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"Innocent Bystander"
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Review votes:
15 Useful, 1 Funny, and 5 Cool
Chicago, IL
Yelping SinceJuly 2007
Find Me Inthe outdoors until frostbite sets in.
My HometownChicago
My Blog Or Website When I'm Not Yelping...I provide math tutoring to all-knowing freshmen
Why You Should Read My ReviewsBecause I have no agenda
My Second Favorite Website Don't Tell Anyone Else But...You can return to your ring by going to my homepage.
Current CrushMybloglog. Go to my "2nd favorite website" for the community for this microblog
Date
1 Previous Review: Hide »
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9/1/2007
This rating is subject to being downgraded.
Why did I give them three stars? Because Yahoo isn't really one service, it's a collection of services, each run by its own team, and I felt funny about giving a collective score to such a balkanized outfit. Three stars is my way of shrugging and going "oh, I don't know" in this case.
Their search engine (their core business) still looks decent, for all of the sniping I've seen directed against it in a variety of locations. Geocities does have the virtue of reliability, though the bandwidth allotment is pathetic, so much so that I've found myself forced to host images with offsite services, and you can guess what a joy that has been.
One disturbing pattern that does seem to be consistent among the teams, though, is that Yahoo seems to lean toward being more supportive of the trolls who write in to make trouble, than of the actual users who provide Yahoo with the content that makes its ad revenue possible. Having been around for a few years, I haven't found the censorship at Yahoo to be as unrelenting as some have portrayed it as being, but it is there, and it can be a headache. More on the boards, though, than elsewhere, I think.
Yes, the Yahoo teams do tend to be nonresponsive. Reports of the so-called "peanut butter manifesto" have triggered a low scale panic among Yahoo 360 users, which I alluded to in a blog post
http://tinyurl.co...
and like I said there, a simple "so guys, is this true, are you shutting down" did not get an answer when I asked, or when anybody else asked either, apparently. This seems to be the pattern with them - reliable software (mostly), some degree of flexibility, but no sign that they respect or care about their users in the least. The only good news about Yahoo support is that they're hardly ever needed.
Addendum, Jan 2008: After refusing (for months) to answer letters send by users concerned about rumors circulating about Yahoo 360's closing, Yahoo finally confirmed those rumors on Oct.16, giving notice that the service would be closing down in "early 2008", but offering nebulous promises about an unspecified new service that the old 360 blogs could be relocated to, admitting that they, themselves, knew little about it (their own new service) at the time of the announcement. One way or another, those trusting enough to have adopted a "wait and see" approach may now look forward to being rewarded for their loyalty by watching their suddenly relocated blogs drop like rocks in the search engine listings. That's such an obnoxious trick to play on my fellow users, however imprudently unprepared and unwilling to pay attention to the signs (such as Yahoo's refusal to address a panic inducing rumor) as some of them may have been, that I think Yahoo deserves to lose a star for that.
This is now the second highly popular service (that I know of) to be abandoned by the cutting edge professionals in Sunnyvale after they got tired of playing with it. Yahoo Photos is gone, deleted in response to Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, with reports of user photos lost during the "merger" of their accounts at the old service with their new accounts at Flickr. One might well wonder about the future of Yahoo Video, now that Jumpcut has been acquired.
Yahoo has been reviewed on Stumbleupon:
http://www.stumbl...
and I've started a Yelp review page for Yahoo Local
http://www.yelp.c...
We'll see whether that matters, giving the pending hostile takeover bid by Microsoft. Yahoo has also been reviewed on this other page at Yelp:
http://www.yelp.c...
Chicago, IL 60603
(312) 443-3600
The Art Institute of Chicago
Category: Museums
Neighborhood: The Loop
I deducted a star for the lack of class shown by the timing of that change. In hard times, the Institute's word to the outsourced professional and middle classes has been "we don't care. go away." Something I hope we'll all remember, someday, should circumstances change and they, once again, come to us all with palms outstretched, asking for our financial help, as they had so many times in the past, before opportunity became an ever scarcer privilege, almost entirely reserved to the very young and well connected when it was to be had, at all.
As we have seen, our charity would be better invested elsewhere. Art is worth caring about. This museum isn't.
1 Previous Review: Hide »
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10/5/2007
I would have to agree with Jennifer K. I've been to the Vatican; the Art Institute does not impress on that level. To say that an institution is "world class" is a bold claim to make, and usually a sign that one has seen nothing of the world, which is still a big place. The Art Institute pales even by comparison to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which has done inventive things with its broader and larger collection, often placing objects in context that enriches the visitor's experience of encountering them. Compare seeing antique silver as part of a table setting vs. placed in a glass box; context gives life to the piece.
But that's a little like complaining that the town beauty doesn't look like Alicia Silverstone; odds are that you'd still have loved to take her to the prom. The very best is, almost by definition, a rarity, and the Art Institute is still very, very good, offering more than enough to keep one coming back and to keep a visitor to our city busy for days. The sad news of the closing of the Terra Museum has been good news for the Institute, which acquired the Terra's holdings and added them to its already impressive collection of American Art, displayed in the basement, uncomfortably far below the water table that close to the Lake, but let's try not to think about that.
Frequent shows bring plenty of fresh experiences when one thinks that one might someday get tired of looking at the Renoirs and Monets. The East Asian Art section could stand some expanding, and the African, Indian and Near Eastern art sections are barely there at all, but there are some beautiful woodcuts from Japan. There is also a sad remnant of the Old Stock exchange, a reminder of how casually Chicago's once great architectual heritage was squandered. The room itself can be seen in reconstruction inside the Museum.
http://www.artic.... (Link to Relevant Picture on Art Institute Homepage)
Yes, well worth many visits, and offering a rich variety of pleasant suprises, some old, some new. As the name "Art Institute" suggests, this is also a school offering classes in a variety of media, so there are student shows that are often worth visiting.
The free day, as somebody noted, is now Thursday, but strictly speaking the admission price is only a suggestion, and speaking as one of those to be currently numbered among the poor, I can report that I've seen no grief when I've paid what my budget would bear. (Less than the $8, very often). The Institute is open until 8 pm on Tuesday, and offers far more than I've even hinted at in this brief review.
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 908-3801
Yelp
Categories: Local Flavor, Mass Media
Neighborhood: SOMA
It's my way of admitting that I don't know who's telling the truth, and seriously wonder who's the extortionist in this exchange. Yes, a lot of people have written in to say "I was censored" ... but ... ever been to San Francisco? Ever notice just how many tourist traps that city has, as does Chicago, for that matter? Places that used to make a good income on the philosophy of "take the money and run" back in the good old days when consumers had trouble hearing from each other, except through the filter of an eminently corruptable media - good for them, not so great for us.
How many shills do you suppose those places could hire? How much of a vested interest might they have in seeing a place like this go down? So the truth is, it's difficult for any of us to know what is going on.
But, if you're concerned - and maybe, as a user you should be - one does have a simple, relatively easy alternative to hoping for the best. Create a blog on which you mirror your Yelp reviews, so that is you are censored unjustly, the fact will (one hopes) be witnessed by the lurkers, who will talk. Whatever the truth regarding these accusations might be, let's let it have a chance to be seen.
Chicago, IL 60614
(773) 883-5282
Bourgeois Pig Cafe
Categories: Coffee & Tea, Delis
Neighborhood: Lincoln Park
This place may well deserve that fifth star that I've failed to give it. Being gluten intolerant, were I to sample their menu very extensively, I'd end up a very sick boy, because that menu seems to consist almost exclusively of baked goods and things made with baked goods (sandwiches). But, as the saying goes, "the heart longs for company, coffee is only the excuse" - and the company tends to be very good at the Pig.
The coffee's not bad, either. Putting them together, I find I have enough to vouch for this place's having earned its first four stars. I'll leave it to you to decide if they've earned their fifth. :)
They have a homepage:
http://www.bpigcafe.com/
http://www.yelp.com/bi...
I'm hoping that comments from this page will be relocated to there from here, and that this page will then be deleted, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to occur. Wishing that Yelp had a title search, so that less duplication of effort like this would occur.
This social networking site was profiled in a San Francisco Weekly article which focused on an innovative business concept that has distinguished this site from some of its rivals, one which can perhaps best be summed up by the words "the customer is always wrong"; protesting that the staff has punished one unjustly is itself considered an actionable offense on this site! Anybody thinking of investing time in this site would, perhaps, do well to read the article, located at
http://sfweekly.com/20...
and make sure to read the comments that follow, especially those written by the supporters of the site. Pure, smug arrogance blended with an almost mindblowing idiocy that stands out, even on the Internet; eg. the anonymous supporter who snidely commented on the fact that I wasn't out partying at what would have been around 4am my time. Yes, one gets to deal with such things online, but does one really want to travel to do so?
My initial comments / observations:
"Admission: I only skimmed the article and comments. I might come back later, read all of this more carefully and come to a much different conclusion. I'm just sharing a gut reaction. Take it for what it's worth, but keep in mind that most of the silent lurking majority will probably be doing much the same.
What I saw, especially the remarks made by the site's owner and his supporters, sent up red flags all over the place, so much so that I would not want to have anything to do with his site. Michaela - was that the lady's name - certainly sounded very reasonable, the "ad hominem whiners" label attached to her complaints sounded like whining and an ad hominem. Then there was the fact that protesting that one has been punished unjustly is itself something that one can be punished for - wow. Bad, really bad. In how many different places have we seen that standard applied, and never with anything but quasi-Orwellian results?
Flakiness is a real problem, but not one that calls for a centralized, bureaucratic top down solution - miniature judiciaries never seem to produce anything other than Kangaroo court justice for very long. Just let hosts of individual groups exercise discretion in who they allow to stay and who they send away, and give hosts the opportunity to link to other groups which they recommend. Remember that the real power of the Web is to be found in the simple concept of hotlinking, of giving the individual user a choice of who his virtual neighbors will be, so that the "signal to noise ratio" problem of that bad old days of the Usenet era ceases to be a problem once one finds one's way to a good location; the million bad places that may exist for every one good one don't matter, because the few good ones you know of mainly just point you to other good ones, so the bad ones sort of vanish for you, and the once good ones that become bad ones fade away for that reason. This simple principle has worked for websites, and there's no reason why it shouldn't work for social networking groups that work through websites.
K.I.S.S. worked for the Web; there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to work for this, as long as sysops are willing to put their inflated egos to one side and get out of their user's way. This particular site seems unwilling to do that, but head over to http://mashable.com, and you should be able to find a multitude of social networking sites that treat their users with far more respect than this one seems to have. I'd put in the url for my own profile, where I've linked to a set of them that seem to be fairly headache free, but I guess that might be taken as spamming but look - just ask Pete for some advice. He seems to be a nice guy who knows A LOT about this subject, and could probably point the unhappy users of this other, not so friendly site in some very positive and constructive directions."
Commentary this mild was considered grounds for the ad hominems that followed. Interesting, especially when the arbitrary membership deletions that LinkUp Central has become notorious for have been defended on the basis that they are needed for the promotion of civility in the site's membership. Irony happens, I guess. (I've also discussed this site in this review on my blog at StumbleUpon:
http://josephdunphy.st... )
Lisle, IL 60532
(630) 968-0074
Morton Arboretum
Categories: Parks, Botanical Gardens, Venues & Event Spaces
During the summer, the mosquitos are the worst I've ever seen, and I've been in both Southern Florida and Louisiana during the warm weather. Picture walking briskly - and I'm around six and a half feet tall, so picture what "briskly" means for me - lifting up your arm, swatting and taking out ten of the little things with a blow. Really, seriously, bring your insect repellant, or failing that, stick to the northern half of the park, where the bugs are less numerous in most years. But give serious thought to bringing the deep woods off, because missing the Burr Reed Marsh would be a shame, and let's keep this in perspective - they're just mosquitos. It's not like I'm reporting the presence of rabid grizzlies and telling you to bring a taser. Simple preparedness should solve this problem, or at least greatly reduce it.
The best part of the park, I think, is to be found on loops three and four, where the woods are the densest, especially along the stretch of loop three between the junctions with loop four. Get to that stretch on a bright day, and you'll be treated to the sight of a tall coniferous forest, a "cathedral in the pines", stretching out over gently rolling hills and ravines. The Arboretum offers a nice and needed remnant of nature surviving in the middle of the suburban sprawl, probably the best that could exist in that location, and even if it isn't the Redwoods, it will give a local visitor plenty of reasons to keep coming back. I'm just not sure that a visitor from elsewhere would see any reason to make the trip.
Chicago, IL 60654
(312) 867-0186
Starbucks Coffee
Category: Coffee & Tea
Neighborhoods: Near North Side, Old Town
What he won't be finding his way to is peace and quiet, because the one exception I alluded to above was the manager. A typical experience was one had at around 6:45 this last Saturday. The man had the piped in music playing at about the same volume that most people seem to be used to watching their TVs at in their own living rooms. Wall to wall Frank Sinatra that night, no getting away from it unless one went to those washrooms which are often as fragrant as a previous user described. I sat there with my first cup, trying to journal, but if you've ever heard Sinatra, you can probably guess what happened - I'd start to gather my thoughts, and as I reached to write something down BOOM! would come Sinatra's next crescendo, because the man couldn't seem to bear the thought of having less than one of those per minute.
If you're into that, and I know that many people are, there's nothing wrong with that, but many people aren't, and when the manager insists on using the sound system as a boombox, their experience is being ruined without reason - after all, what is to keep those customers who do want to hear loud music from bringing their ipods and headphones? Yes, there are much louder places - Mother's comes to mind - and the sound level here won't cause actual pain, but this isn't a bar, this is a coffeehouse. People go there to read, to talk with companions, to engage in quiet time activities that are not improved in any way by music that nobody could even begin to ignore.
Somebody that night had the same thought as I'm sure many others did as well, judging from the large number of books out that night and the looks of frustration as Sinatra came on for the fifth time in a row and the music was turned up, and went up to the register to politely point out that the music was getting to be more of a nuisance than a pleasure. The woman working the register, very pleasantly and professionally apologized for the annoyance and asked the manager, who was just inside the next room, to please turn the music down. Ten minutes later, nothing had changed and the customer left.
"Best idea anybody has had all night", I thought to myself, gulping down the remains of my drink and heading out into the evening, the street noise that greeted me as I exited coming as sweet relief by comparison. I think that I'll go to the Bourgeois Pig next time.
Chicago, IL 60604
(773) 866-9740
Chicago Blues Festival
Category: Jazz & Blues
Neighborhood: The Loop
If you get there late, no worries, just bring a chair, and be amazed at how friendly a crowd of a quarter of a million people can be. The food stands behind the shell tend to be overpriced, ounce for ounce, but if you pass through that line of stalls, on some years a nice art show can be found in the park, and there are the hopefuls busking away on the sidewalks leading up to the fest.
Bashing this event has become a rite of passage for the terminally cool, who will point to the "safe" nature of many of the acts, but if you aren't concerned with impressing somebody, you might be willing to admit that you enjoyed seeing B.B. King on stage, who looked like he was having a grand old time up there - and so were we.
Chicago, IL 60614
(312) 742-7736
Lincoln Park Conservatory
Categories: Parks, Botanical Gardens
Neighborhood: Lincoln Park
I can't go the extra step and give them that fifth star, though, because the staff has a way of being a little clueless and stubborn in its cluelessness. Consider their actions a few years ago, for example, when in the middle of a city where there is never enough food for many, they purchased mass quantities of an inexpensive and nourishing food (squash), sprayed it with insecticide, and filled the ground during their autumn flower show with vegetables that were then left to rot. A needed food source for Chicago's many poor was largely wiped out by an idiotic fashion that this helped promote of buying not one, not two, but dozens of large, family feeding winter squash as a decorative statement and as conspicuous consumption. In a city in which the signs of malnutrition are not hard to see in many of its residents of all ages, children included, this was unconscionable.
(Note: I fully expect a neo-con or non-recovering libertarian to start flaming on this point, and reserve the right to honor my New Year's resolution to start ignoring the loons. Yes, boy and girls, when your actions affect others, we get to pass judgment on that, and the food supply is finite in a way that market incentives won't budge past a certain point, because there's only so much land, so much good weather and so much sunlight. That's reality, accept it or don't).
In fairness to the staff, after a few of us wrote to them about this, they did refrain from wasting food and taxpayer dollars in this manner the next year, but the thought really should have occurred to them without prompting. Where they have been less willing to budge has been in their bizarre adherence to a bright idea that some manager had a few years ago, of how to slip an extra show in each year. Somebody - I don't know his name - decided that if the chrysanthemum show began earlier and ended earlier, that an extra "winter show" could be started. That sounded great on paper, maybe, but the fact that somebody overlooked was that chrysanthemums won't bloom until the cold weather hits. He also overlooked the fact that in Chicago, as in much of the Midwest, we tend to have this thing called "Indian summer", the beginning of autumn frequently acting like an extension of Summer, right up until sometime around Halloween, by which point the temperatures are almost guaranteed to drop off a cliff.
The end result of this was that in the first year this bright idea was tried, the show that had been the high point of the year for the conservatory ended in a sadly anticlimatic fizzle; the flowers just did not have time to bloom, and tax payer dollars went foolishly to waste as bed after bed of expensive, unopened buds were torn out to make way for the poinsettias. One might have hoped that management would have learned something from this fiasco, but a la Dilbert, management made its own reality and declared the experiment to be a success. This has now been policy for a few years, with the result that unless the cold hits early, the chrysanthemum show is a wash, with less than half of the flowers opening before the end.
If you're paying taxes in Chicago, you're paying for some of the most expensive mulch in the Midwest, but these guys, showing remarkable courage in the face of the easily observable facts, just won't budge. One strains to imagine what they were thinking about the first time - just how deep and dark a secret is the existence of warm October weather in our area - but to make the same dumb mistake year after year, at taxpayer expense? Not cool.
Roll your eyes, walk on past, and enjoy the orchid house and the fern room, which usually has a nice aural installation to add to the "age of the dinosaurs look". No doubt about it, this is one of the places to go to escape the winter, and it is a warm, beautiful bit of trapped summer in the midst of the midwinter wasteland, but to give five stars implies a level of perfection that the managerial ego tripping keeps the conservatory from achieving.
No Lists
Joseph hasn't made any lists yet.
http://www.eweek.com/c...
The fun part is that Geocities, pre-Yahoo, had an FTP server! That would been very helpful, right now, a much easier way of recovering content than unrendering individual pages and cutting and pasting the code to files on one's own disk. Yahoo has seen no need to reactivate that server, or even to construct any software to use for transferring Geocities pages to their paid server, telling users to cut and paste, and then FTP their newly constructed pages up to their new location. On a server belonging to the same (expletitive deleted) company.
More than a little evil, and one reason why I chose to move my material to the server of a completely different company. Quoting the article cited above as it quotes the new CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz
"The best candidate for focused investment and renewed innovation are those products that generate the majority of our traffic and corresponding economic value. These include the homepage, sports, news, finance, entertainment, mail search and mobile."
One might note the absence of the remaining sites hosting user generated content in that list, such as Flickr. Yahoo's new future is going to consist primarily of taking stories off of the AP feed (see first five products in Bartz' list). Which means that your content really isn't safe on Yahoo, which will soon be offering you little that you weren't getting out of your local newspaper, anyway, raising the question of why one would bother to visit their site, at all.
Yahoo's contribution to its users, most of whom are on services it had nothing to do with creating - eg. Flickr, Yahoogroups (formerly eGroups), Geocities, Jumpcut, Upcoming, Delicious - has primarily consisted of taking over companies that were functioning decently enough before they arrived and slowly running them into the ground or shutting them down, altogether. It didn't even invent its own search engine. Altavista did that, the biggest change after the Yahoo takeover being that link searches no longer worked properly.
I hesitated to give Yahoo an overall rating before, saying that it was more like a cluster of many little companies than like one large one, making generalizations difficult. Perhaps, but a pattern does seem to emerge after a while. The web would be a far better place today, had this company never been.
Did anybody at Yahoo ever stopped to think that maybe one of the reasons why they're having more and more trouble getting new users to subscribe to the services they offer is because so many of us, with good historical reasons, having come to the conclusion that posting content to Yahoo is a lot like throwing it out?