Ubuntucat

I’ve heard a lot of people extolling the virtues of the Google Chrome browser. I tried it a few times. I even tried to make it my default browser for a couple of months. It didn’t last long, even though there are a lot of good things about it.

Here’s what I like about Google Chrome:

1. Like Firefox and Opera, it’s cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac, and Linux).
2. It loads pages quickly.
3. Tab switching is fast. Sometimes in Firefox if you have too many tabs open, there is a slight delay before the page will show up after you switch to an even already-loaded page.
4. The status bar (well, at least to show you what URL you’re hovering over) pops up only on hover. This is great for netbooks, which have scant vertical screen real estate.
5. Extension installation or theme changing doesn’t require a browser restart.
6. Private browsing can be opened in a new window that operates simultaneously with the regular browsing session. This is very handy for testing what your Google profile or Amazon wishlist looks like to the outside world without having to disrupt your workflow.

Ah, but here is what I don’t like:

1. Even though it generally pages load up quickly, every now and then the loading just hangs in the middle. This has happened to me in both Windows and Linux, on two separate computers with two separate internet connections.
2. If you download a file, a little download progress bar pops up at the bottom of the browser. When the download is finished, though, the bar doesn’t disappear.
3. Theoretically, Flash crashing one tab shouldn’t affect any of the other tabs, but I’ve experienced Flash suddenly turning into a frowny face, and having that happen in every single Chrome window (apparently, it’s the Flash plugin itself that’s failing and not any particular page, but this has happened to me in only Chrome, not Firefox).
4. The address bar will recognize URLs if I start typing the beginning of the URL, but if I start typing the middle of it or some other key phrase, sometimes it’ll bring up the URL I’m looking for, and sometimes it won’t.
5. Some sites do not behave well with the middle-click on Chrome (WordPress tag surfing, for example… sometimes Google News). Instead of opening in a new tab, the site will insist on opening the link in the same tab.
6. I don’t have enough money to buy a proper site certificate for my websites, so when I use https for certain things on my own websites, I get a security warning. In Firefox, I can just install the Mismatched Domains extension to avoid this warning. In Chrome, I have no choice but to just put up with the extra click to get through the warning.
7. The tab behavior in Chrome doesn’t work with the way I browse websites.

This last point was really my biggest pet peeve. I realize I’m in the minority here, but even if that is the default behavior, I should have the option to switch it. Now that the Modified Tab Ordering Chrome extension has come out, Chrome is finally bearable for me. I understand the reasoning behind opening tabs next to the current tab instead of at the very right. Supposedly it helps you not to lose track of tabs when you have too many. Whatever. If you don’t want to lose track of a tab you just opened, open it in the foreground instead of the background (Control-Shift-Click).

This is the way I surf: I have a bunch of root links I visit every day. I open them all at once from my bookmarks. Then I middle-click or Control-click the sublinks I’m interested in. Those sublinks all appear on the far right. Once I’m done closing all the root links, I can finally read all the sublinks. With the Chrome default behavior, I would have to either read all of the first root link’s sublinks and then go to the next root link, or deliberately skip over all those sublinks to get over to the next root link. That’s not the way I do things.

Thanks to Brad Dwyer for making this extension available!

I just finished reading Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, and I have to say the book’s title doesn’t really match its contents. It’s brilliant marketing, though. Any kind of controversial title will always bring more attention to the book. I doubt Gottlieb would have riled up critics and skeptics as much with a title like Have actual reasonable expectations when dating. Not quite as snappy-sounding, is it?

Ultimately, though, that’s what it boils down to. Sure, Gottlieb throws in little humorous self-deprecating anecdotes and makes the book entertainingly simplistic. There is a lot of good truth in her book, though. Unfortunately, where people seem to take offense is in the book’s narrow scope. Truth may be truth… but not all truths are universal.

Who should read this book? Whom do this book’s truths apply to? It seems only women who are like Gottlieb. If you are a woman who feels entitled to the “perfect” man and believes “perfect” involves all sorts of nitpicky details about his hair color, his income, what clothes he wears, what his favorite movies are, etc., and you desperately want to get married and have kids… then, yes, you should read this book (and just ignore the sensationalist title). Anyone else will just find this an interesting sociological glimpse into the world of a certain segment of upper-middle-class heterosexual dating in America among those who buy into traditional gender roles.

In all fairness, I don’t think Lori Gottlieb picked the title to be sensationalist (that was probably just a fortunate-for-her side effect). From the beginning of the book all the way until the end, you get the sense that this epiphany of hers is strictly cerebral. Even as she is telling women (or certain types of heterosexual women) that it isn’t about settling but about recognizing romance, beauty, and attractiveness where perhaps you didn’t see it before; it’s pretty clear that she is still in the process of convincing herself, and so her perspective on it remains labeling that adjustment settling.

All of this becomes quite clear in the chapter in which she signs up for Match.com with the assistance of a dating coach named Evan. Her dismissals of various men explain quite easily why this woman who is desperate to get married (because not all women are) is still single in her early 40s. One man she dismisses because he doesn’t post his salary to his profile. Another she dismisses because his favorite movie is You’ve Got Mail. Even though she is only 5′ 2″ tall, she initially wants to look at men who are only 5′ 10″ tall or above. Seriously? This isn’t about settling. This is really about getting over the princess complex of “I deserve to have every little thing my heart desires.” She eventually, based on stories from friends and consultations with professionals and researchers, does make the distinction between what you want and what you need. I don’t think by the end of the book it fully sinks in for her that you may not even know what you really want (she does hint at it briefly, so there’s hope for her).

The main criticisms I’d lob at the book are:

• Even though the professionals and friends she quotes in the book present more nuanced views of heterosexual relationships, Gottlieb keeps going back to this false dichotomy of men being either exciting and unreliable or boring and reliable. Men are human and complex, just as women are. I have absolutely no interest in her (I’m married), but if I were single, I know she’d glance right over me (my favorite movie is When Harry Met Sally, I’m much taller than her but still “too short,” I am not rich, I am not Jewish). Worse still, if she were actually interested in me, she wouldn’t be interested in me. She’d just be rationally convincing herself that I’m the last resort… and she’d be settling. It doesn’t sound as if she’s ready at all to appreciate men who aren’t some impossible Frankenstein hodgepodge of traditional het female ideals for potential mates.
• She blames feminism for her problems. Well, she blames a lot of stuff, but she has a whole chapter dedicated to how feminism ruined her life. Feminism didn’t ruin her life, though. Feminism has nothing to do with it. Feminism isn’t about finding some crazy ideal of what a husband should be. Feminism isn’t about feeling entitled to some “perfect” man desiring you. Maybe she needs to go back and read some Betty Friedan and Susan Brownmiller… or even some Cynthia Heimel.
• Not all marriages involved what she calls “settling.” Sometimes there are butterflies. Sometimes there is romance, sparks, fireworks, etc. Yes, couples that have been together a long time may spruce up their “how we met” story a bit, but that doesn’t mean “how we met” is always “Yeah, I couldn’t have George Clooney or Brad Pitt, so I married this guy. He wasn’t what I wanted, but otherwise I’d be alone in my 40s and writing bestselling books.”
• A good marriage doesn’t just mean finding two people who match up with each other. We are not all puzzle pieces looking for a matching, interlocking puzzle piece. It’s not as if you suddenly meet “The One” and then everything’s golden. A lot of what makes two people good together isn’t just who they are and how well they match up with each other. A lot of it has to do with what they have been through together, the experiences they’ve shared, and the ways they’ve supported, shaped, and appreciated each other over the years. She quotes (and actually misquotes, at one point) When Harry Met Sally a couple of times. Maybe she needs to watch that movie again.

Despite all my critcisms (and, believe me, I’m not the only critic), I enjoyed reading the book. Lori Gottlieb has an engaging writing style, and she mixes in her own thoughts and experiences fluidly with professional and personal interviews/anecdotes. If you identify with this obsession with fairy tale weddings and having two-page lists of everything you think some guy should have, this book is certainly for you. It isn’t about “settling,” though. It’s about appreciating beauty where you didn’t think you would find it. It’s about ditching your assumptions about men based on their looks, salary, height, or superficial interests. It’s really about realizing that men are humans, too. If you’re a woman like Gottlieb, just think about how you would measure up if men judged you the way you judge them.

Google just announced a new service called Buzz, which is supposed to be Google’s answer to Facebook. Unfortunately, based on the Buzz site and its accompanying video, I don’t see this supplanting Facebook any time soon. I’ve got some advice for Google on how to make it work:

1. Allow people to start slowly. Yes, when Facebook was released to the general public (not just college students), a lot of us felt like “Really? You want me to sign up for yet another thing? I thought we did all this? Friendster, MySpace, Xanga, etc. I don’t want another account.” Many people gave in, though, and created another account because Facebook offered the kind of lively community other social networking sites had not yet offered. It’ll be a lot more difficult to convince people to start up not only another social networking account but another email account. A good chunk of my friends have GMail accounts, but they don’t all have GMail accounts. From what I’ve seen, Buzz requires a GMail account and is part of the GMail interface. That’s a mistake. It should be its own thing (like Docs, Translate, Maps, etc.) with perhaps added integration with GMail if you already have a GMail account. Google wised up to this with its recent changes to Google Voice (you can have a subset of GV features by using your current cell phone number, and you can add more GV features by creating an entirely new GV number). If Google doesn’t encourage people to start slowly, Buzz will die, because I’d much rather keep in touch with all my Facebook friends than only the ones who use GMail (by the way, I have a GMail account, but it is not my main email account, and I check it through an email client, not through webmail).
2. Really follow through on reducing noise-to-signal ratio. It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve finally grown to love Facebook. There are a few things about Facebook that still annoy me, though, and if Google wants to have people use Buzz, Google needs to step up and really fix the mistakes Facebook has refused to fix. The biggest problem for me now is that I’m basically friends with someone or I’m not. There are people I want to keep in touch with, but I don’t want to know every single aspect of their lives. Right now, Facebook allows me to either ignore certain friends completely… or hear about what they had for breakfast, and lunch, and snack, and what latest gadget they got, and some link they thought was interesting, and twenty pictures of their baby daughter. If Google can organically make the updates fit how friendships really work, that’d be a huge draw for future former Facebook users. No more fretting about whether someone is an acquaintance, a friend, a former close friend, a current close friend, a family member. You’ll get the kinds of updates you care about. Certain people will appear more frequently in your feed or more kinds of posts you care about will appear more frequently (to anyone who’s my Facebook friend right now, I love pictures and interesting status updates—I hate weird applications, quizzes, and embedded videos).
3. Make privacy settings easy. The privacy settings in Facebook right now are the worst of both worlds: they’re complicated, but they are also not comprehensive enough. Just as I don’t want to hear everything about what’s going on in certain people’s lives, I don’t want everyone to know what’s going on in my life, but sometimes I want even acquaintances or not-so-close friends to know certain things. In Facebook, people can basically either see your updates… or they can’t. If Buzz has the ability to set any given post as for just super-close friends, for all my friends, for all my friends and acquaintances, or for anyone with internet access, that’d score points for me and make me want to move over from Facebook.
4. Keep the interface consistent. I have no doubt, actually, that Google will do this. I’ve seen them overhaul GMail and the Google homepage, but they tend to take years to do a makeover. Facebook seems to want to redecorate every few weeks, and that annoys its users. If Google wants to bring people over, there needs to be a lot of emphasis about what Buzz has to offer that Facebook doesn’t.
5. Encourage folks to “dual-boot.” If Google can find a simple way to encourage people to try out Buzz and actually use it while not entirely giving up Facebook, that’d be gold for Buzz. No one is going to drop Facebook completely and start Buzzing. If Buzz is going to take off, people have to be able to test the waters. I would suggest a Buzz kickoff week, in which Google encourages everyone with a GMail account to take a brief sabbatical from Facebook and Buzz about something cool that week.

That’s all I can think of. And I don’t even think that’s a surefire way to get Buzz to take off. I think if Google takes all these suggestions, it may have a fighting chance against Facebook. No guarantees, though. Right now, Facebook is everywhere.

Spoiler Warning: If you want to eventually see Avatar or Inglorious Bastards, I reveal plot details here.

There has been quite a bit written about James Cameron’s Avatar. Here are two examples:
Annalee Newitz’s “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?”
Ariel Boone’s “Avatar: Count the ‘isms’”

I get it. I understand all the racial, imperialistic, and gender issues with Avatar. I knew all that stuff going in. And, you know what? It didn’t bother me that much. I was actually able to enjoy the movie, despite the “White guilt” sign that practically flashed on the screen every other scene.

What I find interesting, though, is Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards. In it, there’s quite a serious rewrite of history, in which a Jewish woman, whose family is killed by the Nazis, is able to destroy the leadership of the Nazi party, and a rebel American group gets to carve the Swastika symbol on the foreheads of other Nazis so that they can’t later pretend they had nothing to do with the Holocaust. A nice, quaint rewrite of history, just as James Cameron’s Avatar says “Oh, wouldn’t it have been nice if one of the White settlers in the Americas could have led the Native Americans in revolt against the other evil White people, and the noble savages could keep the land pure and untainted by technology and corporate interests?” Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards says “Oh, wouldn’t it have been nice if we got all those Nazis, and if the Jews themselves could have given the Nazis a taste of their own medicine?” The cinema itself becomes a kind of gas chamber for Nazi leadership.

No one in the theater I saw it in was horrified. People were cheering. Everyone seemed to enjoy the film. I enjoyed the film. But I wonder… if Quentin Tarantino had decided to make a movie in which Black slaves in the American South in the 18th or 19th century violently revolted against their masters and lynched those White slave owners, would (predominantly White) American audiences still cheer? After all, those White people aren’t you, right? For many White people in America, those slave owners aren’t even their ancestors. And for those White Americans who did have slave owning ancestors, do you think about how the descendants of Nazis feel watching Inglorious Bastards?

Maybe I’m guessing wrong. Maybe American audiences would give it the same kind of reception. Maybe it would, as Avatar seems to do, soothe some White liberal guilt. Maybe James Cameron’s next movie will feature John Brown leading a successful slave revolt at Harpers Ferry. I just haven’t seen anyone discuss this angle when talking about Inglorious Bastards. For those of you who’ve seen both films, what did you think? Is there a connection between the two? How did you think about them sociologically?

P.S. I don’t really dig White liberal guilt. I am a non-White liberal (very liberal when it comes to race, gender, politics, etc.). If White filmmakers want to make a real change, a great start would be making more films that feature Asian American, Latino, and Native American (both female and male) protagonists (no reason to have foreign-sounding accents, either). The White straight male protagonist with a supporting cast of women, geeky men, non-Whites, and possibly a gay person approach has been done… and overdone, way overdone in Hollywood movies.