41–50 of 99 posts
That strip mall is long gone now. Even when we used to go to Carambas in the 80's, it looked ancient.
La Costeña is still in business. They were on Rengstorff and they're on Middlefield now. Either they're not very good or my expectations have increased considerably. xcostena was an early X app done at SGI back in the day; fill out a form and it would fax the order to La Costeña. Arguably the beginnings of ecommerce. Back then, they were the closest available calories. This was before SuperMac Technologies started th…
This brings back the memories. Another true story to add to this one. I (like many Sun cohorts) loved the burritos at La Costeña market, and we had adopted the FAX trick from Adobe. Then along came the "Distributed Objects Everywhere" project (which invented CORBA) and they wanted an example application so they created "BurritoTool" which used CORBA to find the server that was connected to the fax line, and a nice WY…
During my tenure at Sun the burrito tool faxed your order to Burrito Real (good, but not the institutions that La Costena and La Bamba were). Maybe this was in the wake of La Costena turning off their fax machine. It was a dark day for Bay Area Burritos when they tore down the building that housed La Costena and La Bamba. There was some Burrito magic on that corner of Old Middlefield and Rengstorff.
I wish we could have something similar in modern times. Instead, we have a handful of equally-shitty delivery platforms with terrible and bloated UIs and no API.
Have you read the documentation for this beast? It is complete but I would not describe it as easy to use. To be fair, we could probably slap an API and a GUI on top of this nonsense: $ burrito -time +:30 b+g+cc+jf+jf+sf+sc-sc+i"Black Beans"+n:2/Ross \ b+v:cc+g+cm+sc+i"no rice"/Kathie ( sigh no double dash long options and a horrific base food specification thingie - yes it is complete and well formed but it is still…
Now I'm stuck with whatever crappy interface the Grab and Gojek developers give me on my shitty mobile phone (imagine people wanting to use their 1920x1080 screen instead of a phone to order food...)
im serious. compared to the relatively clean, coherent and transparent burrito script, the dumpster fire that constitutes modern online ordering is an unforgiveable travesty.
again this is not delivery...no gig shit this is just simple pickup n go we're trying to do here but at the end of the byzantine transaction you make on a vendors website you've opted into a dozen mailing lists and you're getting menus and direct mailers from any and every local and non-local restaurant and bar...complete with mailers from the goddamn platform itself shilling you to either get in your car and play delivery drone or sign up for endless datamining.
and hell, you might not even be ordering from the restaurant itself. most of these platforms set up the virtual equivalent of a pop up tent in front of the business. If nothing else, this script has pushed me to reconsider email-to-fax orders to the handful of small local restaurants in the neighborhood.
All the "PostScript" developers then got SparcStations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you read the documentation for this beast? It is complete but I would not describe it as easy to use. To be fair, we could probably slap an API and a GUI on top of this nonsense: $ burrito -time +:30 b+g+cc+jf+jf+sf+sc-sc+i"Black Beans"+n:2/Ross \ b+v:cc+g+cm+sc+i"no rice"/Kathie ( sigh no double dash long options and a horrific base food specification thingie - yes it is complete and well formed but it is still…
At least it's something you can work with: write your own interface against, program an UI on top of it, or whatnot. Now I'm stuck with whatever crappy interface the Grab and Gojek developers give me on my shitty mobile phone (imagine people wanting to use their 1920x1080 screen instead of a phone to order food...)
Gonna make a goal to use a JavaScript web GUI to pass data to python to generate a fax that sends burrito orders. Should be a perfect into project
compare this nearly 30 year old script with the absolute red hot hell of trying to order anything at all through toast,caviar,grub hub,uber eats or postmates and you'll want to check out the latest RCS and build it on X86 before the end of the day. im serious. compared to the relatively clean, coherent and transparent burrito script, the dumpster fire that constitutes modern online ordering is an unforgiveable traves…
I went through to the payment screen and was greeted by several delivery-related fees, including a "small order fee" (which presumably only applies to inexpensive orders) and a "service fee", and a "CA Driver Benefits fee". None of these fees apply on orders that you pick up yourself, so it's pretty dishonest to say "no delivery fee" front and center in the app.
The user only discovers these fees at the very last screen, once they've invested in researching restaurants, choosing items, adding them to their cart, and possibly coordinating with other family members regarding their preferences/orders. Basically, users are much more locked-in by the time they realize there are actually many delivery-related fees, even if the "delivery fee" itself is not applied (when I looked another time, this particular fee was much smaller (1/8-1/4) of the delivery-related fees that remained.