world cup tickets

May 19th, 2006 by Lawrence David

sadly, it looks like we won’t be buying a house after all this summer. everything just didn’t come together, which is too bad, since christina and i were both excited to have our own place. fortunately, things probably worked out for the best.

one of the reasons for my sanguine outlook is that we’ll have disposable income this summer.

of course, that’s completely unacceptable for a graduate student. reading jennie’s blog today, christina and i’ve decided that we should attempt to remedy the situation by heading to germany to see the world cup this summer.

unfortunately, all 3 million! seats are sold out already. however, starting tomorrow, it looks like fifa will be offering for resale returned tickets.

since i don’t feel like constantly reloading their site every 5 minutes at work, i’ve written a little shell script to check the website for available tickets. if you too would like to head over to germany in june, stick the following into a cronjob and wait for an email notification!

curl -s -o fifa.txt “http://tickets.fifaworldcup.com/cgi-bin/ds_wme?fun=pksbyeventreihe&doc=ds_einzel1&id=WME_NO_SESSION&affiliate=wme&key=0″
soldcount=`cat fifa.txt | grep “soldout” | wc -l`
if [ $soldcount != 512 ]
then
echo `date` | mailx -s “there’re world cup tix!” me@gmail.com
fi

[ of course, modify the email addresss on the last line. oh and i make no promises that this will work, since i had only negative controls in my test set - i had no example of what an available ticket looked like ]