The Is No Place To Order Good Chinese Food From In Fort Greene

wah-wah-wahI don’t care that at a quick glance Fort Greene appears well stocked with Asian Eateries. Yes, there are about 200,000 Thai restaurants on Myrtle (OK, 3). And about 340,000 Chinese restaurants (more like 20) with a few spatterings of Indian occurrences but Thai is Thai and Indian is Indian (not sure why I mentioned it now that I think of it–desperation?) and those Chinese restaurants are not Good Chinese restaurants.

Have you ever eaten in any of the many “Dog Food” Chinese establishments on Myrtle, Dekalb or Park? If you are not sure, here is how to spot a “Dog Food” Chinese restaurant: your order is thrust at you through a bullet proof partition and it is always garbage. Their main focus seems to be deep frying chicken and french fries (the fries are crinkle cut and chicken wings are immensely battered and both have been frozen for about 26 years).

Plus, there are faded pictures of food on the walls. I always know the food is going to suck if there are pictures of it on the walls.

The one acceptable Chinese restaurant on Myrtle does not deliver and is 16 blocks from my house. I don’t want to make the 32 block hike for food, even for Sichuan. As the deprived and lazy grow in numbers if we band together we might be able to get a City ordinance to Force Kum Kao to deliver. Or better yet, entice and entreat several proper Chinese food chefs to move in and open shop.

We Can Do It!

It was Hell and I never want to do it again.

Here’s a fun scenario:
Say you spend hours and hours on a custom theme,try to repair damaged SEO, sign up for Google Analytics for your client, create a Paypal shopping cart ( add to cart buttons,but for over 50 products-that’s work) sign up for a FeedBurner account as well. Get all your ducks in a row, finally only to have your host reset the shared server in such a way that you cannot any longer have use of the IIS admin console-without which all your links break and you must rethink navigation and put in place ugly urls. Because at least those work.

Then because you have had it anyway with IIS you take it upon yourself to buy an account with the host you personally use but they’re having server problems. In fact, they just finished a new server set up just when you signed up and the kinks weren’t quite worked out.

So what usually took one day took 4, all the while you were stressing because the domain name registrar was being an **shole. For some reason taking it very personally that you wanted to manage the domain from now on and not knowing if he was going to cooperate.

So I had 2 accounts.
One wouldn’t load any pages without a 500 error.
The other wouldn’t let me set up permalinks the way I wanted.
Both hosts wouldn’t answer their phones.
Both hosts were having server issues.
Probably why they couldn’t answer their phones.
And the domain name was in the hands of a jerk.

Continue reading It was Hell and I never want to do it again.

What burns my britches.

I’m a freelance web designer who prides herself on the fact that I care about web standards as well as design. There are lots of people who go on and on about the fact that that’s just a load of hog-wash (they probably don’t believe in Global Warming,either). So they load up Microsoft Frontpage 5.0 and churn out tons of td laden, boxy pages and people pay good money for them.
Oh, what’s she ragging about,now?
We are now in 2008, shouldn’t your site look like it was made in at the very least 2006?
But the way a site looks is actually the least important thing.
To me the most important aspect of being web standards compliant is that the site will render properly in a variety of browsers. It’s reassuring to know that what a visitor sees using Opera is close to the same as a visitor using IE.
There’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on over writing code as water tight as a duck’s ass. I waver because there has to be a line drawn somewhere and for me it’s all those hacks.
Hide from IE 5 mac for crying out loud. Are there people using IE 5 on macs?
I tend to get cross eyed also thinking I should set up a seperate style sheet for print, then for media hand held devices,then for Braille. Braille? You got me there.
If someone can set up a site that someone can read in Braille, pay them 2500 bucks!
They’ve earned it.
Continue reading What burns my britches.

Kicking against the pricks

Why must everything be such a hassle?
Hassle One: My new account with Powweb is totally bolloxed. I was twiddling my dainty thumbs for 2 days waiting for some mess to clear up with how CGI gets enabled for new accounts so that I could get going setting up my dad’s new site just to find out a minute ago that it was enabled improperly.For the record,when a new user signs up a new account with powweb the 1st thing they ought to do is click a little button that enables CGI. Why it isn’t the first thing bang in your face upon activating your new account-I have no idea. It ought to be right there as soon as you login like:

Hello username, would you like to enable CGI on your account so that you might be able to get stuff to work?

Sigh, but that would be too easy. I had to find this out in their community forums…It isn’t top of the list in the knowledgebase,either. It’s also not an easy button to find from the control panel. Whatever.

Hassle Two:The administrator of the domain I need pointed to another nameserver is being…difficult.
I clearly stated what I needed him to do and he wrote me 2x today telling me to “get it together” and send him the info. Which I already had. I gave up getting it transferred to me and just asked him to point it for me. But now that Powweb has decided to poop out I sure hope the domain doesn’t end up pointing toward a website that isn’t set up at all.I have to be able to install WP in order to set things up and I can’t do that until Powweb “gets it together”.Yikes.
So by tomorrow am that website better be working because I am going to have to act super fast to make it ready…if the guy ever does the DNS stuff for me, maybe he’d rather just keep the catty emails coming.