Tag: Buffalo

Updated Below

This post is a placeholder of sorts; I’ll update it later on after I’ve had a chance to peruse the Buffalo News‘s new website. Longtime readers know that I’ve long found the current incarnation of Buffalonews.com to be a joke, but they are apparently finally moving into 2007, with a page that updates more than once per day and including blogs and other cool stuff. They go live later this morning, and I won’t be able to look at it until later this afternoon after I get home from work.

Between now and then, feel free to use the Comments thread here to voice opinions of the new News site.

UPDATE: Or don’t use the comments here to say anything. Sheesh.

As for the News site: I like the initial look. I’m sure it will change a lot over the next few months as things are tweaked, but the overall visual look is orders of magnitude better than the old site. The old version crammed everything together toward the left of the browser window, with lots of empty space at the right; so much stuff was jammed together that navigation was difficult; and most annoyingly, the day’s content went up all at once, at 9:00 am every day. (Thus making pre-work online newspaper reading impossible in this town.)

Now, the new site has a much more elegant and open design. The actual organization is actually similar to the old site, but it’s more spread out, with the paper’s sections listed across the top of the page (just below the masthead), and with mouseover menus used as well. They do need to work on story formatting a bit, I see; take this article from yesterday’s edition on fiddler Natalie MacMaster. The article had a sidebar with MacMaster’s discography, but the sidebar isn’t mentioned in the story and it’s only linked in a fairly easy-to-overlook menu halfway down the page containing “More Entertainment Stories”. They need to work more on getting articles that are clearly meant to be taken together linked as such on the Website.

The blogs are interesting as well, although without exception they all need to evolve a bit. Writing on a blog is different from writing for a newspaper, and the initial entries of each blog exhibit “New Blogger Syndrome”, wherein new bloggers just kind of fumble about a bit in short form until they settle into their natural “blog voice”. (And yes, I went through that syndrome as well; you can go back to the first month or so of entries here and see for yourself, if you don’t believe me.) Lots of them seem to want their blog content to basically advertise their print content (either existing or forthcoming), and a few times they forget the formatting (in blogging, you really need to put a double-return between paragraphs). But that’s all “baby steps” kind of stuff. That they accept comments is a welcome sign; hopefully they’ll link others as well.

(By the way, one of the posts I read over there referred to a topic the writer will specifically “blog” about sometime soon, and that got me thinking about the verb “blog”. When I say that I “blog”, I use it as a general type of verb, a collective verb if you will, to refer to the general act of maintaining a blog or putting content on the blog or whatever. However, when I’m thinking of a specific topic or even formulate a specific post in my head, then I don’t think of “blogging” that topic, but rather posting about it. I wouldn’t say “I’ll blog about Pirates of the Caribbean later”, but rather, “I’ll post about Pirates later”. I’m not mentioning this as a complaint, mind you; it’s just a bit of grammatical fluff that suddenly lodged in my head.)

Anyhow, if any of my three Buffalo-based readers hail from the News, welcome to Blogistan!

Share This Post

Kevin Hosey and his spousal unit Val are good urban types, to judge by the writings on their respective blogs. So apparently they ventured out of their urban comfort zones and out into…the suburbs! All the cars! Streets with multiple lanes! Big box retail! Cookie-cutter restaurants! The horror!

OK, I’m just needling a bit here — they’ve never struck me as the obnoxious “City good, suburb bad” kind of people. What got me is something in his opening paragraph:

Val and I ate dinner at Friendly’s in Cheektowaga Saturday; we saw a commercial for Friendly’s Thursday night, and we started talking about eating there many years ago. We both noted how good their sundaes were and that we hadn’t had ice cream in months, so we decided that Saturday would be the day.

Did you notice it? No? Here it is again, with the passage that tripped me up in bold:

Val and I ate dinner at Friendly’s in Cheektowaga Saturday; we saw a commercial for Friendly’s Thursday night, and we started talking about eating there many years ago. We both noted how good their sundaes were and that we hadn’t had ice cream in months, so we decided that Saturday would be the day.

If there’s anything I find harder to understand than the impulse to vote Republican, it’s the idea that anyone could meaningfully measure the period between instances of consuming ice cream in a unit larger than hours.

(I notice that Kevin didn’t mention the service at Friendly’s, which in my experience can make the progress of glaciers seem sprightly by comparison. Maybe they’ve improved in this area? It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten there. They used to have a sundae that consisted of half a Belgian waffle topped with a fairly large scoop of vanilla ice cream, which was then saturated with hot fudge. And I’d better stop writing this post right now, because I think I just heard my pancreas whimpering.)

UPDATE: Contrasting with my light tone here is this blogger’s experience with Friendly’s. That’s astonishing, truly astonishing. I’m glad the guy’s kid is OK…and if I’m trying to pour water on my child’s burn and someone tells me “Gee, you’re making a mess”, I’d want to hit the guy as well.

Share This Post

For my Buffalo readers: have any of you eaten at a restaurant in East Aurora called “Tantalus”? I’m wondering how good it is. Let me know.

Share This Post

Wow, it’s cold in Buffalo this week. Scary cold. The kind of cold that makes you wonder just what kind of drugs or liquor the Inuits drink to voluntarily live in cold like this. Some observations:

:: Granted, my sample size isn’t huge, but I’m noticing a lot less overtly crappy driving over the last few days. I’ve only had one of those situations where I was driving down a road that’s usually four-lanes, but due to snow was down to effectively two lanes, only to be passed on my right — and fairly closely, too — by some guy driving a big pickup truck. That usually happens during these storms a lot more.

:: Six weeks or so ago I took my car into one of those Quick Lube joints for an oil change, which they did very nicely, thank you. I even let them run that Engine Cleaning stuff through my engine for twenty bucks (yes, you can tell me how dumb that was in comments, because I suspect I got fleeced a little bit there). But I did not let them replace my battery, even though when they hooked it up to their Magical Battery Scanner, my battery was rated as “marginal” and therefore stood an excellent chance of failing in the cold weather.

Well, we’ve just come through three of the coldest days I can remember, and each morning, my car started up just fine. Sure, there was a little grinding as the battery basically said, “Geez, do I gotta?” But each time, the engine caught just fine within five seconds of me turning the key.

Some “marginal” battery, eh?

:: TV News stations have got to stop this business of sending reporters outside to report on the weather. I have a window. I don’t need to see some schlub reporter bundled up in a parka standing outside in the dark to tell me that it’s really cold and snowing.

:: Rant time: The Daughter has missed the last two days of school, since her district closed due to the snow and cold. Fair enough. However, yesterday morning the decision to close the school was not made until 6:45 a.m., which was well after the usual time when the word can be disseminated effectively. How bad was it? Well, on a morning when the wind chill was double digits below zero, The Wife and The Daughter didn’t find out that school had been canceled until they’d been standing outside for ten minutes waiting for the bus. They weren’t alone, either; not even all the bus drivers got the word, so they ended up picking up all their kids and then being told to bring them all to the district’s bus garage to wait for their parents to come get them.

And then the Superintendent went on TV to defend her actions, insisting that concern for “the safety of the students” had forced her hand. Well, having kids on buses on their way to school, with others standing outside on horribly cold days waiting for buses which aren’t coming, doesn’t strike me as being terribly “safe for kids”. It’s not as if the snow happened with no warning; the forecasts were known to be for large amounts of lake effect snow and abnormally bitter cold, and in fact, a number of school districts decided on Monday to cancel Tuesday not because of snow but because of the cold.

:: This blast of cold brings back memories of winters in Iowa during my college years. I don’t know how you Minnesotans do this (minus the lake effect snow, of course). I’ll take our hundred inches of snow a year with temperatures that are usually around 20 degrees, over twenty inches of snow a year with winter temps down around -20. Yeesh.

Share This Post