Condor Ferries: modifying a booking

After finding how to log in to a Condor Ferries account (it's a tiny "my account" as a footnote of the web page, along with the other footers), I was amazed to find I could modify an existing booking.  For a pretty-ropey Guernsey state-backed enterprise, this is impressive stuff.

It had my booking on there, and I clicked on it.  I only changed the return date, and it went straight to giving me a choice of picking the return voyage (with voyages for the outward date, just one, also shown above).  This was amazing.  Usually, by now, on a web site, things would have just stopped working, or perhaps given a useless error message.  This was giving all the signs of actually going to work.  Whereas the probability of main happy journey succeeding on a web site is around 50%, it drops to around 5% for an exceptional flow.

"An error occurred.  Value cannot be null.  Parameter name: source".  Phew, that's more like it.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the persistent idiocy of "privileged ports" on Unix

TCP and UDP have ports.  These are 16 bit; there are 65535 or so per IP address. These protocols don't care to differentiate between the ports.  Elsewhere, IANA presumes to operate a process to allocate "well-known" ports in the range 1-1023, "registered ports" in the range 1024-49151, and to reserve the remainder, 49152–65535, for "ephemeral" ports.  The caller end has to have a port, which is how replies get back within the virtual connection, and these are conventionally picked from the ephemeral range by the OS's networking stack. The whole idea of ports is ridiculous, because it allows ISPs to arse around presuming to decide which services they will "not allow".  Anything that allows IPSs to do anything other than shift opaque packets will allow ISPs to meddle and break things, and due to the Law of Meddling, if they can, they will.  I am currently working around an issue with Claro, a pretend ISP, blocking port 5060, allocated to SI...
Read more

hardly any suitcases or shopping trolleys have brakes

Image
 Taleb observed in Antifragile that it took 6000 years between the invention of the wheel, and someone putting wheels on luggage.  Sadly, castors without brakes result in a lot of rolling around.  This is getting worse each year, as the luggagetards seem to take unbounded delight in reducing the friction in their castors, but never add brakes.  Thousands of people are going round announcing they "work in luggage design", but not a single one has implemented the most obvious and beneficial "innovation" available to them. I have so far been unable to (spot test and) buy any luggage with brakes on the wheels, despite asking in several luggage shops. Searching online yields promises of "universal" castor parts with brakes, where "you must have a strong ability in DIY", meaning: they're not universal, and the fitter may as well be crafting the whole item from scratch.  It also brings up a 700 EUR piece of Chinese tat, with no brakes visible in the...
Read more

you are even more disgusting than before the pandemic, especially you disgusting bloated milky (non-Jap) ones

Trying to have an optimistic take at the start of the pandemic, a friend remarked to me that at least people from now on may have some basic decency around coughing, sneezing, blowing their nose, having a cold, and so on.  No such fucking luck. Despite covid-papers-please Austria getting obsessed with papers-papers, and people threatening to call the police on non-mask-wearers well after Omicron exceeded 99% of new cases, sneezing out into the open on trains appears to be socially acceptable.  Guy a few seats away just spent a minute mega-sneezing out into the air.  During his performance, his hand moved around in proximity to his face, in a symbolic gesture that showed he felt like he should pretend to try and cover his face.  His being was in spasm.  Once he was done, he kindly got an FFP2 mask and put it on his face.  The only other person visibly disgusted by his behaviour was a Slav on the seats in front (update: later turned out to be a posh Ukrainian...
Read more