Brick Oven

I went to Brick Oven for the first time today.  I wasn't impressed with the menu.

Waitress only kept half the drinks full.  She seemed to mostly give up on the table after food started coming to the table.

A coworker said that their root beer was great.  It did taste good, but I was assuming it would've had a head on it since it was their signature thing.

I got the Market Room Buffet, which includes the soup and salad buffets.  I wish I had gotten a sandwich and the salad bar.  The pasta part of the buffet, which was the extra onto the soup and salad when getting Market Room, was confusing.  It wasn't an open pasta bar.  You had to go put in an order and wait a few minutes.  They had you pick two servings of pasta or vegetable.  They had a bunch of different types of pasta and a broccoli or mixed vegetable it.  I didn't get the vegetables, so not sure exactly what it was.

After they heated up my pasta in some warm water they gave me a couple of pieces of sausage and a piece of garlic bread straight out of a brick oven.  I then took my bowl over to the soup bar where they had soup and also pasta sauces.

The soups were not exciting to me and I like a good soup.  I got the clam chowder and the chunks of clam and such were really small and not many of them.  I realize it is soup, but I prefer a more robust chowder.

The salad bar had several items on their, but the selection of dressings was limited.

A couple of people in my group got ten inch pizzas and they looked good and filling, but I think they were eleven dollars.  Seemed a little expensive.

A couple of people in the group got sandwiches and they came with a cookie and a bag of vending machine chips.  Seemed very chintzy for a sit down restaurant.  I guess it makes them more flexible for their take out customers.  Seems like the sit down experience should be better.

One member of our group customized his sandwich to swap mushrooms for jalapenos.  The down side was that they did not switch them as he asked.  The good news was that they offered to either redo it or give him jalapenos on the side or some other way he would choose to make it right.

It was a unique experience and nice atmosphere, but not a place I would choose to go, especially if I am paying.

Flickr

While the 1 terabyte of storage is phenomenal, the software is some painful that it is near to unusable.  The software is not intuitive, so it is difficult to learn how to use.  Once you do get the feel for a little of the functionality, it is so slow.  Trying to select a bunch of files for upload the desktop uploader tool takes forever.  I tried using the one online and never could get it to stop spinning the loading screen.

Additionally, Flickr does not appear to have provided true management tools.  It is difficult to upload, download, organize, and view all of my photos.

I'm sure they are fearful that many people might actually use the full terabyte of storage, but if they make it painful to use then no one will use it at all.  It won't just make them use the storage at a slower rate, it will just frustrate them and people will give up.

I've been trying for weeks to up load my photos and have gotten some up there.  Then I tried to show my wife and daughter how to access them.  It was horribly painful to figure out how to expose it to them and only them and then to explain to them the hoops they need to jump through to get to them.