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7.14.2004 posted by William 10:07 link |
My internet connection at home has been flakey for the past few days, and I haven't had time to suffer tech support yet, so that's why I'm writing a quick post from work this morning.
This past weekend was about as good as a weekend can be when you've got a cold that causes you to cough unceasingly every night starting around 10:00 PM until you take 3 or 4 doses of 'tussin, and to hawk up gobs of legal notepad-yellow mucous in the morning. Friday night I just played some video games at my old apartment and went to bed very early, hoping to speed my recovery, so I missed Hello Nurse's Tesh Tribute show at Continental. Saturday I took Metro-North up to Chappaqua for a low-key bar-b-q at Dan's first-wave suburban manor. It's a big, old homestead, all wood and stone, with plenty of space to absorb tired drunk BBQers. I slept in one of his younger siblings' rooms (the rest of the family was away) and I think I was alone in that wing of that house, despite the fact that there were about 12 people crashing in it. Sunday morning the pancakes were hot and the badminton was hotter. After returning to the urban jungle, I went with Dov and Kathryn to check out Central Park's free Lasker Pool. The verdict is you get what you pay for: we waited in line for almost an hour (and it was Sunday evening, right before the pool was to close, not even prime time), the pool was big but still fairly crowded, and the entire thing is 3 1/4 feet deep! I guess I'm spoiled because I spent my summers growing up at Orange Hunt Pool with its varying depths from 3 to 12 feet, two diving boards, low and high, and an entrance policy that allows luxurious items like bags in. So the All Music Guide got a redesign this week, and pretty much everyone agrees that the new site sucks. Not only does it look ugly and distribute what used to be on one easily viewable page over four or five pages using tabs, it's slower to load and worst of all, it only works right in IE. In fact, when I view it using Opera 7.23, my preferred browser on Windows, it causes Opera to top out the CPU and stop responding! An All Music developer wrote in to Waxy to respond to these complaints. He/she explains that they are just a small organization, they don't have the resources, 87% of their visitors use IE, etc. Well, ok, if you want to lose 13% of your traffic, go ahead an write for IE only. I'm not switching, and I bet most people would say the same thing. Once you try another browser and find out how awful IE is, it's impossible to go back. And I sympathize with the limited resources they have as a small company, but they still didn't need to bring the redesign online before it was ready. Because they've provided such a great service for free, I'll be patient, but I really hope they get their act together and do some thinking about how a redesign should make the site more accessible, more intuitive, rather than less. |