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~ Feverish ravings of a middle-aged mind

Random Blather

Monthly Archives: September 2014

Beauty, Physical Shapes, and Our Twisted Societal “Requirements”

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by dougom in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

skindeep
Image courtesy of Box Six

Lots and lots and lots of people have written posts, articles, scholarly dissertations, and entire books about the standards of beauty that are pushed on our society by media from movies to newspapers to billboards to you name it.  It’s a bit presumptuous of me–to say the least–to think that I can add to that.  But recently an college/internet friend was lamenting the insanity of body image and just by losing a few pounds (not on purpose), suddenly she was getting lots of comments about how “skinny” she looked.

I’m glad that people are complimenting her, but the subtext here is really unfortunate. “Skinny” as the correct goal, as the only proper body type for a woman to have, as if those stick-like runway models you see posing in Calvin Klein or whatever are the epitome of feminine perfection.

It’s just as twisted in Hollywood, of course.  I’ve done a bit of research and found that the vast majority of Hollywood actresses are both tall (few under 5’8″), slender, and small-busted (B or A cup sized).  When a woman gets up to a C cup, suddenly she’s “curvy”; you get over that and they start calling you “full-figured” or “voluptuous”, which in Hollywood-speak–but not in the real world!–means “overweight”.  In a culture that calls Jessica Alba (5’7″, 125 pounds, B-cup) “curvy”, you know something is out of whack.  And women that are Belle Epoque-style like Christina Hendricks or Kat Dennings stand out so much that you can’t hardly read a profile of them without their size being mentioned.  It’s insane.

(The thing that struck me is that in a country where the average height of a woman is 5’4″-5’5″, anyone under 5’7″ is considered “short”.  I keep thinking Rachel McAdams is short, but she’s 5’5″, for pete’s sake!  And when you watch “Firefly”, Christina Hendricks looks like she’s quite short, but in reality she’s 5’8″–she’s just surrounded by a bunch of men who are all over 6′.  Which is a whole different conversation.)

I once opined to a friend of mine that I really appreciated seeing actresses that were built like women, with busts and hips and whatnot.  She almost hit me.  “Plenty of women are naturally thin!” she said.  “There’s no one build!”  And she was absolutely right and I had been stupid, and that’s basically the point of this whole rant:  We come in all sizes, and it doesn’t matter a damn bit what your size is or even how you look.  I have dated women varying from 6′ tall and very slender to under 5′ and very curvy, and who cares, you know?

When you love someone, or even just like hanging out with them, you will stop focusing on the inevitable imperfections–my chipped tooth; my thinning, graying hair; my over-abudnace of stomach fat, my lack of much of a chest or a six-pack (which I’ve never had); etc.–and start seeing mainly, or even only, those things that you like.  Maybe like an ex-gf, you are fascinated by the lion-like yellowish tinge at the center of my irises, or maybe you find my chip-toothed smile endearing, or maybe my perpetually rumpled look makes you feel comfortable.  Whatever.  It doesn’t matter, ultimately, because if you like the person, you’ll like things about their physical appearance.  You just will.  Or you’ll simply cease to notice it.

Now I would be an idiot if I said that looks and build and whatnot didn’t matter at all.  Of course they do; perforce, they’re the first thing you notice when you meet someone.  And of course you have preferences; everyone does.  But if you limit yourself by those, you’re ruling out a pretty wide swath of people that you might quite like, or even want to partner up with.  Just because I tend to prefer curvy brunettes and redheads doesn’t mean I haven’t dated slender blondes (or slender women in general); just because I like being significantly taller than a partner doesn’t mean I only dated short women and indeed, I married someone who in our wedding pics looks taller than me.  Etc.  It’s the person, you doofs.  They say beauty is only skin deep, and I have to say I agree with Rosie O’Donnell in “Beautiful Girls”:

Implants, collagen, plastic, capped teeth, the fat sucked out, the hair extended, the nose fixed, the bush shaved… These are not real women, all right? They’re beauty freaks. And they make all us normal women with our wrinkles, our puckered boobs, hi bob, and our cellulite feel somehow inadequate. Well I don’t buy it, all right? But you fucking mooks, if you think that if there’s a chance in hell that you’ll end up with one of these women, you don’t give us real women anything approaching a commitment. It’s pathetic. . . If you had an once of self-esteem, of self-worth, of self-confidence, you would realize that as trite as it may sound, beauty is truly skin-deep. And you know what, if you ever did hook one of those girls, I guarantee you’d be sick of her.

And it’s true, kids; it really is.  If the person you’re with is not someone you like talking to, believe me:  The morning after in bed is going to be damn awkward.

I don’t know how to change the warped perceptions of “Beauty” (with a capital “B”) coming out of media, but we can all do it one person at a time, right?  Stop judging those women by their slenderness or big boobs; stop judging that guy by his nice ass and awesome six-pack.  Listen to Rosie; those things fade.  Let’s all get a grip.

A Little (Well, Quite a Bit of) Windows Hate Venting

01 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by dougom in Opinion, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Apple, GUI design, Mac, Microsoft, SGI, Silicon Graphics, Windows

image
Photo courtesy of ZDNet

So let’s get the caveats out of the way right up front, shall we?  First off, I am not a Mac acolyte (or MacAholic, or Mac Booster, or AppleHead, or whatever you call folks who think the sun rises and sets on Apple products).  Yes, we have a bunch of Apple products at our house, but that’s primarily because once I got an iPhone and Sami got her work Macbook, it just made life simpler to have everyone on the same OS.

At heart, I’m a UNIX nerd, and have been since the Reagan administration.  I’m perfectly comfortable with GUIs that run on top of UNIX (or UNIX-ish) systems, like the Linux GUI, or the Mac desktop, or (and especially) the late, lamented Silicon Graphics desktop.  But at heart, I’m a UNIX nerd who has VI keyboard shortcuts coded into my lizard brain.  It’s just how I am

But second, I don’t like Microsoft, the company.  I don’t like how they used their OS market dominance to force products on people and kill (often technologically superior) competitors; I don’t like how they steal ideas from anyone and everyone, change them slightly, and try to pass them off as their own.  And I most especially don’t like their huge, bloated desktop programs, which they seem to change every couple of years for no reason other than to update the color scheme or move menu items around.  (Or to add my least favorite GUI innovation ever:  “Ribbons“.  An opinion in which I’m hardly alone.)

To get to the point here:  For the last several years, I’ve been working on a Mac (for business reasons–I tend to work on what they give me, and haven’t owned my “own” system in a long time, unless you want to count my iPhone and iPad mini).  There are any number of things about the Mac interface that annoy me–and seriously, don’t get me started on that horrific piece of design known as iTunes–but in general I find the Mac user experience pretty solid.  In fact, it reminds me very much of my beloved SGI Indy box.  But recently I changed jobs and am back on a PC, and my Windows hate has surged once again to the fore.

Rather than get into all the ways that Windows drives me nutty–how hard it is to take screen caps compared to on a Mac, or the difference in complexity in deleting a program (on a Mac, you just drag the thing to the durn trash can!)–I can sum it up pretty quickly:  Defaults.

You know all those settings you can change in Windows?  The default font size of your emails; whether calendar alarms chime and with what sound; whether the top and sides of the screens perform that new “docking” maneuver; etc.  All those options have settings put in by Microsoft out of the box.  Those are the defaults.  And for me, the difference between the (SGI) Irix GUI and Mac desktop, and the Microsoft desktop, is that Microsoft sets all those defaults wrong.

No, I don’t want all those noises, chimes, and alarms to sound for all those applications.  No, I don’t want click noises when I move Windows around.  (I find Windows so noisy I keep the desktop muted all the time.)  No, I don’t want Internet Explorer to be my default browser.  No, I don’t want “ribbons” fully opened in all my apps by default.  No, I don’t want all my past emails “grouped by date”, I just want a flat list.  (And you can’t even set that to be the default; you have to change it for every single mailbox by hand!)  No, I don’t want the email list to be a stack; I want it to be a stack, with the most recent item at the bottom of the list, not the top (and when I reset it, please open it that way the next time I fire up Outlook.)  Etc.

And then there’s that little “Windows” button that everyone has on their keyboards.  OK, fine, but it’s right near the shift and control keys, which means half the time I try to use keyboard shortcuts, I get the Start menu instead.  It got so bad at a previous job, I actually pried the damn key off my keyboard.

image
The keyboard in question

Of course, there are other little annoyances as well that drive me nuts.  That you have to click in a window before you can scroll in it; a Magic Mouse on a Mac will scroll any window, no matter where you clicked last.  Or how hard it is to kill an application in Windows vs. Mac–in Windows, you have to open the task manager, where on a Mac you can just right-click that sucker.  But in the main, it’s those damn defaults.

Yeah, sure; some of those settings are wrong on the Mac, too.  But the majority of them, they’re fine.  On Windows?  I spend the first day or two resetting a whole bunch of defaults so that I don’t get annoyed every time I try to perform the simplest actions.

Some of you more savvy tech folks out there are saying, “What’s the big deal, Doug?  So they set up the defaults in a way you hate; you can always change them!”  Yup, that’s true.  I could argue that the fact that I have to spend the first couple of days on a new system changing all the defaults strongly implies they’ve screwed up on their choices pretty badly, but I won’t.  The real problem is:  Figuring out how to change these defaults is practically impossible.

There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, there is a veritable ocean of default settings, and when you’re looking for one drop of water in an ocean–or even in a bathtub–it’s going to take you a long time to find it.  And it turns out that Microsoft’s inability to correctly guess what their users are going to need on a default basis extends to where they put their various system settings.  For example, you know that thing the desktop does when you drag a window to the top of the screen and it plunks it into full-screen mode?  That’s a feature set by default, called a “hot spot”.  It allows for auto-sizing and docking, and some people really like it.

Me, it drives crazy, so I wanted to turn it off.  It’s similar to the fact that when you launch new programs they always pop up on top of whatever windows are on your desktop.  Hey, if I launch a program that takes forever to come up, and then go into another window to do something else, I don’t want that damn program to grab control of my screen!  I tiled a different window to the top on purpose!  Similarly, if I want my window to go to full screen mode, I’ll do it myself, thanks.  Most of the time, I just want it to go to the durn top of the screen!

So okay, I want to turn it off.  Where is that?  Why, in the most obvious place imaginable!  You go to the Ease of Access Center from the Start menu (which is no longer labeled “Start”, I might add), select “Make the mouse easier to use”, and click a radio button labeled “Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen“.  Yeah, that’s right; under a mouse settings location.  Intuitive, no?

No.

As a rule of thumb, let me just say this to you UI designers out there:  If your users have to go to Google to find out how to modify settings in your app, a) your app design is a failure, and b) your online help system sucks.  (And seriously:  You don’t want me to start on the lameness that is the MS help system.  When a user doesn’t know if she’s going to get pop-up windows, a separate help window, or get sent to the browser and the MS web site, you’ve got a screwed-up system.)  Just sayin’.

And for me that pretty much extends to the entire OS; it is a rare day when something I’m looking for is where I first look.  Or the second location.  Or even the third.  The vast majority of the time I have to pull up the help window.  How is this intuitive interface design?  Does Microsoft even have a user experience team?

Bet it saves them a ton of money, thought.

I’m not an engineer.  I trained as one, sure, but I’m not one.  But I’ve had a ton of experience in fiddling with new user interfaces, and on this, Windows really tanks.  And I know I’m not alone in thinking this.

[puff puff]  Okay; I’ve gotten that out of my system.  For now, anyway.

 

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