Cheesy Quintessence

Today I read an article claiming that MySpace’s design works. The article extensively makes excuses for the simplicity, ugliness and inconsistency of MySpace’s design, justifying it by claiming that it’s effective for the target audience. While I would agree that a design need not be complex or filled with eye candy like so many sites’ designs are, the article’s other points are fairly ridiculous.

Consitency in design could be attained with less complex code if MySpace would make correct use of CSS. Why waste time to look crappy and inconsistent? Because of the way it’s coded, what consistency MySpace does have is extremely time-consuming to maintain (for example, stylistic HTML attributes are everywhere). Even if the target audience doesn’t care, the exhibited cluelessness of MySpace’s web interface coders is costing them time and money (especially in bandwidth costs, considering this is the 7^th most popular English site on the web).

Another point made by the article is equally ridiculous:

MySpace permits users to do almost anything to the look of their profile pages, and the prevailing aesthetic is decidedly “more is more”: more color, more animation, more typefaces, more sound, more of everything makes a better profile page.

Of course, properly styling a MySpace profile is impossible (not that it matters anyway, considering the inherent validity of a MySpace page’s markup). Additionally, since MySpace is stuck back in 1995, using HTML attributes to change the presentation of almost everything, it’s impossible to customize the look of specific elements of a profile. As a result, anything you can do to customize a MySpace profile will look even more hideous than the design of MySpace itself.

I just read an amusing article about a male student wearing skirts in protest of his school’s ban of shorts this time of year. He is merely trying to point out the unfairness of the school’s ban of shorts while girls are still allowed to wear short skirts. The school tried to stop him from wearing skirts because of it being “disruptive,” but he ultimately won and will be wearing skirts until April rolls around and shorts are allowed again.

This brings up an interesting point about male and female rights. Although there is no enforcement outside of this specific class, my American Government II instructor, a middle-aged woman, is a real “Nazi” about hats being worn indoors; she will not allow men to wear a hat in the class because it is “disrespectful” according to “well-established” rules of etiquette. However, if a girl wants to wear a hat, it’s just fine. Is that ridiculously unfair or what? Thus, while girls are allowed to wear ridiculously short skirts, men can’t even wear a hat to keep their heads warm in the 63°F classroom because doing so is “rude.”

In a late celebration of 2006, today we went to Chili’s for the first time ever. That will probably be the last time ever, too, due to the miserable experience there.

To start things off, we were seated in the bar without being asked. Not only that, we were attempted to be seated at a high table rather than a normal table or booth. Now, when we go to other restaurants, we get asked before being seated in the bar; what’s Chili’s problem? After being seated in a booth in the bar, our waiter showed up for our drinks, which took them several minutes to get out to us. After that, refills of our drinks weren’t too prompt either.

Then came the food. It was mediocre. Considering the prices, it was poor. My parents didn’t like their food much, though mine was okay; the corn was pretty good, the fries were good except for being soggy, and the chicken was really tender, but some of the pieces were soggy. I’d have much rather had a similar dish at Cheddar’s for $2 less.

When we were finally done with our food, disgusted by how long it took to get service out of our waiter, we asked for some more to drink, only to have the waiter almost spill water on us by trying to carry too much stuff at once. We wanted dessert, and they seemed to have an inviting dessert, but we decided we didn’t wish to give them any more money. But before we could even pay, we had to go tell them we were ready to pay, because they’d take all day to come back around to give us the bill!

The bill turned out to be about $36. My father left them a tip of $0.16. After that miserable experience, we went on to Cheddar’s for dessert. Therein, the service was fast, courteous, and the dessert was excellent. Our waiter there got a bigger tip on a $4 cake than the waiter at Chili’s got on that $36 meal.