One of my favorite restaurants, Corner Bakery, has undergone a bit of a shift at it’s Irvine Marketplace branch since the last time I’ve been home. When last I ate there, and since it’s opened, customers would enter the restaurant, pass a few displays, and queue in a short line that takes them past a counter/display case showcasing all of their food. You would order, your food would be prepared and given to you, you’d put it on your tray, and slide it down to the register to pay, cafeteria style. The design was elegantly simple — newcomers had a chance to see all of the available food options without having to just read a menu, and traffic was managed effectively as people moved quickly through the line.

Now, the line is gone, the area is rearranged, and the display cases are no more. While things like salads and soups were dished out right in front of the customer before, they are now hidden in the back, along with the sandwiches and such. There is no food sitting out except for the baked goods, and there is no queue. Now, you enter through the front door, look at the menu, approach a cashier, and place your order. It is a very, very bad change.

The new layout creates a choke point at the door as people line up before the registers. No more are crowds swept into the restaurant through an elegant queueing system; now they are bunched up in a line. Worst of all, because food is no longer prepared in front of the customer, there is a much higher rate of errors. Since I have to sit down before I can receive my food (delivered to my table), I have no opportunity to correct someone if they put the wrong soup in the bowl, if I want a different kind of bread, or whatever the circumstance is. And the last time Shaina went to a Corner Bakery, they forgot to bring her her order, and then didn’t believe her when she went to the counter to ask for it!

At the same time as this change happened, trash receptacles and dish bins were removed, I assume so that customers no longer feel the need (or have the ability) to clean up after themselves. That one confused my mom to no end. Are we supposed to leave everything on the table now, or not? Were we before? Do we need to tip now? The old design was unclear, yes, but now it is perhaps moreso.

All in all, Corner Bakery’s new approach to dining — and it’s gradual transformation into a more full-service restaurant — is a major disappointment, and a very poor choice.

What’s working and what’s not in the new blog: All of the posts are here, but many are not formatted correctly. New categories, but nothing in them. Remaindered links, but no easy way to post them. Archive works, RSS works but isn’t linked, comments work. Pagination doesn’t. Images might need tweaking. Haven’t set up the auto-acronymer yet. Shows “new” posts but doesn’t yet indicate which posts they are. Took a bit of time but I got the newest comments tracker back to working. New calendar is pretty nifty. The “context” tracker is cool, but might not take into account all contexts. Have to see if I’ve missed any! Most of the “other places” pages aren’t actually there yet. That’s the major hurdle at this point.

I really love my new design, it makes me happy. Things are subtle, not too much information presented, nicely categorized. Pretty much all XHTML goodness, very few tables (calendar, 2-column links), and (generally) it degrades well. And I think it’s pretty. And it’s all about me, right? So there! 😛

I was feeling pretty bad about switching to a fixed-width design (one where the web page does not expand to fit the entire browser window), but then I found that there is an ongoing debate about just this issue going on right now, with more and more people supporting fixed-width for the design control vs. fluid designs that maximize use of screen real estate. What are the advantages? When you’re designing for fluid it’s much more difficult, and you often can’t do things or line things up without an excessive amount of tinkering and tables nested within tables and all that. And then, to top it off, your nicely formatted paragraphs of text end up expanding to fill the entire screen, looking awful with paragraphs being only one or two lines long, and the reader having to move their eyes all the way across the screen to read it, which is just a very bad situation. There is a reason books and newspaper columns are narrow. And I should know — I write all my papers using L^AT_EX, which uses nicer fonts and much larger margins then Microsoft Word and the like for the express purpose of making things more readable and easier on the eye.

I’m still not sure I really like fixed width in all situations (I often find sites that use it very contraining, and it’s annoying when you have a large monitor and the site was designed for a small one), but I might just be going with it anyway, because I like how it looks for my site. Hmm.

NYT on Firefly – the show was killed early by FOX and is now enshrined in a nice collectible DVD, but, in the tradition of Television Without Pity (which gets a shout out), there is also a fan-created commentary disk set, which is basically two DVDs worth of character info, video montages, and video essays, plus some audio commentary and such. I’ve blogged before (or at least written an essay) about fan-supported television, and my belief that the networks are becoming obsolete and television is getting more democratic. I think this is a pretty good example of it.

I’m attempting to redesign this site and move it to a new blogging system. This’ll be the fourth design, and I hope to capture in it some of the information that was long in the transition between design 2 and design 3. Somewhere along the way I lost some biographical info, old files, etc. I’m drawing heavy inspiration from Jason Kottke‘s simple, direct site with minimal junk. This site redesign has been on my mind for a while and is kinda a part of the whole “life redesign” I’m going through at this point – simplified, focused, deeper, more real.

This is also the first design I’m doing on a PC, since my Mac is still dead. I’m borrowing cycles from Shaina, who is nice enough not to kick me out of her room. Shaina rocks.

I’ve been telling people I see Dean is a Bartlet, and Aaron goes into detail. Yeah, like he said.

I’ve been waiting for the Dean moment to match the Bartlet “I screwed you on milk” one, but I haven’t found it yet (Aaron likes Dean’s straight talk about the draft). I’m also scared because I think it would mean incredible things about the improvement of our democracy if Dean were to win, but you can see from The West Wing how the Bartlet people went into the White House all idealistic and stuck up and how it completely backfired on them. You have to hope the Dean people are a little more gracious, a little more strategic, and a lot more political. At this point, they seem to be doing a good job.

Two annoying things that Kevin points out:

The Wasington Post has an article on how the Bush administration is rewriting history by retroactively changing their web site to reflect policy. Some of the deletions: information on how condoms can be used to stop unwanted pregnancies and avoid sexually transmitted diseases, a report showing that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer, and a transcript from a Nightline interview where the interviewee tows the party line that the US taxpayer will pay no more then $1.7 billion to rebuild Iraq — thanks to contributions from other ally nations, of course.

Second is a BBC piece about how Governer Arnold has declared a “fiscal emergency” in California so that he can redirect money from welfare and public health care programs towards police and firefighting, which are apparently underfunded now that he has removed the controvertial car tax. Now I don’t know about the car tax, but Arnold’s tactics closely mirror what the Bush administration has done with Medicare and other programs — finding ways to “force” them into debt or cutbacks. So you don’t like welfare, fine. Debate it in the open, try to get a law passed. Stabbing programs you don’t like in the back and then claiming that it’s not your fault, that’s just evil.

From August through to December, my life has just been a string of failures. A failure to finish club renewals in the month I originally budgeted, resulting in an ongoing struggle and loads of work to get the damn thing done in a semester. Thank YOU, club leaders. A failure to keep issues of racism and the school newspaper in the student realm, with both sides asking and then forcing administrators to intervene, striking a blow for student soverignty. A failure to resolve any of the issues raised in a meaningful or productive manner. A failure to get all the people involved to just calm down, shut up, and go back to classes, including myself. A failure to account for that huge amount of time spent (wasted?) on a futile pursuit of happiness for students, resulting in…

A personal failure of classes, for the first time ever, and that just doesn’t help my prospects for grad school at all, in fact it hurts them, perhaps irreperably, and there is really nothing I can do about it at this point.

And finally, a failure at home. A failure to maintain on an ongoing basis anything I try to do at Maintex. The result is that I try to give people things that are better, try to improve their lives, but all it does is give them short-term hassles (thanks to a variety of factors, several out of my control) and then ongoing hassles because no one can maintain what I create and it ends up being thrown away anyway. Is there really any point to me creating a standard boot image, or trying to install antivirus software, or secure these computers? The result, of course, will be that someone here won’t have the specific software that only they use, and someone there can’t get their email, and someone over in the corner can’t do something else, and it’s just endless fixing things, and then when I leave something breaks and no one else knows even the basics to fix it and so they just get angry or throw it away or start over, and I’ve accomplished nothing.

I really can’t handle any more failures at this point. Maintex is great — nice people, good pay, but it’s just not something I can deal with any more. And tech support has not, is not, and will never be my thing. It’s just painful to do, and I don’t want any more stress, even if I’m getting paid for it.

I’m finished. I’m going to go in to work tomorrow, fix Orchid’s email, try to fix Ali’s computer, figure out how to back up the Mac server that serves less and less, and then going home, and that’s it. I’m done there, I think, because I’m not being useful to anyone, I’m not enjoying it, and I can do better doing something — anything — else.

On creating a better world:

[W]hen you stumble a lot, you start looking at your feet. We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying, “make my life have meaning.” And to our inheritors before us saying, “create the world we will live in.” We’re not just holding jobs and having dinner, we are in the process of building the future.