I’ve posted a few of my doodles on Flickr.

From Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man:

In all my experience passing back and forth between male and female – often going out in public as both a man and a woman in one day – I rarely if ever interacted in any significant way with anyone (even store clerks) who didn’t treat me and the people around me in a gender-coded way, or freeze uncomfortably when they were uncertain whther I was a man or a woman.

It was the freezing that always struck me most. People will literally stand paralyzed for a moment, somtimes in mild, sometimes in utter panic when they don’t know what sex you are. You can see the confusion registering, or with polite people, being suppressed, and then you can see the adjustment being made either for male or female or for an extremely uncomfortable and robotic neutral ground between the two.

If they don’t know what sex you are, they literally don’t know how to treat you. They don’t know which code to opt for, which languatge to speak, which specific words and gestures to use, how close they can come to you phyically, whether or not they should smile and how. In this way we are no different than dogs – with the notable exception, of course, that no dog has ever been mistaken about anyone’s sex.

Apparently the OS X Java 5.0 r4 update breaks the QLA 3.5 server. I’m writing this, because I’m certain that this will happen to me later this summer when I’m setting up that Tiger Xserve that’s currently collecting dust in my office.

• Fix Quark QLA server after Java update

Okay, so I couldn’t find any screenshots on the Windows site (easily), so I got one courtesy of Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows.

• Screenshot of Vista’s Media Center

All I have to say is that it just plain looks bad. It looks like a very amateurish version of a Photoshop mockup. Everything is clunky. The type is too big. The icons look silly. Not necessarily the icons themselves, but the way that they are placed. Note the player controls on the bottom right. Some of them look like they are type dingbats others look like icons. Then there is the random giant green play button. I know it’s supposed to stand out…but seriously, isn’t this a little overboard? And Why is the Windows logo in the top left just a little bit bigger than the back button. It just looks bad.

So I was going to post about Vista and how I think the design really stinks. I decided that instead of stealing someone else’s screenshot, I should go straight to the source. So, I ended up at Microsoft’s Vista site. Oh my god, I’ve never seen a site break so bad in my entire life. I’m using Safari 2.0.3 (my cynical side thinks this might not entirely be an accident, but seriously…)

• Microsoft Vista Features Page

UPDATE: The site appears to be cleaned up a little and is now at least useable in Safari. The navigation is still horrendous though, but that’s another issue. (2.10.07)