Tag: Long

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It was fast. Anticlimactic, really. It took a few reloads to get the Comic-Con International home page up, but once I could click on the reservation link, everything went smoothly. I was done by 9:05.

The reservation page was actually optimized!

  • Just one image: a banner across the top.
  • Everything was on one page, including the list of hotels, the personal info, and the hotel choices.
  • Hotel selection was done by client-side scripting, so there was no wait for processing between selections (and no risk of typos confusing their processing system later today).

This is a huge deal, especially compared to Travel Planners’ horribly overdesigned 2008 forms — yes, forms, plural — that kept bogging down. (I never even saw last year’s, though I tried for an hour and a half to get in.)

On the downside, that one page does load a half-dozen script files, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed it down much.

In case none of your 12 choices were available, they asked for a maximum price you’d be willing to pay for another hotel that’s not on your list. I vaguely recall this being a feature of the old fax forms, but I don’t remember being asked this on the phone last year.

I was surprised to find that they didn’t want credit card info immediately, but that’s good from a streamlining perspective as well. The hotel choices, room type, and contact info are critical in order to make the reservation in the first place. Payment can be done later, so in a rushed situation like this, it’s better to handle it later. Plus, not asking for credit card information means that they could run the site without encryption, speeding things up a bit more.

I would have liked to have gotten a confirmation number for the request, or an email, just so that I could be sure that I was in their queue. And to be sure that I entered the right email address. And the right start and end dates. And…well, you get the idea. I’m a little paranoid about the process at the moment.

Here’s hoping that the back end of the process, and sending out confirmations, goes as smoothly as the front end did.

Update: Short answer: it didn’t. Long answer: I’ve written up what went wrong, at least from the guests’ point of view.

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Long Beach Comic ConThis Saturday I attended the first-ever Long Beach Comic Con. I had a great time catching panels, meeting writers and artists, talking about comics, sightseeing, and even breaking some Flash news. I can definitely see this as an annual event.

Note: If you just want to look at photos, feel free to skip to my Long Beach Comic Con 2009 photo set on Flickr.

Location

It’s been at least ten years since the last time I’d been to the Long Beach Convention Center*. I didn’t recognize the building the con was in at all (and I’m sure the shopping mall across the street wasn’t there before), though the facade and lobby reminded me a lot of the San Diego Convention Center with the arched ceiling and floor-to-roof windows. It made me wonder whether they had been designed by the same architect.

With a mall across the street to the west, Shoreline Village across a bridge to the south, and Downtown Long Beach across the street to the north — not to mention the food service in the lobby not being swamped — I really regretted having brought my lunch with me. Though it probably did save time, since I had panels I wanted to see from noon until 2:00. If I’d wanted to go to, say, the Auld Dubliner (right across the street! Auughh!), I would have only had about half an hour on the convention floor that morning.

*Not counting plays at the Terrace Theater. Though the last thing I saw there was a touring production of Miss Saigon in 2003, about two days before the start of the Iraq War. Talk about timing.

Main Hall

I think the main floor was about the same size as the floor at Wizard World Los Angeles the last couple of years — or rather, the amount of floor space they used was about the same. (Last year WWLA had a large empty space in the back.) Exhibitors were clustered around the entrance, mostly indie press (I remember Boom, Archaia, and Aspen) and a large Nintendo exhibit. The center of the room was dominated by the Artist’s Alley, with dealers wrapped around it and celebrities lining one wall.

In the back, inexplicably, was a raised wrestling ring. I didn’t notice it when I went through in the morning, but in the afternoon, when they were actually holding wrestling matches, it was loud! Halfway down the hall, you could hear the *smack!* *thud!* as the wrestlers threw each other to the floor. I figure the floor of the ring and the convention center floor must have made a fantastic sounding board!

I got in about 20 minutes after the con opened for the day, so if there were any huge lines I missed them. The artists’ tables were practically empty (they came in later), and most of the action seemed to be at the publishers’ booths and dealers. There was a big line for Jim Lee, and people were lining up for Stan Lee and Berkeley Breathed signings at 11:00.

Unlike San Diego, though, I could walk around without relying on Level 18 Crowd Weaving! Continue reading →

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Opera IconAfter a long wait, Opera 10 is out! So what’s new in this first double-digit web browser?

Turbo

The biggest new feature is Opera Turbo, which can massively speed up web access on a slow network connection. Turbo takes the compression used for Opera Mini, which has to deal with slow cell phone networks, and brings it to the desktop. On fast connections you won’t need the proxy, but if you’re stuck on dial-up or sharing a busy network, it can help immensely.

I definitely could have used it on the painfully slow hotel wi-fi during Comic-Con!

Turbo can be turned on and off through the status bar, or set to auto-detect your network speed and switch on when it would help, and off when it’s not needed.

Speed

Even without Turbo, Opera 10 is a heck of a lot faster than Opera 9 was! The app itself is a lot snappier, it displays pages faster, and it responds quickly. Opera feels lighter than Firefox again, after the (comparatively) clunky 9.x series.

Web Fonts

Opera’s CEO CTO recommended embedding TrueType fonts with CSS in 2007, but Safari was the first web browser to support it in a non-beta release. Now Firefox, Safari and Opera can all download fonts as-needed. That means websites can use fonts that aren’t already installed on your computer.

Until now, if a designer wanted to use a font other than one of the standard fonts that come pre-installed with Windows or Mac OS, they had to save the text as an image. That’s fine for banners and the like, but a pain for anything that changes regularly…like headlines or content.

You can read more about web fonts at Mozilla Hacks, and see them in action at Speed Force (font write-up).

Site Compatibility & Features

Website compatibility has improved a lot, and Opera has continued to add support for newer technologies. It’s great to see Opera, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all working toward the next generation of the web. (If only Internet Explorer were along for the ride – at least IE8 has finally caught up with the last generation.)

Spell-Check

Opera has had on-demand spell checking for a while, though on Windows you had to install a separate dictionary. Now it’s built-in, and it’ll underline misspelled words as you type. (Downside: it underlines inside HTML code. I don’t really want to add “href,” “li,” and so forth to my dictionary.)

Unite Postponed

One thing Opera 10 doesn’t have that was introduced in the betas preview snapshots is Opera Unite, which lets you set up a presence on your computer that other people can see for file sharing, social networking, etc. Apparently they decided it needed more work and didn’t want to hold up the release.

But Wait, There’s More!

Some other new features:

  • Visual tabs: Stretch out the tab bar and see a thumbnail of each page you have open.
  • New e-mail client, including the long-requested ability to compose with formatting.
  • Automatic update.
  • Customize Speed Dial.
  • Web apps integration with web-based email and feed readers.
  • Improved developer tools (Dragonfly).
  • Opera Link: synchronize bookmarks, history, notes, etc. across multiple computers and phones. (Not new, but I think it syncs more types of data than it used to)

And a lot more.

As a reminder: Opera is free (as in beer). It has been for almost 4 years now, but it’s worth repeating because every once in a while you see someone who thinks it’s still pay or ad-based software.

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It seems as though every year, around the time of hotel registration for Comic-Con International, people start clamoring for the con to move from San Diego to Las Vegas. More hotel rooms! A bigger convention center! Gambling! Strippers!

It makes me want to headdesk.

Now, I don’t hate Vegas. I’m not ZOMG in love with it, but I’ve been there more than once and I don’t think it should be removed from the face of the earth. What I believe about Vegas is that it is a law and a destination unto itself, and that everyone should be able to choose whether they go based on the merits of the place, not on the merits of what else might be going on there that isn’t a usual part of the location. Please keep this in mind as I present my list of Reasons Not to Move CCI to Las Vegas:

1. Weather. San Diego may be incredibly hot some years, but it’s coastal. There are breezes a lot of the time, and it’s often quite bearable. Vegas is inland desert and is 99% guaranteed to be nasty hot in July/August. Part of the crazy fun of CCI is seeing costumes on the street, which would become darn near impossible for a lot of people given the temperature.

2. Distance. I’m not talking about the distance for people to get there (though I will in a bit), but the distance between things. It can take over half an hour to get from the front door of one hotel to the front door of the next one over. In San Diego, it’s pretty easy to leave the convention center, go find food that’s not jacked up in price for an inferior product, and come back. In Vegas, unless you take the monorail, that’s a pipe dream, especially given that the convention center is off the Strip and not really near a lot of hotels. Keep reading for more. Continue reading →

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Comic-Con International finally announced the opening of this year’s convention block in San Diego hotels: March 19.

This time last year, they’d already gone on sale and sold out.

As recently as three (or maybe four) years ago, they’d have sent a postcard by January. They used to include a full list of hotels in the winter newsletter with distance and prices. I could swear I remember them going on sale in January.

Of course, five years ago you could still book the Little Italy Super 8 only less than a month in advance. Now the discounted rooms are in such demand that they sell out in a matter of hours.

Like last year, they are only selling tickets in advance, so if you plan on attending, you should order them online.