ttj - Tom Jones

 As I approach Paris, Interrail has entered a new and exciting failure mode: I appear to be logged in, and a search for the route even brought up some results.  I click on "Book Reservation".  I get to step 2/2, which sounds promising: One the one hand, this shows some of my details, providing further assurance that I'm logged in.  On the other hand, given that I only have one "trip" on my Interrail account, why does Interrail obsessively make me remind them which one of my one "trip"s I want to do things with, including every time I want to do anything with the app, including show my pass to a ticket inspector?  But more importantly on that other hand, clicking "Done" here does not go from step 2/2 to some kind of let's do this payment screen, but instead goes back to a screen just like the top screenshot of this post, which they entitle "Book Reservations", and which one might dub "step 1/2" to emphasise the incorrec...

Repeatability is a perennial software engineering concern, so it may worry the team at interrail that their web site, in failing to sell seat reservations, does so in a slightly different way on different browsers. This morning, on chrome, we have this: The button has not been pressed.  It is never activated and says "Please wait", and is permanently in a faded state indicating non-activeness. On firefox, and with encouraging consistency, we still have: The "Please wait" on this was also never working. But, I should warn you, this is no time for complacency.  On the Android browser (also "chrome"), the login worked, and it was not until a subsequent stage that it became impossible to complete the reservation: In this case, the search button has been hit, but the results never come.  Plenty of effort has been put into the "user experience" that happens while the results don't come.  There are whizzy things going around, and gray templates, jus...

Interrail login is now failing in a different way, with red writing "Something went wrong": previously: < https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2022/11/interrail-unable-to-sell-seat. html>

 The appeal of interrail is the prospect of being able to use railways without having to deal with unmanned stations, non-working ticket web sites.  The offline app works well enough to add journeys reasonably quickly.  But, in some of Europe's more backwards regions, "seat reservations" are mandatory.  The extremely backwards dens of indolence, such as France, seem so impressed with the smell of their own high-speed routes, they insist on them being treated specially.  Buying a ticket, sorry, reservation, on the spot, cost me 70 EUR(2022) last time (to someone reading from the future, this is several hours' work at median wage).  The interrail app says it's 12 EUR if booked online.  So I went to their web site to log in. Initially, the log in appeared to work, but then it went on a redirect frenzy, from login page to some other page and back and forth a lot, resulting in nothing working.  I closed the browser and started it again, and now I get: ...

I went to Starlink's web site to buy their service.  It said "YOUR SESSION HAS EXPIRED", saying 15 minutes, but I had only just loaded the page. I went back to their front page and started again, but it failed in the same way again.  Like every other "e" "commerce" "vendor", Starlink is unable to cobble together a web site capable of the most basic vending.

I went to condorferries.co.uk to try and buy a ferry ticket.  The date was set to a date almost three months in the past: It was impossible to edit the date as text.  Clicking on it brought up a date selector -- a very bad date selector, which did not allow selection of a date: Consistent with the field's default value, the month shown is August.  All the days are grayed out -- presumably because they're in the past.  There is no visible way to change the month.  I hovered around where the arrows might be for change-month, if they existed, but nothing. This is the state of the web.  Since 1997, the probability of successfully completing any given transaction using the web has monotonically decreased from year to year, and now stands at almost zero.