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I attended last night’s football game between the Cleveland Browns and the New York Jets. My bride came upon some loge seats, so we went.

I’m regretting it.

First, we arrive, after parking our car in the Science Center garage, and enter the nearest National City entrance.

This is where all the shit starts (sorry — there’s more), unfortunately. Please read on.

Instead of directing us to the South side entrance, the kindly Customer Service gentleman ushered us into the North entrance, and told us to go to the third floor, follow it to the right and go around into the City View Lounge, then take another elevator…

In short, he made us walk the entire circumference of the stadium. Nice. Thanks.

We finally made it to our seats/loge, but only after the Browns had made it half-way through their first possession (after a three-and-out by the Jets after kickoff). I saw the last four or five plays of the Browns’ opening drive, including Braylon Edwards’ fantastic touchdown catch, which was a spectacle.

Then the thundercloud hit, driving everyone out of the stadium and the teams off the field. I’m OK with the removal of people into safer surroundings — please don’t get me wrong — but Cleveland Browns Stadium is NOT built for 72,000 people crowding the third floor lounges — under any circumstances.

At this momentous point in time, I was sent down for a pretzel. Yeah, right. I went downstairs, against my better judgment.

Issue #1: I asked for two pretzels, and was told by the concessionaire that they “can’t serve you any pretzels. There aren’t any.” When asked why, he said, “because they are coming out of the oven too hard.”

So I ordered a large, Souvenir Size Diet Pepsi for my wife, figuring I could get something better elsewhere (including a better beer than the swill they serve there for as much as you can buy for six at the store).

While I waited, the supervisor brought over a regular-sized Diet Pepsi instead of a Souvenir Cup. She asked the server about this, and he said (and I shit you not): “The customer changed his mind and asked for the large size.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “I asked for the large size initially — please don’t blame ME for your… well… misunderstanding. It’s not my fault.”

The station manager, in a huff, took the pop over to the fountain, dumped it into a large cup, topped it off with more soda, and brought it back without a word.

Fault #2, #3, & #4: don’t blame me for “changing his mind” when I didn’t!; don’t give me a huffy attitude, and don’t walk away like a bitch, OK? Say you’re, well, not sorry, but that you regret the inconvenience of the miscommunication, OK?

And don’t treat me like a piece of shit.

Bitch.

Then I decided to venture over to another stand to get a better beer and a couple of pretzels, hoping that they aren’t using the same oven — they couldn’t be! OK…

The third floor lounge is NOT built for weather delays, let me tell you: there wasn’t an inch to walk in, even if your life depended on it. Seriously: I wouldn’t want to have a heart attack in there! You can’t move — there’s no room at all.

Then, in the midst of that crowd, I discovered that I had lost my cell phone.

OMFG!

I lost my cell phone, a Verizon LG 9900 EnV with all of my photos, my contacts, photos — everything. OMFG!

Panic set in. I began to scour the area, looking high and low, through tangles of legs and such, all over the area, looking for my phone. I actually questioned a kid with a suspiciously-looking identical phone, complete with the “secret” code taped to the inner screen, about the phone. He said it was his, and an adult next to him told me to leave him alone.

OK. I returned upstairs. I grabbed my wife’s phone and called our cellular provider and suspended my phone’s Electronic Serial Number, preventing anyone from using the phone. Cool. I’ll let the homeowner’s insurance cover it from here, but…

I decided to go to Guest Services to see if anyone was honest enough to turn it in. This was an adventure in itself: not one “Customer Service” person seemed to know where Guest Services was actually located — one said it was in Section 102, another said 108, another said 130, another said 150… you get the idea… and each had a different way to get there!

Hey: “You can’t miss it!”

It took me 45 minutes to find Guest Services.

Of course, I’m looking for a 3-foot-high sign that said, “Guest Services,” but I was wrong: the sign was, in truth, less than a foot high, in the midst of BUY THIS and BUY THAT.

Nothing to help out someone in dire straits.

I finally found Guest Services in Section 102, and filed a report on a 11.5×8″ paper manually torn in quarters, and turned it in to the gal at the desk. She called a couple of the other GS stations, but no luck. She then said she’d call my wife’s phone if they found it.

Great.

Ok, so now it’s almost half-time, and I arrived back at the suite. My wife tells me, “if you want food, you gotta go now: it’s 7 minutes until half-time. Go beat the crowds.”

Great. Back into the abyss.

So I went downstairs, and started toward one of the food stands. I wanted a Guinness, and had seen it earlier, but… Hey: I had earned it, OK? On the way, I decided to stop by the concierge and see if someone had turned in a cell phone. I described it.

There it was. OMFG!

The 2GB data card was still there, too! OK… time warp… I got two Guinness, drank one, and went upstairs, OK?… Cool… I get back to the suite, and found that someone — while the phone was out of my possession — tried to make an international call at almost $10/minute.

They were denied, of course, because: a) my service declines international service without a pass code; and b) I had an unpaid balance (just billed, thank you) that they didn’t want to pay. They wisely decided to turn the phone in to Lost & Found.

Wow. Back to the game, OK?

By the time I returned to our loge, the third-stringers were playing, and watching the game was a worthless proposition. We decided to leave. I saw a total, over the evening, of 6 or 7 plays by the Browns’ offense, and 2 or 4 by the defense. Wow.

Our exit, thankfully, was simple and straight. We found our own way out, thank you very much.

Lessons: Don’t accept me at the wrong entrance — please direct me to the proper entrance and don’t make me walk the entire circumference, OK?

Make Damned Fucking Sure EVERY Customer Service Agent KNOWS WHERE THE FUCK GUEST SERVICES IS, and HOW TO TELL A GUEST WHERE TO FIND IT. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Don’t EVER allow food services workers to blame the customer for a mistake! Want to drive me away? That did it right there, before I knew I had lost the phone! Get rid of that guy RIGHT NOW. He’s incompetent.

Don’t ever assume the guest is at fault: most times they are, true enough, but sometimes they’re not; listen to them, hear them out, and try to discern their issue: don’t just say, “I don’t know. Ask someone else.” I got that repeatedly.

If you can’t answer my question, don’t just blindly take me somewhere — ask me if I CARE if you take me somewhere — don’t automatically assume I know where I am: I might be lost! I don’t want to get more lost than I already am, OK?

Right now, I don’t want to go back to Browns’ Stadium.

I wonder why.

Tags: browns, celveland browns, Cleveland, stadium, stadium review, user experience

We jaunted off to a local restaurant tonight, as is our custom on pay weeks. Since we had a gift certificate from Cleveland Independents for Willoughby Brewing Company, that’s where we chose to go for dinner tonight.

My bride had the Santa Fe Chicken Salad, which required some potable to chill the flame. I, on the other hand, had the Glazed Salmon.

The salmon was excellent, perfectly done. The risotto it sat on, on the other hand… let’s just put it this way: in my honest opinion, the chef at Willoughby Brewing Company needs to go on a strict salt-free diet for about the next six weeks, then taste his food: the risotto tasted like it came straight out of the Cleveland salt mine (sorry, this links to a PDF!).

Seriously: there is absolutely no need for 3,000mg of salt on a side dish when your daily suggested intake of salt is only 2,400mg — 2,000mg for those of us on a low-sodium diet! This is, and has been, my complaint with the food at WBC: the main course is generally excellent, but the side dishes suffer from severe sodium poisoning.

I’m going to be swollen for the next week at least.

The beer, on the other hand, is improving, although the barkeeps have no idea that a beer is supposed to have a head on it — and have no idea that a beer with a head on it is actually easier to carry around without spilling.

I shouldn’t have tipped as well as I did. But, had I not, the message would not get through. Alas…

Tags: Beer, Cleveland restaurants, Salt, Willoughby Brewing Company

First, Time-Warner Internet service to the ‘Bend dropped like a rock on Sunday.

Besides the frustration of not being able to go anywhere on the Net, check the weather to see if it would rain when I went to the golf course (it did), or catch up on my email, I was unable ot do any serious work. Oddly enough, I still had VPN, SSH, and FTP access, just no SMTP or HTTP — which hardly works when you’re developing on an online development site. TW’s EPIC FAIL also delayed the relaunch of this site.

Yes, I’m about to relaunch. The delays have prevented me from completing the alternative style sheet, and I will hopefully be able to add it to the site and make it active in the next week. My schedule, however, will force me to launch this week without the style switcher.

No big deal, you might say, and I agree — to a point: the primary style will irk some folks (hint: it’s a reverse), so the traffic might suffer for a couple of days. For this, there is nothing I can do, unless I want to wait another 10 days to upgrade — which I don’t. You’ll see why during the next week.

Stay tuned.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The ISP issues forced me to spend time with the folks at the Time-Warner/Roadrunner help desk — which forced me to disencumber my network, killing my laser printer in the process.

In getting the printer back online, I ran a diagnostic (it’s an older HP LaserJet 1200 that I got used — for free), and it gave me an interesting statistic:

Total pages printed: 41,736
Pages jammed in printer: 24
Pages mispicked in printer: 24

One in 1,739 pages printed have jammed. Not sure if this is a good ratio or not, but since only about 3 or 4 have jammed since I have had the printer, and I’ve printed a good 20,000 pages (giving me a ratio of between 5,000 or 6,600 to 1), I’d say it’s more likely that the previous owner had no idea how to operate the printer in the first place.

It’s been a great printer for me, with service even better than the old HP LaserJet IIIs and IVs from 10 years ago… you might remember: some of them are still around, in service today. As long as I can get toner and a current OS X driver for my 1200, it’ll stay right where it is: in my office, hooked to my network, where it gets used almost every day.

Now all I need is a photo-quality, multi-function (scanner, printer, fax is unnecessary), ink jet printer that will print from a roll to a long length (i.e., for hi-res panoramic photos) that will work on a network — and not lose Photoshop functionality — and I’ll be all set.

Any suggestions?

Found in an interesting site for all you golf lovers out there: www.golfflyover.com.

Now before you head over there to be amazed, be advised: don’t bother. One silly fact: these guys are so paranoid about people stealing their stuff that you can only view one or two courses at a time!

Beyond that, don’t go to one course and then another and then back to the first one, because they won’t let you. I had to email them to let them know that I was having difficulty, and their response was polite enough, but I can’t recommend that anyone actually use their site until they get real.

Their reply:

…Several people have tried unsuccessfully to scan our website and download all our data.

OK, so if they tried, then you’ve looked at your server logs, no? Why not just ban the IP? It’s not all that hard… Beyond that, there’s all sorts of tricks you can play with the .htaccess file to prevent mass downloads as well — and they all work for the most part.

No, they want to make it hard on the end user — and that is what borks this site, not the application itself. Yeah, I could say a lot about inaccessible HTML, invalid markup & CSS and all, but it’s not worth it.

Then he gave me a link — and it didn’t work. I had to manipulate Google Earth to get me there (I was looking at Powderhorn in Madison; I wanted to look at Thunder Hill as well, but no dice), and it took some wrangling.

Seriously: if you and a friend are perusing courses, trying to decide what course you’d like to play, see the challenges that each course provides, then make a decision, you’re strictly S.O.L. — in the sincerest form of that term. And that’s too bad: this site has a nice potential.

There’s reasonable fear, then there’s unreasonable paranoia, and these guys crossed that line years ago.

But for the way it is right now, you’re better off with the golf course’s brochure — this site isn’t ready for prime time yet.

I’ve been lamenting the closing of Shinano’s Restaurant in South Euclid, of late. Open in the same place with the same crew (save for two people) since 1991, Shinano’s had just about the best sushi on the upper East Side of Cleveland.

Word is that they are looking for new digs, perhaps near Solon, which doesn’t do me a whole bunch of good: I don’t want to drive 25 miles for sushi — if I’m going to drive that far for sushi, I’ll go a few more and head to Ohashi’s in North Olmsted, which is probably (perhaps easily) the best sushi restaurant in town.

So what’s a guy like me to do? Suffer?

Not quite. Enter Young Lee, the former sushi chef at Lure Bistro in downtown Willoughby. Lee and his wife have recently opened Young’s Sushi on Clark Avenue in downtown Willoughby (old Willoughby). Clark Street runs parallel to Erie Street one block West of Erie.

OK, so I’m not exactly convinced by the location — I think I’d rather be right on Erie Street, but then again, the rent is higher there. Young’s location has its own parking lot, which helps out: parking in Willoughby can be a nightmare, especially during the car show.

Walking in, I was a little amazed at the decor; get this: black and white linoleum tile floor, a pale ash green wainscot-type bottom half and deep purple top half paint scheme on the walls, cantina-style tables with metal-framed plastic chairs, and (oh, wow!) country music playing in the kitchen.

I had my doubts…

…and was well rewarded for my open-mindedness. The sushi was outstanding: their white tuna is on a par with Ohashi’s any day of the week. I had the Fire Bird Roll, which has tuna, salmon, red snapper, white tuna, crab, avocado and cucumber; the Love Roll, which has white tuna, snow crab and avocado; and two pieces of white tuna nigiri. My bride had the Mexican roll (!), which has shrimp, avocado and cucumber; the snow crab roll, which has snow crab, avocado, and cucumber, and another which I can’t remember.

We both also had the Miso Soup and the house salad with ginger dressing. Both of these were excellent. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that both exceed any we’ve had yet (in Cleveland).

But the sushi was, as I said, outstanding: the fish was absolutely fresh, the rice perfectly cooked, the seaweed not too chewy, and the vegetables crisp and flavorful. And the ginger was so fresh it almost burned my tongue!

At first, I was going say that the wasabi was a little weak, but that would be wrong: it’s not weak at all — it’s what you would refer to as a “sleeper”: you get some flavor, but little heat… so you take a little more… then, all of a sudden…

WHAM! Your sinuses are under assault, your eyes can’t hold their water, and your mouth is going hooo-HAH! The wasabi is truly excellent.

I saved the white tuna nigiri for last — white tuna sashimi is one of my all-time favorite foods — and I was not disappointed in the least: it tasted almost like butter, and it melted away on my tongue slowly and evenly — and not a single hint of a sour note, which can happen easily with less-tan-Grade-A white tuna. My only regret here was not ordering two orders of white tuna nigiri (or maybe three — what the hell: when it comes to sushi, what can I say? I’m a pig… <grin>…)

All of this from what you would never think of when you think of a sushi restaurant. I only had one negative to the whole experience: the chop sticks were oval, and were difficult for me to handle. That is something I can definitely get used to, with practice.

I have to wonder about their timing, since opening a restaurant is never easy, especially in bad economic times, but if Young can develop and keep a loyal clientele (and with food like his, I see no reason he can’t do it), you’re going to be hearing a lot about this restaurant in the future.

The hours are 11-9 daily, and 1-8 Sundays; the restaurant is located at 4082 Clark Avenue in downtown Willoughby, about two blocks from the Willoughby Brewing Company (the other side of Erie Street), right next to the convenience store.

If you’re out and about on the East side, and you have a taste for sushi, try this place — you’ll be glad you did.

Cleveland, you gotta’ be kiddin’ me.

I pass this amazing piece of crap twice a day, every morning and every evening, and I’m always amazed that it exists.

How long are you going to sit passively in your cars and pass this wretched hulk day after day? Take a good look, Cleveland, because this is the real face of our city:

A real beauty, right?

The city could probably take this building by Eminent Domain, and for a song. The only problem is that this hulk has been sitting on this spot, just like this, for years: open, broken windows, open doors — the works. It’s probably going to cost a fortune to clean the hazardous waste out of this building.

What? Hazardous waste? What hazardous waste? In an empty building?

You bet: just about every bird living within 10 miles of the city has to know that this nice, little shelter is here waiting for them in bad weather. Just about every rat the size of Shamu does, too. And every stray dog, too. What about snakes? We have them in this region of Ohio. And I’ll bet there’s more bird shit and rat shit in there than Exxon has oil.

THAT hazardous waste. (It’s time to call in Mike Rowe for another episode of “Dirty Jobs.”)

The land could be worth a fortune — if it were habitable, which it’s not. Not by a long shot. You could build something very nice here: a housing complex, perhaps, or an aquarium, maybe, or an office building, possibly. Gee: maybe even — dare I say it — a casino? Not that I’m for having one in Cleveland, but if we did have one, this would be an excellent location…

The possibilities are endless for a property with an outstanding lake view like this.

But instead, we have this hulk just sitting here, taking up space, rotting from the inside out and the outside in, housing all sorts of vermin, rodentia, and the like. Just a thought: if mosquitoes are breeding there, and they are breeding in water polluted with rabid or diseased animal waste, you have to wonder what kind of diseases they carry with them — and what they can infect us with.

Our priorities are elsewhere: a convention center, a medical mart… not that these things are unimportant — they certainly are important — but you can’t forget about severe rot like this. Not in an area so visible.

So, Cleveland, there you have it: your fair city. This is the face of Cleveland, Ohio, like it or not: this is what every visitor to this city sees every time they go down to Progressive Field, or Cleveland Browns Stadium, or the Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame, or one of those supposed conventions our politicians want so badly that we never seem to be able to attract.

They blame the lack of hotel space (ironically — and laughably — this is an abandoned Howard Johnson Hotel!) for the lack of conventions here. Yeah, right. If you were hosting a convention, and you had a choice between just about any other American city — and this dung heap — what would you choose?

I’ve been meaning to get down there with my real camera and take some better photos; I just might tomorrow morning, if the weather holds. I will post more photos here as I take them, believe me.

All day Tuesday, April 22nd, the good folks over at TCP in Aurora, Ohio will be celebrating Earth Day with IllumiNation, a special Earth Day webcast about conservation, recycling, and ways you can help conserve our planet’s environment and natural resources.

Tune your browser to www.tcpi.com/earthday for more information.

While you’re at it, check out Help Our World to learn more ways to help the environment.

Ed Hammer, known as the “Father of Fluorescent Signature Analysis,” invented the Compact Fluorescent Light bulb (CFL) for General Electric in 1976. Ed eventually won the IEEE Edison Medal for his pioneering work in the lighting industry.

Ed currently serves up podcasts about his experiences in the business, and (pardon the pun) sheds some light on the true nature of fluorescent lighting from the first days to recent developments in the industry — including advances that help eliminate the introduction of mercury into the environment.

You can check out his weekly podcasts at www.drop-the-hammer.com.

I can tell you that we here at the Bend have changed about 3/4 of our light bulbs over to nVision CFLs in the last year, and we’re seeing a significant savings in our electric bill.

Check it out — and save a few trees.

UPDATE — You can also digg this at:
http://digg.com/environment/illumiNation_An_Earth_Day_Event_Brought_To_You_By_TCP

Whoa, relief…

I was just able to relieve myself from a difficult client’s expectations and go to another project at work this week. The initial client is a bit, shall we say, persnickety; everything has to be absolute letter-perfect, pixel-perfect, etc., all the way down the line.

Print stylesheets? Perfection need only apply. (What? We have lousy print CSS support across browsers? The Hell, you say!)

We have a bug tracker, of course, and I have been free for a couple of days now — that is, of course, if you ignore the client’s bug reports issued today, which were really a series of change requests…

All that aside, it was a pleasure for me to move from one challenging site to another, internal, site that is probably more like moving from the frying pan into the fire than it is moving from one difficult situation to an easier one.

Seriously.

But what I was able to do, this week, was to leverage some recent learning into the internal client’s site that saved me time, countless hours figuring out stuff, and plenty of headaches.

I used jQuery, my new heartthrob.

My superiors are impressed, and so am I — and the best is yet to come, as I have more wrinkles to expose in this project: the sky is my limit!

So I just got home, after numerous hours at the agency this week, slaving away, and I come home feeling… well… tired, yes, but…

…damned good.

It’s a feeling of accomplishment, but better: it’s knowing that I stretched myself to create something that should be; something that belongs where it is as it is. It’s a feeling that I created something that simply deserves to be. Something right.

It’s rare, because it’s a feeling that I did it.

It’s a good feeling, too: and I want more.

By now, I can assume that you have been able to dig yourselves out of the snow and actually get around our fair city.

For some of us, that process took longer than others.

I got home Friday night around 7:30, and it was just in time: I took my lunch leftovers and the daily mail inside, dropped it on the kitchen counter, then slid into the bathroom to do something… well, if you can imagine that it took me almost 90 minutes to drive home, you can imagine what I had to do in there.

Afterward, I went outside to have a cigarette, and I saw the first of what was to become a long list of cars to get stuck in front of my home over the weekend. I lost count around 18 or 20, most of which were 4-wheel drive trucks with snow plows, or Jeeps, but there were a couple of cars and minivans — and one of the latter got stuck right at the end of my driveway sometime late Saturday morning.

By that time, we had at least 16 inches of snow in the street, and it was still coming down — hard. (When all was said and done, we ended up with 28 - 30 inches of snow in the street, drifting to 4 or 5 feet in some places just off-road.)

The lady who owned the minivan abandoned her vehicle with the intent of returning to get it out. She tried later, only to get her Jeep stuck before she arrived at her minivan.

What really got to me was what happened Sunday morning: a city snow plow, trying to get around Ms. Had-no-business-being-out-in-the-worst-snowstorm-in-Cleveland-history’s minivan, got stuck in the very same place many other vehicles found them selves in the hours earlier.

I woke up just in time to take these videos (I apologize for the sharpness — I woke up just seconds before, grabbed the camera, and began shooting; the fuzziness is the window screen):

Turn the volume up and you can hear my bride and I talking about what a good job these guys were (and have been) doing — and they have.

I mean, let’s face it: the heavy snow wasn’t hardly their fault. Nor was the fact that their jobs were made infinitely more difficult by the bozos who felt that they were such good drivers, and their cars were so great in the snow, that they could get through anything.

For that, the proof is in the pudding, as they say:

In this second video, you can hear me say, “oh, please hit that minivan — please hit that minivan!” I was saying this because the person that left their minivan there had absolutely no business being on the road on Saturday — for whatever reason. And their lack of consideration for themselves or others resulted in many more individuals getting stuck in the same place — and to preventing the plows from cleaning our street when all of the others in the neighborhood had been cleared at least twice.

We were stuck in our house until 5:00 p.m. Sunday, unable to go for groceries or other goods when others had been out for hours — thanks to this person’s stupidity.

I took the video because you never see snow plows getting stuck — or pulled out of such a situation; I posted the videos because people need to see what a lack of thought and consideration can do to inconvenience others (and I’m not just talking about me).

Next time they say to stay off the roads unless it’s an absolute emergency — stay off the roads.

UPDATE — My video has been picked up by The News-Herald.

“Stormageddon” strikes the city mid-day. We had plenty of warning, so why was there 5 inches of snow on the Eastbound Shoreway at rush hour?

Seriously. The National Weather Service issued advisories, watches, and warnings for the last three days. We knew it was coming.

Jeff Tanchak on Channel 19 hasn’t worn a jacket for a week now, and his sleeves have been rolled up so long his arms are frostbitten. We knew it was coming.

They can track these storms and predict right down to the hour when they will enter our area — so we knew we would get it mid-day today.

The highways in our area tonight were a total mess at 6:00 p.m., some 8 hours after the storm started. It took me 90 minutes to get home tonight, from Independence to Euclid, white knuckle all the way. Go figure.

Not too long ago, we had another mid-day storm that we knew for two days was coming mid-day, and evening rush hour traffic was again a mess — snow crews hadn’t gone out to plow during the day; they waited until rush hour was over to go salt and clear snow, and by then the highways were a total mess.

Why do they wait? Why don’t they get out there at a proper time and treat the roads so that they don’t accumulate so much snow and cause so many problems? Are they in cahoots with the body shops or something?

(It’s not the guys on the line, in my opinion. I think it’s just a simple case of poor management.)

Oh, by the way, the answer to the question is an ODOT truck. Or, if you’re a Hitchhiker fan, they sleep 42.

And… punt.