seats, and if any one segment sells out, the top level ticket cannot be sold.

In addition, there are seat upgrades - a First Class car, an Open car, a Caboose - each with limited seating. There is a special package including a hike to Gillette Castle (limited by the number of passengers who can disembark at a small platform). It's all quite complex.

I've put together this ticketing system from square one - from setting up useful and meaningful product ID codes and names, creating the linked segments to force top level tickets to sell out when individual segements are gone, setting up a menu of categories to help find tickets, and implementing some novel workarounds to make a standard shopping cart system work for ticketing. For instance:

a) Set up a fake "warehouse" system so that each day of the year has a spearate "warehouse" - this makes sorting tickets (for customer use as well as client use) easier.

b) Forcing products to become hidden at the end of each operating day, as well as when the ticket becomes sold out.

c) Creating special option trees to manage passenger types (child / adult / infant / senior, each with a different price) and also to permit double senior discounts on Mondays.

It's been a fun project, with a liberal use of advanced spreadsheets (filters, text functions, macros) to automatically propogate data - it would be impossible to build and maintain a 10,000+ item inventory control system by hand. Now that the seaon is underway and ticketing is going smoothly, I'm working on spreadsheets and processes to export data (daily ordering information, dinner train passenger manifests, etc.).

I'm not really a programmer or IT person; I'm mostly just an advanced user. But I guess I've got those genes (Dad worked in IT back in the data processing / Univac / punch card days)

New Media vs. Old Media

A not so happy story from down in Essex - there was a fire at the CT River Museum last night. The Middletown Press seems to have the best coverage so far: Fire at Conn. River Museum may have destroyed historic artifacts

One of my clients is the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat, so I'm familiar with the CT River Museum as a tourism partner - which drew my attention last night. I did a bit of web surfing, dropped by Twitter, and watched the 11 pm news. WTNH's Jamie Muro was on site, but was not able to get close enough, quickly enough to catch the fire on video.

The Middletown Press, on the other hand, rocks it in terms of integrating text, photos, and video, and really documenting the heck out of this story better than anyone else on the web. Their coverage seems to be entirely generated by one reporter (Lauren Flaum), with a camera that captured video. WTNH - needing to set up a Sat Truck and Camera Crew, was unable to get close enough to really cover this as it happened (Mr. Muro noted in his first stand-up that he would have to walk over to see what was happening and would be back later in the newscast) - but Ms. Flaum (on foot, light, and mobile) from the Press got right in there, got some photos and video of the fire itself, and some eyewitness interviews.

Just an interesting example of "how the new media works vs. how the old media is limited"

And from the Press article: ‎"At one point as firefighters hammered away at the roof, a cluster of bats was disturbed and fluttered away into the dark night sky."

It's the little poetic touches....heh.

A Real Job

It's been a LONG time since I had the sort of job where one drives to the office in the morning, sits at a desk for a more or less traditional workday, and drives back home at the end of the day. December 7, 1995, if I recall correctly.

Wednesday and Thursday, I headed down to work with a client as they launch ticket sales for a big seasonal event - traditionally the first few days of sales are pretty crazy (we sold close to 10,000 tickets today) and there are lots of opportunities to muck it up - overselling, not cutting off sales fast enough, losing orders, pissing off customers. Near as I can tell, today was a huge success, in part because of changes made this year vs. last, one of which was that I was onsite keeping a very close eye on internet sales, updating the website, tracking ticket sales, etc.

But goodness - is that what work is? Going in for 8-9 hours, sitting at a desk, taking a quick break now and then, framed by a 45 minute commute on either end? Yeah, there was some lovely banter and fun with co-workers, but we had the excitement of an "event" to keep things fresh - a 2-3 day push to answer the phones, move the tickets, and make things happen. I'm certain that a regular workday is far less engaging.

In any case, it's a nice change of pace (and I'll get to bill for my time) but you can keep that 9-5 workday, the organization gig. 15 years of self employment have spoiled me for corporate work.....

In the meantime, I'm off the grid again tomorrow.....

A Beehive of Activity

I'm camped out (figuratively, I better add that considering how many nights I slept in a tent in July) in Essex CT for a couple of days. We've starting selling tickets for the 2010 North Pole Express down at the Essex Steam Train, one of my clients.

My job:

a) Monitor online ticket sales, using some extensive email filters that drop individual orders into a folders by departure date and time

b) Shut off online ticket sales as needed

c) Keep a tally of online sales plus group / walk-in sales

d) Monitor the Facebook page for customer feedback and to post updates

e) be here "just in case" we have issues with the ticket sales, website, etc.

Last year, the ticket sales could best be described as a FIASCO - with the railroad folks unable to keep up with the flood of online orders. This year, by pulling the most popular Saturday sales offline (phone orders only) and bringing me in to track the remainder of online orders, things are going much more smoothly.