Okay so last Tuesday afternoon, I figured I’d grab all those Twins concert dates everyone’s buzzing about. Saw folks online begging for a neat PDF schedule they could stick on their fridge or whatever. Thought, “How hard could this be?” Famous last words, right?
The Hunt Begins
Hopped straight to Google. Typed in “Twins 2024 tour dates official”. Pfff. First page was just ticket scalpers and noise. Scrolled down, scrolled some more. Clicked three different fan sites. Dates scattered everywhere like confetti. Some had partial lists, others had wrong venues. Total mess.
Spotted their official site eventually. Layout was… chaotic. Menu under some flashing banner ad for merch. Dug through “News” then “Events”. Bingo! Full list! Or so I thought.
Formatting Nightmares
Copied the whole table straight into LibreOffice Calc. Immediate regret. Data looked like some kid tossed alphabet soup. Cities mashed with dates, venues wrapped across three cells. Even the month names showed up in three different languages. Manual cleanup took ages. Deleted extra spaces, fixed split cells. Hit merge like crazy. Still looked like copypasta junk.
Figured maybe a screenshot might help. Snapped the page. Quality sucked – blurred text, tiny fonts. Absolutely useless for printing.
PDF Puzzle Time
Decided brute force would win. Resorted to typing each show manually into a blank document. Got through March before wanting to scream. Then remembered the “paste special” trick. Copied the clean-ish table data finally, pasted as plain text into Notepad++. Still needed loads of find/replace for weird symbols (thanks, auto “smart quotes”). Shifted everything into tidy columns manually. Two hours gone. Coffee cold.
Saved it as a basic PDF. Previewed it. Panicked. Half the dates split across pages, venues cut off mid-word. Adobe to the rescue? Ha! Spent another hour dragging boxes in Acrobat just to make it readable. Final layout still looked kinda janky but, you know, functional.
The Share Dilemma
Felt semi-proud of this Frankenstein PDF. Threw on a simple title at the top: “Twins 2024 Concert Schedule – Download & Cry Later”. Added my blog name tiny in the footer. Exported the finished file. Double-checked venues against official site – paranoia pays off, found one date typo I’d missed. Fixed it.
Didn’t wanna deal with big file platforms. So just zipped the PDF down and slipped it into my own blog attachment space after disabling direct indexing. Told everyone to check my bio for the grab.
Whole thing took like 3.5 hours. Moral? Tour dates should come WITH the damn PDF pre-made. Job done. Need a nap.
