Gourmet burgers are all the rage these days.  Someone figured out that if your customers are the yuppie crowd, it’s more profitable to sell them elaborate $10 burger contraptions, rather than $5 fast food combos.

The Counter is one of those places.  With a trendy design, highly customizable burger menu, and a full bar, this place is no McDonalds.  Why?  for one, McDonalds gives better service.

But, I’m digressing.  Let’s start from the top.  The Counter is a small franchise that currently has two locations.  The first store (pictured) is in Santa Monica.

I hate the design of The Counter.  The soft teal color scheme and industrial design is unattractive and depressing.  The restaurant trys, unsuccessfully, to combine the chic look of an ultra lounge with the comfort of a burger joint.  The end result is a restaurant that looks like a time machine broke down, spitting out hideous amalgam of future and past, with a little bit of prison coldness mixed in for good measure.

I visited the Palo Alto location on California Ave, a decent location packed with restaurants.  At lunch the place was busy - not because all tables were filled, but because the hosts and cashiers were too slow to balance seating customers and taking to go orders.  It’s frustrating when you’re forced to wait for a table when you see many tables open - but it’s infuriating when the person with your fate in their hands is some teenage girl with enough piercings to cripple an 18 wheeler.

So, I got togo.  The menu is self-serve checklist style.  You pick a burger type (beef, turkey, veggie, chicken), cheese, toppings, sauce and bun.  You can also select a premium topping or a burger in a bowl, which is exactly what it sounds like (minus the bun).

The toppings are decent.  I picked a horseradish cheddar burger with tomatoes, roasted chiles, spouts, mixed greens, sauteed mushrooms and a fried egg.  I know, fried egg…sounds good though, don’t you think?

Perhaps, but I will never know.  The girl who took my order got it wrong, and didn’t order my fried egg.  Hard to imagine, since the order form has little check boxes, and the one next to ‘fried egg’ was checked.  Seems simple enough, right? 

In any case, I waited 20 minutes for my burger.  And when you think of eating a burger for lunch, you never want to wait 20 minutes.  Actually, my burger was done after about 15 minutes, and it sat there in the bag while my fries were finished.

The problem here, is that the burger had wet toppings, so by the time I actually got the burger the bottom bun was a big soggy mess.  Not bad for $14, huh?

Actually, I know where my money went.  It was spent on my togo bag.

This bag was HUGE!  See, it’s almost as big as my computer!  I’m not even sure if I should throw it away.  I don’t know if it’ll fit in my trash can.

Anyway, the parts of the burger that was not soggy was actually decent.  The sauteed mushrooms had a bit of rosemary, and the mixed greens, while sparse, added a nice peppery taste to the burger.  The horseradish mayo that I selected was also very good. 

I’ve seen sweet potato fries at several restaurants now, and I have to say, I love them.  The Counter, despite its many failings, does succeed with these fries.  They were crispy, flavorful, and well seasoned.  Don’t bother with the included sauce though.

At the end of the day, The Counter has decent food that is vastly overshadowed by poor, slow service.  In some cases, such as my soggy burger, the service affects the food directly.  In other cases, the poor service makes you wish for a quick and efficient ‘fast food’ burger.

At one point, I asked the heavily pierced girl what the status of my burger was.  As seemingly simple question, yet she walked around in circles for a while, played with the computer, and never even got back to me.  And I was standing in front of her.

It’s this type of poor service that reflects most heavily on The Counter.  Look, it’s easy to make a burger with a lot of toppings.  But it’s hard to bring all the pieces together in a cohesive manner that makes said burger appealing - service, price, ambience, etc.  This is where The Counter fails most significantly.

The Counter

369 California Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94306
Telephone
650 321 3900

Fax
650 321 3902

As I mentioned previously I just moved, and got a new desk to go with my new place.  It’s a simple desk, with a dark wood top about an inch or two thick.

 One thing I wanted was a convenient way to hold my dual 19″ LCD monitors to both maximize desk space and flexibility.  In my previous place, I just used the stock monitor bases, but on Dell’s those can be cumbersome.

I chose a desk mount instead of a wall mount since I am renting, and don’t want to put any more holes in the walls than I really need to.  But most desk mounts were surprisingly expensive - even the ones for single monitors.

So, I turned to ebay, and found this pretty good looking seller with buy it now.  I’m hesitant to buy this kind of stuff on ebay, because it really needs to be strong and non-branded ebay stuff tends to be a bit weak, but oh well.

The price was good - less than $100 for two monitor arms, that’s a deal!  And it looks pretty clean too, if a bit too knobby for my taste.

I’ve been using this thing for a couple weeks now, and I have to say, it works great.  It is actually very sturdy, but the monitor arms have enough flexibility to let me move the monitors around, either forward/back or side to side.

It was easy to put together - took about five minutes.  The directions are pretty good, but really, there are not that many parts at all - it’s very simple.

Some things I don’t like:  the arms don’t go up and down, although you can tilt the individual monitors.  Also, the cord management is kind of weak - the cords pop out, and they’re only loosely concealed.

But all in all, this was a great buy.  If you have a couple of monitors you’re really wasting a lot of desk space by leaving them in their stock stands.  For less than $100 this is a steal, and it works great!

 Over the past decade, the market for mobile electronics, including cell phones, portable music devices, radios, and the like, has evolved quickly.  Today’s devices are smaller than ever before, while also packing impressive specs such as processing power and storage.

The evolution of these devices has been so quick, in fact, that many new devices are limited by human logistics rather than technology.  Cell phones, for example, can be the size of a postage stamp - however the human need for a screen with readable digits, and a keypad with pressable keys,  makes the development of such a small device impractical.

The answer to this dilemma is rollable screens.  Unlike traditional screens, rollable screens are thin, lightweight and flexible.  Not only can these screens flex horizontally and vertically, but they can be rolled into a more compact form for storage and transportation.

The applications for rollable screens are endless.  This technology may enable mobile phones to take a slim cigarette form factor, and when a call needs to be made, the keypad and screen can be unrolled.  PDAs, many of which are the size of a deodorant stick, can be made much more compact and portable.

I’ve been following this company Polymer Vision, one of a handful of companies that are investing in this technology.  I think it’s going to be the next big thing.  The company already has a few products out - but there is a lot more potential with their design.  As these screens become thinner, more durable, and more cost effective, I expect that most mobile devices will rely, at least to some extent, on a rollable display.