I'm a little intimidated by buying train tickets in a foreign country. Find the right place to go, wait in line, negotiate the right ticket without quite understanding fare options or the local language, ... So I like that the Swiss train company lets you buy and print tickets online. Just pick your journey online, press the "print" button, and voila, you get a PDF file.
Every conductor I've given one of these to looks at me funny; I guess they aren't common yet. The ticket has an interesting security feature, a grey box of random pixels (as seen above). I thought at first it was some spread spectrum encoding of a bunch of data, but I think it's really just a simple visual mask hiding a few letters. Cool that it works through PDF and crappy home printers.
lifezurich2005
  2005-09-24 08:30 Z