ComedySportz San Jose is reopening next weekend, and tickets to their first shows were supposed to go on sale at 10am today. I wanted to be sure that we got tickets to the Friday night show, so I loaded the Buy Tickets page at 10am exactly.
It only listed two events for November, neither of them the one I wanted. I reloaded, saw no changes, waited a few minutes, reloaded again and still saw no changes – I realized that this was a job for the computer, not me. I looked at the source of the page and saw that the actual event list was on vbotickets.com. It was easy to figure out how to use curl and jq to get the count of events available in November. After that, it was trivial to create a one-line script that would check the count of events every 60 seconds and tell me when it was time to order tickets – I started it running and began preparing the marinade for Oven-Roasted Chicken Schwarma.
A few minutes later, I heard “Buy Tickets!” and saw the order page pop up on the screen, so I bought three tickets for next Friday night’s show and went back to making marinade.
Tonight, I have a Shir Hadash Board meeting, but I’m going to have to leave early so we can go to SFO and pick Jeff up (hence the need for three tickets). I’ll cope.