Like/Dislikes
Preface
This is a very quick and dirty "rantometer" of things that I think are
great, and things that annoy me, at a given point in time. I'll constantly be updating
this same page.
Likes
- Bymark
Restaurant : This is a swanky new restaurant at the base of the
Dominion tower at the TD Centre in downtown Toronto. With an excellent
ambience (it's the sort of lighting where diamond rings sparkle to their
fullest) it offers tremendous food in pretty hearty quantities
at reasonable prices. Expect to pay about $180 with tip for two people
to have an appetizer, main course and desert, and a glass of nice wine (the
selection by the bottle is very comprehensive, and by the glass it's more
complete than most). Being a "small town boy", without the elitist aura, I was
very impressed by the friendliness and non-condescending attitude of the staff
(I've been in a lot of really dumpy, garbage restaurants where they hope that
a snotty attitude alone will fool you into believing that they are worthy.
They talk the talk, if you will. Bymark is one of the few restaurants that
actually walks the walk). They have fascinating graphics indicating the sex of the washrooms.
NOTE: This website is ranked quite respectably
in the grand Google rankings, and I've noticed quite a few people coming here
looking for a Bymark restaurant page (probably over 100 people
in a single day...the place is
obviously a very hot spot so reservations should
probably be made well in advance). Unfortunately it appears
that there is no such official page, however if you're looking for directions
you can find Bymark in the PATH system under the TD Centre (if you're heading
North from Union Station, it's the first hallway on the left/West right after
entering the TD Centre from the Royal Bank. There are signs hanging at the
junctions and one has a little logo and an arrow). If you click on the "Search
for Stores By Name or Category" on the TD Centre page you'll be able to select
ByMark and visible see a indication of its location on the graphic.
- Suck.com : This site is actually defunct from an
ongoing perspective (i.e. there is no new content), however I still go there
to read re-runs of the brilliant articles of yesteryear. Suck was there at the
beginning of the net and they truly were an extraordinary bunch of writers and
artists, and it was a sad day when the failure of the net economy shut them
down.
- Lal
Qila Restaurant : If you're looking for a great
place to eat in London, Ontario, give this place a try. Not only is the staff
friendly and helpful, but the food is absolutely superb (consistently. The
vegetable somosas are truly heavenly), and extremely reasonably
priced. When we lived in London we
would go here quite frequently, or order the equally high quality delivery,
however now that we live in Burlington we can only enjoy the occasional time
that we visit while on a trip down there.
- SmartFTP : Excellent
FTP program, at an extremely nice price (free!).
- Dual-head configurations : While
the software isn't entirely there, dual-heading is extremely effective
for software development, or even for playing a game of UrbanTerror while multitasking with something
productive.
Dislikes
- Advertisements on purchased media:
This one really is some low-hanging fruit, however I think I
encountered the most outrageously unbelievable example of an abuse of the
customer's time - The DVD "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" (personally I
thought the movie stunk, however I think a lot of people enjoy it not so much
for what the movie is, but rather the wedding subtext that they play in their
own mind)-This movie has almost a dozen ads after the
moment you hit play to actually getting into the movie. There are so many
advertisements on this DVD that I was literally believing that my DVD player
was screwing up and repeating a chapter, as surely no company could so
outrageously steal their customers time, people who plunked down $20 for a
movie that already paid for itself hundreds of times over. If media companies
insist upon kicking their customers in the face in such a manner, then I will
refuse to buy media unless it can be returned (and will petition for a legal
requirement that movies can be returned), and if it could I would have
returned this travesty in no time at all. While they committed a cardinal sin,
abusing the customer, the one "saving grace" from me smashing this
polycarbonate disc into a million pieces was that they didn't commit an even
bigger crime and utilize the heinous DVD consortium feature of being able to
lock out fast-forward/next-chapter.
- Undefined "Tim Hortons Style Lineups": For
those who haven't been in a Tim
Hortons, often
the lineup works as a single loose line a ways back from the tills, and when a
till frees the guy at the front of the line goes to the next available till.
While this sounds very efficient, and it actually is, the problem is that this
line technique is starting to appear everywhere, but often without proper
barriers or indicators making customers aware. In other words you're standing there in the little Tim
Hortons lineup at a Blockbuster video, HMV, or waiting for a bank machine
and someone walks up and stands behind a guy at the till, hopping
past several people. This is happening all over the place and is
generally leading to mass confusion and the worst situation of all: People
getting angry as they imagine someone budding in line before it even happens
(this is how the roadway becomes chaos: Everyone imagines the worst of their
fellow man and acts accordingly). Such a lineup works great when there are
signs and barriers making it clear how the process works, but often
establishments seem to be simply too lazy to bother, and customers are left to
fend for themselves. NOTE: Given the time of year, one good
example of the Tim Hortons lineup is
car washes, where often a adhoc unclarified line appears, and a constant
stream of cars hop it going directly into an emptying bay.
- Pop-up Advertising: While I fully
understand the need for sites to be financially viable, pop-up
advertisements are not a reasonable way! Pop-up advertisements may bring
short term gain by slamming visitors with advertisements, however the long
term reality is that they'll either install ad removal tools, or will switch
to a browser like Opera or Mozilla that offer
functionality to effectively eliminate these ads. I put pop-up advertising in
my dislikes despite the fact that I virtually never actually see it: I
use Opera with the setting "Refuse pop-up windows" set. I look
forward to the next version of Internet Explorer which will purportedly put much more control
in the user's hands to eliminate spam.
- Sloppy utilities that consume far more resources than they
should: A quick example that I bring up purely because they
explicitly advertise "low resources" is ICQ Lite: This
simple utility that takes messages and displays them consumes upwards of 10MB
at times. While 10MB doesn't sound like much, it wasn't that long ago when
Windows 95 PCs were running on 4MB. Now we have a trivial messaging
application that consumes 2.5x that by itself. The guilty party is sloppy
programming tools with a "include the world because maybe they'll use it"
(i.e. no intelligent function level linking) philosophy. I would wager that
with a bit of ankle grease in C++, a ICQ competitor could be made consuming
much less than 1MB.
- Spam: I've had it with spam,
and recently abandoned a long used email address as it was up to 100s (yes
100s. I'm not exaggerating) of pieces of spam per day. Worst of all, spammers
have lowered themselves so far that they now mass-spam pornography. I would love to
see these losers, or anyone who facilitates or abets them, sitting behind
bars, as what they're doing is incomprehensible. I prophecize that the open email
system that we know today is going to go the way of the dodo, and instead, because of
nefarious spammers with no comprehension of limits, we'll
have a closed and/or authenticated system (i.e. each authorized email server
having a authorization certificate that is revoked the moment they allow
spammers). Spammers don't even bother finding open relays anymore: They connect
directly with the destination server (ex. Hotmail).
- Walker Blockades: I spend a lot of time in downtown Toronto, and one thing
that always astounds me is seeing groups of 3, 4, or 5 people walking abreast,
forcing everyone else to the edges to avoid the blockade that they've set-up. This is
not cool: If you're on a public sidewalk, walk at most 2 abreast - You
can all chat it up once you get where you're going. This sort
of walking barrier is usually the result of one person being surrounded by sycophants worried that if
they fall behind at all they'll lose some brown nosing time.
- Tourist Blockades: I'm not anti-tourist - I think they're
great (and Canada is an awesome tourist destination due to low crime, world class facilities,
and a currency that makes coming here an absolute bargain. I think many Americans would be very pleasantly
surprized to find just how far the mighty American dollar goes up here). My problem comes when you see those moron, braindead, socially inept
tourists (tourists meaning anyone visiting an area to gawk. It could be a Japanese family, or the guy from the suburbs who brought his kid in to
see the big building) who stand on one side of a busy thoroughfare to take a picture of one
of their brethren on the other, expecting everyone else to stop
everything they're doing so that they can get their picture. A recent example
was being on King Street in downtown Toronto as a show just got out, with
thousands of people spilling out. A cluster of tourists decided that they
wanted a picture in front of Roy Thompson Hall,
so they went over by the street and the photographer went to the other side of
the sidewalk, and they actually expected hundreds or thousands of people
to all stop while they get their picture. It was truly an outrageous
situation as they were actually scolding those who walked into their picture.
Either get yourself a shorter focal length camera, or go to a location more
geared to photography (in this case there was a mostly empty park right across
the street, and they could even have gotten the theater in the background):
NEVER EXPECT OTHER PEOPLE TO STOP WHILE YOU GET YOUR PERFECT
SHOT.
- Escalator Blockades: You're probably noticing a theme here. :-) When using escalators in public places,
please realize that not everyone uses it as a time to stand motionless and relax. To some people people escalators are
nice ways of moving even faster to get to where they're
going. To facilitate this, many locations (such as airports) have put up
actual signs saying "Walk left/stand right", stating that one should move to
the right, leaving a pathway open, if they wish to stand motionless relative to the escalator. This simple act allows people
who really need to get somewhere to get by, especially in those places where the escalator is the only option. Most
people actually do follow this rule, and most facilities don't put up signs as they might be viewed as crass, but there
still is a problem, especially in areas with a high percentage of people who are unfamiliar with the area (i.e. tourists.
BTW: I'm a "tourist" in many of the places I go, and often I look like a total ass I'm sure. Recently in a rental car in Florida I was
sitting at a red light looking at the lights on the dash when I realized I'd had my high beams on for probably a considerable
amount of time. There was that other time in Savannah, Georgia when I simultaneously changed lanes and slammed the brakes for a yellow as a pickup behind
me nearly skidded atop us. Whoops! The point is that I'm not claiming infalliability, but rather that society gets along better as we
all stick to certain rules). If you're with a friend, stand inline rather than abreast: don't blockade the escalator simply because you
feel that no one needs to go faster.