compuTOR! take me to the CLASSses!

Okay! So I'm registered at Shoreline for the bio class I can't get into at main campus in the fall (because nonmatriculating students don't get into the intro bio sequence, too many people need it) and that's all set up and ready to go. The registration system puked at me and didn't want to let me log in, but when I called their registration group they had it working in under five minutes. That's pretty cool.

Oh. Because I am insane, I'm also enrolled in Japanese 111. INSANITY!

Meanwhile, my summer quarter UW class schedule starts in, um, 65.4 hours. YEEK! Lab coat's in the wash, textbooks are pulled and ready, notebook filled with paper and ready (it matches my backpack! ^_^ ), RF response keypad pulled and power-checked.

I am so nervous.

Yuck.

Livejournal is hacking with the user profile page. The changes are, in my opinion, universally awful. Look at your own userinfo page, then add

?ver=ng

to the end of the URL to see the "new look." Here's what mine looks like in "new look" form.

Things I hate: The two-column layout. The pronounced tendency to horizontal scrollbars. The nasty myspace feel. The priourity it gives to "friends" over "biography" - you know, the thing the user actually writes. The fact that it puts the most useful information in the right hand column, the column where sites often put ads, and which is also the column many web readers have learned to block out. Advertisers call this "right hand blindness," and that's where they've put things I care about in the profile. The accidental nasty whitespace that appears in the middle of the second column (of three, in dystopia) if you put anything of any length in your bio. The fact that it lists the last school in your school list as your current school, which is just wrong. The bad wrapping control in the top box, the one that replaces the neat and tidy (and small) icon strip currently used.

Comments on the lj_design thread that I've read so far have been overwhelmingly very negative, but supposedly the comments from the support team were less than overwhelmingly thrilling, but they've gone ahead and referred to that feedback as being "positive feedback" and are so far pushing ahead with the new look. I think it's awful and suggest people here who have LJ accounts and opinions leave your own feedback on the thread I linked to above.

[ETA: None of this is to imply that I think the current userinfo page is good. It's not, particularly. But the new version is significantly worse for anyone who writes a bio or does any manipulation on their userinfo/profile page. For people who don't, the new look is... well, still lame, but not nearly as bad for them as for us.]