Saturday, December 16, 2006

Buying train tickets online? Keywords has the inside dope


Feeling that frustration trying to figure out how use the English language train ticket purchase system? Kerim has found the Grail:

So … we head over to the English language site and navigate the menu “ticket — internet ticketing” which gives us a 404 Page Not Found error. That’s because the link is incorrect and hasn’t been fixed in the six months I’ve been in Taiwan. Come to think of it, the system didn’t work five years ago either … although the page has had a redesign. (Honestly, before it had a starry night-time theme and the links didn’t work then either.) Anyway, here is the correct link. But before you go there you might want to look at this web page which gives you an easy to navigate schedule - don’t ask how I found it, it seems that Taiwan Rail has about half a dozen different web pages each seemingly maintained by completely different people who don’t talk to each other. Go Go Go! Good Good Good! Once you’ve picked the train number you can go directly to this page and enter the relevant data. (Note that the “departure date” menu is still in Chinese, although the lack of Chinese encoding on this page makes the day of the week appear as gibberish.)
Read the whole post, it's excellent. Go thou, and purchase!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It never ceases to amaze me that the nation that builds computers for the world doesn't seem to be able to construct an easily accessible website.

Anonymous said...

It's pitty to acknowledge the backwardness of 台鐵's website. But it would be better to understand that Taiwanese people are trained to manufacture, not to think. Consequently service industry is relative awkward. Don't take result as cause. All this is caused by five decades authoritarian education to produce compliant subjects.

Anonymous said...

姦母氏,哩細北七ㄛ

Five decades of authoritarian educations林北啦

Now if u ppl understands how local governmental agencies work and how they upgrade their IT infrastructures, then u would understand why this is happening. Taiwan has some of worlds most advanced websites, but that usually applies only in the private sector. (Who helped in the creation of Yahoo and Youtube? Taiwan Ex-pats)

Case in point, I have created some tricked out website for myself or for a nice paycheck, and I have created some crap website for those agencies, free of charge for someone, because someone's boss ordered someone to do something the governmental way, and the boss did not give that someone vital information about project plan, current IT infrastructures, future IT support funding, contact details, milestones, etc.

Now how about you follow what you say and drink a nice cup of...