less than successfully attempting to buy us open 2024 tickets

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Every year I buy two tickets to the US Open. One evening and one day. It’s always been easy. And then there is this year. I half succeeded.

Failing at the American Express Presale

I tried after work (not at 9am) to buy my tickets during the American Express pre-sale. This is when I’ve always bought my tickets. It’s not Comic Con where I have my browser open at the exact moment. By the time i got online, there were no tickets; only “verified resale.” This article suggests had I tried in the morning, I’d have been aggravated and still possibly not have had tickets.

Attempting during regular sale

I know more tickets are released for regular sale. I tried again today after work, the first day of regular sale. I was able to buy an evening ticket for Ashe. However, all the non-resale tickets were single seats and there weren’t a lot.

I think the day tickets are sold out. I say I think because this is the process:

  1. Go to US Open individual tickets page or Ticketmaster tennis page
  2. Click “Join queue”
  3. Verify identity by entering code from text or email
  4. Accept terms of service and that using “All-In” pricing which includes all fees
  5. Observe all tickets are “Verified Resale”
  6. Want to try a different ticket type or date. Start over with step 1. That’s right. You have to authenticate for EVERY search.

I checked online and people who were online at 9am also had problems. I gave up.

Surrounding with Double Quotes in IntelliJ

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IntellIJ has a feature where you can surround a String with double quotes by simply pressing “. Here’s how:

  1. Select the text you want in quotes
  2. Press “

There’s a video showing the feature.

However, this may appear not to work on your machine. There are two possible causes

Cause #1: The feature is off

Go into your IDE settings and choose

  1. Editor
  2. General
  3. Smart Keys
  4. Check “Surround selection on typing quote or brace”

Cause #2: Keyboard mapping

I’m on a Mac and the feature worked for single quotes and not double quotes. How odd. It’s clearly not cause #1 since it works for single quotes.

I then tried on my laptop keyboard and it worked with double quotes. So clearly the problem was my keyboard! Somehow it was being treated as an international keyboard instead of US. I remapped by going to “Keyboard” on Mac system settings and choosing “setup keyboard.”

Once I did this, the feature worked consistently on both keyboards.

Makes me wonder how people with non-US keyboards are supposed to use the feature!

EPS files on Mac

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It used to be possible to view .eps files in Mac Preview. This was very convenient for viewing a quick image. In Sonoma, that ability was removed to avoid previewing malware.

Ok. But now I need a tool to open .eps files. Preferably a free or cheap one. I know Adobe Illustrator can do it, but that’s not cheap.

What didn’t work

Here’s what I tried that didn’t work

  • GIMP – showed the image with poor resolution for a few seconds than crashed. The. second time, it crashed right away. I tried redownloading and now Gimp says it can’t interpret file.
  • Skim – Didn’t open EPS files
  • Open office – shows just a box, not the image
  • Inkscape – ignores the request to open the file

What did work

I then abandoned trying to actually open the EPS file since I don’ edit them. There was some about converting to PDF. But images preview better. So I went with converting to png.

I found a Stack Overflow post suggesting using ghostscript. I was able to run a one liner and get all of them as .png. Now I can preview again!

find . -type f -name '*.eps' -exec gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dEPSCrop -sDEVICE=png16m -r600 "-sOutputFile={}.png" {} \;