Greener Pastures

As of the beginning of 2008, I am no longer updating this site! The saga continues at newsfromconstantinople.com!

Daily Do’s and Don’t’s

Alas, my job doesn’t afford me too many opportunities to further myself professionally, stretch my analytic skills or otherwise tax my brainpower in any particularly useful way.

However, any given day will see me surfing through at least a dozen websites that I’ve never laid eyes on before. As a professional web surfer, I’m all business: I know what information I’m looking for before a page even loads, and I want to make a surgical strike to retrieve it in the fewest minutes and clicks possible and then be on my merry way.

So I’m probably not going to marvel at your lush graphics, and I’m certainly not going to sit through your cinematic flash intro—with its full streaming stereo sound and as many pulsing spinning things as you can cram into my browser window. Paul Boag of Boagworld.com disdains flash in general and flash intros in particular, and the more flash I see, the more I agree. “SIT STILL, DAMMIT, YOU’RE ABOUT TO HAVE A MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE AND YOU’RE GOING TO LIKE IT, TOO!!!”—is what most flash intros say (scream!) to me, and they tend to bias me against a website. Especially if the programmer doesn’t provide me with an immediately accessible opt-out link.

But my opinions of websites don’t begin and end with my dislike of flash: as a user, I will appreciate it if your website has things like sensible section headings, a search box, contact info, and (depending on the number of pages and type of content) maybe a calendar, a FAQ, and plenty of internal links to get me from one place on your site to another without having to retrace my steps back to your homepage every time.

I’ve been taking notes as I make my way through the bayous and back alleys of the internet these last few months, and I though I might begin to share some of them. Today’s entry was inspired by a recent quest to hunt down a particular children’s theater event at the Del E. Webb Center, a music and theatre complex in Wickenburg, Arizona. It can be found here.

Here’s the first thing you see when you hit the site:


Nice page. Pretty. All right, down to work. Now where is that darn search box….

::hunt, hunt, hunt::

Oh! Here! Wait…




Oh-ho! Masquerading as headings, are we? How clever! Splendid, well now that I’ve cleared out that confusingly bold placeholder text, I’ll just plug my SEARCH term into the search box…oops.



Now tell me: which is which? One is meant for to take an email address and the other is meant to take search text, but as you can see, they’re indistinguishable once I clear out the big, bold placeholder text. Here’s a question: why not put “Search” above one and “Mailing List” over the other? Even better, put the two boxes on different parts of the page. Best, to remove any last possible source of confusion, color the inside of the text fields white, so they don’t camouflage with the background elements quite so well.


Lesson:

1) If you’re going to use placeholder text in your site’s text fields, just go crazy and make it gray against a white background. This will help you text boxes stand out from the rest of the stuff on the page, and be less confusing in general.

2) Don’t have the placeholder text be the ONLY thing proclaiming your search box’s function. Search boxes are a critical tool—place them prominently. Certain of your visitors will use on a regular basis and almost ALL of them will expect nowadays. It may be one of the first things a new user looks for when he lands on your site (especially when you’re a site with a wealth of frequently-updated, event-specific information like Del E. Webb. People are mostly there to get specific information and get out, rather than to idly surf, read something, buy something, look at some nice pictures, appreciate your subtle synergy of fonts and shading…)

3) Separate text fields with different functions. Search boxes should have pride of place; they’re used a broad swath of the visiting public to find specific info on your site. Mailing list signup fields are only used by a small fraction of your visitors who like what you do so much that they want to be kept up to speed on everything that goes on in your little world. As much as you’d like to think that everyone who visits your site will like what you’ve got so much that they’ll want you showing up in their inbox bi-weekly…brother, it just isn’t so.

Improve Craigslist?

Almost a year ago now, I interviewed with an SEO company here in Seattle. I was excited by the prospect of getting a non-service job, and thrilled that the crash course I had given myself in SEO and ‘netspeak in the four days between sending in my resume and gaining an interview had prepared me for such questions as “What does RSS stand for?” and “what are some of the factors involved in SERP rankings?” I was confident, that is, until the interviewer threw me a subtle stunner that laid me low: “How would you improve craigslist?”

I was stumped. After a minute or so of “uh…nurr” I think I managed to squeak something out about the font. The font! Swing and a miss! I was not called back for the second round of interviews.

In the interviening time I’ve grown more and more interested in web design, usability and optimization. I’ve also (mercifully) switched jobs and now spend a good portion of my day surfing websites, exposing myself to all sorts of clever and not-so-clever layout and usability strategies. Recently, I remembered that stumper of a question from back in August. And started to look at craigslist with new eyes. Here’s some of what I came up with.

It’s a good question. Craigslist is one of those sites that most of us have used for so long that we don’t really ‘see’ it anymore. Generally we know what we’re looking for when we get there, so rather than actually reading through the page of almost-uniformly tiny text, we automatically look towards the part of the page that holds the link we want, or else we click on the purple links that indicate where we’ve been recently.

So, to start out, I should say in answering this question that I don’t particularly feel like there’s anything wrong with craigslist. It might be a little extreme to cover you entire home page head to toe with anonymous blue hyperlinks, but overall I think it’s a good strategy for what they’re trying to achieve: they need to direct you through a LOT of different content, and they want to set things up so that you can get where you’re going with the minimum number of clicks. The easiest way to do this is to avoid ‘trees’ and long hierarchies.

However, this strategy is prone to breakdown. One situation where this happens is with ‘catch-all’ catagories and ones that have an extremely high volume of content—take the “Free” section as an extreme example. Right now there are almost 300 postings for Monday alone; you have to hit the ‘next’ button twice just to get to yesterday.

This poses two problems: first, it’s hard to ‘shop’ the free section—you’re pretty much limited to browsing through whatever random items happen to be at the top of the list when you hit the page. Second, if you’re a seller (or giver in this case, I guess), any one posting will only reach a small sub-section of potential receivers. The advertisement you posted for those “free law textbooks” or “OLDER ORGAN” (two real examples from the screen in front of me) will be stale by mid-afternoon—relegated to page three, buried under a mountain of somebody else’s “free emergency rations” and “Body by Jake Bun Machine.” Reaching someone who’s willing to come and cart away your cast-offs will probably require frequent re-postings.

Sadly, there’s not a lot that craigslist can do about this phenomenon without drastically changing its interface. It’s tempting to break up catch-all categories into finer-tuned subheadings (“free-electronics” “free-perishables”), but to make any real dent in the number of postings in a high-volume category with this strategy, you’d have to multiply them all out of hand, which forces your user to squint through pages of lists to narrow things down to manageable proportions. You also multiply the necessity of posting the same item to multiple categories, which is just as labor-intensive as posting an item to the same category over and over again.

One possibility would be for craigslist to adopt poster-selected tags that could be attached to each item, a la Digg and del.ici.us. This would make it easier for users to find similar items, and also take some of the keyword guesswork out of searches.

Another Craigslist problem, one that could be fixed relatively easily, is the lack of differentiation between postings. As it is, the only way you can make your post jump out is by YELLING or Taking Up A Lot of Space So That Your Posting Title Runs All The Way To The Left Margin! (Often used in combination with yelling by those with no shame). Craigslist allows pictures, but confines them to the posting page. Why they don’t allow thumbnails on the listing page like eBay does? It sure would help break the monotony of those long blue columns.

In general, I dig the balls-out anachronism of it all. There’s even something charming about their curmudgeoney hold-out mentality and their retro late-nineties chic. But sometimes it feels like craigslist refuses to change just to remind you that they were doing user-generated content way before user-generated content was cool. But c’mon guys, we’ll give you all the kudos you want—just give us a break.

Bisque in Anger, Volume II: Bartending for Fun and Profit

As promised, here’s the next exciting installment of Bisque in Anger; or Jonathan’s Amazing Adventures in the Service Industry. For those of you who are just tuning in, in the first installment I covered the basic reasons I left the service industry (short answer: it was slowly sucking my soul; long answer:..well, it’s complicated, but suffice it to say that it was slowly sucking my soul.). In this installment, I want to talk about my favorite part of the service industry experience: bartending.

I became a bartender unexpectedly; I was in the process of ‘quitting’ my job as a fine dining waiter at the end of a long, profitable Santa Fe summer because I was going back to school and didn’t want to work the minimum required three shifts a week. I happened to be talking to the bar manager one day near the end of (what I thought would be) my tenure there at the hotel, and she mentioned that she needed a Sunday daytime bartender. I agreed to take that one shift for the semester, and fill in on others as needed, and thus my bartending career was born.

Embedded in this little piece of history is the first lesson being a bartender: you don’t need to go to ‘bartending school’ or get a certificate from some expensive program to become one. In fact, I’ve only known one bartender who actually took one of those programs and though she wasn’t bad, she didn’t stay a bartender long. The basic skills needed by a bartender are the same as basic waiting skills: multitasking, customer service, and grace under fire. All the rest is basically window dressing.

“But Jonathan,” you shout. “What about the most critical bartending skill of all? What about the one thing that separates a bartender from a mere cocktail waiter? What about mixology?!”

And to that I answer: meh, it takes some practice, but really—not that hard. Takes more time to learn how to keep you bar consistently wiped down and your glassware stocked than to learn the basics of “mixology.” Since most cocktails have the same basic proportions, once you learn how to pour by feel you can make them quickly and consistently—and that just takes practice; ‘shaking’ a cocktail is really about as easy as the word itself implies; and despite all the ludicrous and intimidating Buttery-Sex-On-The-Purple-Hooter-type names that fill bartending manuals, there are really only about a dozen cocktails that anybody ever orders, and half of those only have two ingredients (or less: newsflash—few bartenders put vermouth in a martini anymore, unless you specifically request it, so your Grey Goose Martini is really just a double shot of vodka, very cold and slightly diluted. The bottom line on this is that almost nobody in America likes the way vermouth tastes—I mean have you ever actually tried to drink the stuff. Ugh.)

Mixing drinks is easy. You learn it as you go. And if you’re just starting out and are worried that people will send back a poorly made drink, remember this: 1) most people don’t know what goes into their favorite cocktail anyway, 2) even bartending guides can’t agree on a ‘standard’ recipe for many cocktails, and 3) most cocktails contain so much sugar and/or booze that it’s not easy to taste whether the bartender forgot the Triple Sec or mixed the wrong proportion of cranberry juice to lime. Still afraid that some irate guest will spit out your first attempt at an Old Fashioned and fling it contemptuously in your abashed face? When in doubt, ere on the side of more booze. Most people won’t send back a drink that’s too strong. There is, of course, a major caveat to this, though: if you’re going to cover your mixological inadequacies with an extra float of rum, keep in mind that if you give people more booze than they should expect in a standard drink, you’re responsible for the results. Pour responsibly. And remember, it still has to be drinkable.

Most bartenders start out like I did, on a slow day shift, or as a bar back, and then move up in the rotation after they’ve paid their dues. No classes necessary, no certificates or certifications, besides what the state makes you take. And you’re off!

I always enjoyed bartending much more than waiting. Indeed, I actually entertain the fantasy that some day, when I’m older and settled into a satisfying and modestly lucrative career, I’ll pick up a shift or two a week at the local bar wherever I am, just for variety, for kicks, for the very real satisfaction of being a bartender. Oh, and did I mention the easy money?

Bartenders working prime shifts at lively bars make bank. On par with Fine Dining Waiters—we’re talking $300-$500 a night, sometimes more for the good ones. Now, the establishments at which I whiled away my bartending days (a luxury hotel and a members-only club) were not what you would call the most happening of nightspots, but even I had plenty of $200 to $300 shifts. I had blockbuster nights waiting tables, sure, but I always finished those nights feeling worn out, beat up, and fragile. After a good night as a bartender you feel good—tired, sore, and more than a little sticky, but good.

And this distinction cuts to the heart of the matter—what, for me, was the critical difference between bartending and waiting. People treat bartenders with more respect than waiters. The same customer will sidle up to your bar and treat you like gold and then sit down at a table and treat the waiter like crap for the rest of the night. After seeing this phenomenon play out first hand, from both sides, for a long time it finally dawned on my why this was the case. Simply put, when you’re a waiter, you go to them; when you’re the bartender, they come to you.

This one little change turns the server-customer dynamic on its head. People can berate a waiter, they can make a waiter run, fetch, sit up and beg—he’s waiting on their table, after all, so he exists to serve them. The waiter does not own the table or the dining room, the guest does. From the guest’s perspective, the waiter is just part of a larger mechanism that exists to feed him dinner. However, the bartender, in some sense, owns the bar. Guests and waiters alike come to him to request something that only he can provide. They sit at his bar, where he works, and wait for his attention.

This is perhaps overstating my point—plenty of customers have been rude, and demanding, and condescending, and all things obnoxious to me as a bartender—but you see where I’m going. A bartender is in a position of power—symbolically (because you go to him), and also in fact, since he is a repository of esoteric knowing (making cocktails is easy, but the customer doesn’t have to know that). Most importantly of all, he’s the guy who decides when (and if) you get a drink. I’ve only cut someone off three times during my brief bartending career, but I always knew (and, I admit, kind of got off on the fact that) it was ultimately my legal right and responsibility to do so.

And here I’ll wrap up Part 1 of my Paean to Bartending, and the second volume in my series on Waiting. Next time, we’ll cover common bartending misconceptions, parlor tricks, and why bartenders are just so damn cool.

The Final Wire

The battery in my laptop is ailing. It once held a charge for a respectable 3+ hours; now it barely breaks the one-hour mark. And now I find out that I have been hastening its decrepitude all along. I have always let the battery drain completely before recharging it, a piece of battery folk-wisdom I picked up somewhere. But, apparently, according to this site, Lithium Ion batteries actually wear out faster if drained every time. , Awesome...

Why are we still cursed with chemical batteries? I realize that battery technology is getting better and better every year, and that new batteries are smaller, cheaper and last longer than the ones being made even a few years ago, and that this trend is bound to continue. Still, it feels like batteries are an awkward hold-over from an earlier age; the last few years have seen a transition to flash memory, wireless data transfer, and superthin LCD and plasma screens in many mobile devices. Laptops and cell phones are getting tinier and tinier, with only two factors imposing size restraints on them: the user-interface and the battery. Workarounds are possible (and often fascinating) with user interfaces: iTap, voice-commands, and touchscreens all help to mitigate the lack of space issue. But batteries remain, relatively, big and clunky, and there's nothing we can do about it.

The battery on my Moto Razr makes up most of the weight of the device, and doubles its thickness. The battery on my iBook will cost several hundred dollars to replace. Can't we do better than this? I dearly hope some crazy engineer somewhere is working on miniature hydrogen fuel cell technology. Or tiny, well-contained cold fusion drives. Or bitsy little hamsters on treadmills. Something--give us something.

I suppose we're stuck with chemical batteries for the forseeable future, but *dang* it's frustrating. Computer can do so much now, with no wires and fewer and fewer moving parts. But how can anything that you have to chain to the wall every few hours be considered *truly* wireless and portable?

Bisque in Anger

Bisque in Anger
Or
How I Learned To Stop Waiting and Love The Desk

Recently, a buddy of mine asked me why I quit my lucrative waiter/bartender position in favor of a desk job that paid less than half the money. What started out as a simple response to his question blossomed into a surprisingly lengthy rant on the beef I have against the service industry and the creatures that inhabit it, on both sides of the bar. I’ve been wanting to write a series of pieces on being a waiter for some time now. While I was in the biz, I was always coming up with pithy little observations and collecting amusing anecdotes; partially to pass the time, and partially to vent some of the frustration that I had to deal with working the job. Now that I’ve hung up my cocktail apron for good (or at least, for now), I think I might have the scientific objectivity to tackle the project. This will be the first of several entries on the wild and wooly world of waiting tables and tending bar.

I started waiting tables my junior year of college, and started bartending about a year later. There are many advantages to working a service job in college: the jobs are relatively easy to get, even if you’ve never waited before; evening work hours make it easy to accommodate your class schedule; you earn a big chunk of money for a few hours’ work; you’re working with a lot of people your own age; there are no take-home responsibilities; and it’s even got some ‘cool’ cache to it. Even after college, for a guy or gal in their early twenties, who’s not sure about a career path, a service job can seem like a good idea.

Then why did I quit my bartending job? Two reasons. One, I've never liked the blatant disrespect that customers and co-workers are allowed to treat you with, and I kept getting into fights with people. I usually got away with it because I'm basically likable and a good employee, but if I'd stayed in the industry, it would only be a matter time before I got fired/walked out/spilled hot bisque on someone's lap in anger.

Two. More prosaically, working evenings meant that I didn't get to spend as much time with my girlfriend, who works a 9-to-5, and it was beginning to take a toll on our relationship. To all you young couples out there: you and your partner can get away with working different hours for a while, but if you want to stay together, you eventually need to sync up your shifts. It’s hard to keep the love alive with someone you never see.

Three (now that I've got a full head of steam I realize that my reasons were legion). I’d officially graduated from my early twenties to my mid-twenties. I might not have known yet what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew that a service job wasn’t getting me there. I wanted to get a job that could conceivably lead to a better job, somewhere down the line. Now, granted, this cuts both ways: sometimes you get a lame desk job that you realize can only lead to FURTHER lame desk jobs, most of which will probably pay LESS than a halfway-decent waiting gig. But it was a risk I was willing to take.

Four. Being a waiter or bartender when you COULD be doing "so much more with your talents" is a way of making a statement to the world. It's a declaration that you don't care how other people judge you, and you're going to do things your own way for your own reasons. Besides, it gives you ample free time to pursue artistic activities, or other personal passions that those poor saps chained to a desk all day don't have the time or the energy for.

Unfortunately, I didn’t meet many waiters with this mentality that actually DID much that was creative and meaningful with their time. The vast majority just got drunk and partied every night, and then become career waiters because they don't know anything else and have destroyed all their credibility and their drive. That's just never been my scene. Also, all that money you make? Hard to save, baby, when the after-hours bar beckons. I knew plenty of waiters who made forty, fifty grand a year (or more!) but struggled to pay the rent every month.

One exception to this rule is a bartendress of my acquaintance who has a business as a professional photographer working the wedding/baby/graduation circuit. Creative? Not the most. But it's her own business, it's fulfilling, and she's working to make it into a full time gig, and she's making progress. Then she can kiss the service industry goodbye. Cheers to her.

Five. That ‘career waiter’ track that everyone who’s in the industry long enough gets on? Scary stuff. Working in fine dining, I’ve known plenty of them. Many of them are good human beings, but something about being a waiter past a certain threshold works strange changes on your soul. Worse, most of them eventually become Restaurant Managers, and end up working more hours for less money and more accountability. I’ve seen it happen, and trust me, it ain’t pretty.

I could go on longer, but I'm sure you've heard as much as you need to. I actually dig my lame desk job right now. The pay is low, but then again so is supervision and accountability, I can listen to music and old Loveline reruns on my iPod all day, and it’s something I won’t be embarrassed about putting on a resume. I don't know if it will provide me with the magical key that releases me you the vicious lame-job cycle, but right now, I’m content to…wait.

Lapcats

Sometimes, a well-placed cat can achieve things like nothing else can.

A cat in the lap is something to be savored, a warm comfort that I hadn't experienced for a long time until recently, when Allie and I were blessed with two bundles of feline joy of our very own. It's kind of a shame to rouse an ensconced lapcat. Mine always manage to look offended when forced to move along, way out of proportion with what the crime of moving them should warrant. And a lapcat's trust, once broken, will never be extended again--at least not for a good hour or two, or until it wants something from you. At any rate, a cat in the lap is worth at least two knocking things off the counter or scratching on my favorite chair, so there's always an advantage to keeping them in plain sight.

The other advantage of having a cat in the lap is that it forces me to stay put. And, in this case, to publish a first blog entry. About time.