Things I love about my new Mac:

1. Super-fast boot, sleep, wake and shutdown
2. Being able to update apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. when I want and not having to wait for Ubuntu to provide a package
3. Not having to click through stupid “your browser isn’t supported” pages on websites like Citibank just because I’m using Linux
4. Software updates that actually fix my computer instead of break it (wtf, Ubuntu?)
5. Spotlight
6. Muti-Touch

Things I miss about Linux:

1. Home and End keys that are clearly labelled and work the same way in all applications (wtf, Apple?)
2. Never/Rarely having to pay for software
3. Using my iPod to copy music to/from my home & work computers w/out iTunes thinking I’m a music pirate
4. Clicking the Firefox icon in my Panel (Dock) and having it open a new window, instead of bringing all the other FF windows to the front
5. Apps that quit when you close all their windows

I will never understand the allure of sliding glass shower doors. They’re ugly and hard to clean. This apartment has them, as well as a thick black layer of grime all around their bottom track. To make matters worse, they don’t fit well in my cramped bathroom, so they overhang in the inside rim of the tub by about a centimeter, making a nice little niche for more mold to grow. This is like, twenty years’ worth of grime; surely dating back to when this neighborhood was a slum and this building, probably a crackhouse squat.

As embarassing as it may be, I have been happily ignoring this grime in the 1 1/2 years I’ve lived here. I don’t take baths, and I avoid looking down too much. But yesterday I sat down on the floor of my tub during a long shower and saw that the mold had gotten even worse, so today I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I can’t bring myself to describe what I found, but suffice it to say that it’s now mostly gone– I’m taking a fume break, since my bathroom doesn’t even have an electric fan– just a passive air shaft with a vent that’s permanently rusted only 1/4 way open (even a few blows with a hammer couldn’t get it to open more. Because of this vent, I’m also treated to the mundane conversations of everyone else in the building as I sit on the can each morning.)

This apartment came with so much filth in so many places– from the mouse-turd infested stove (thoroughly Clorox’d my first couple days here, I’m happy to say) to the 1/8″ thick layer of dust on top of the medicine chest (too high for me to see and only discovered when a 6′4″ former boyfriend causticly remarked that I had a “very clean” bathroom) down to the mysterious layer of mud that I scraped from underneath the fridge on the day my kitchen drainpipe broke– that I can hardly believe some days that I live here. Why didn’t I notice the listing floors, the kitchen cabinets hung askew, the 4″ gap stuffed with steel wool between the bedroom floor and the interior closet floor before I agreed to take this place? Why didn’t I run screaming like the other guy the real estate agent took up with me? And let’s not even think about the broken cold water faucet in the bathroom or the perpetually running toilet, a 60’s-era powder blue contraption so old that they don’t even make replacement valves for it anymore.

The answer is that this is the East Village, and it’s trendy, and people want to live here. There are great bars and restaurants. Who cares if the rent is actually higher than most of the Upper East Side, the buildings infested with vermin, or that many people have bathtubs next to their stoves? You can go out with your friends on a weeknight and stumble home without the expense of taking a cab. Plus, this is still something of a gay neighborhood (although the boys are slowly being pushed out by the NYU kids who like to puke on my sidewalk and have loud cellphone conversations at 3am in my hallway.) And, like it or not, I’m not really interested in hanging out at the sports bars and chain restaurants that litter the UES. I guess there’s always Chelsea, but I’d feel like I’d have to start waxing my shoulders and getting my eyebrows threaded to live there.

Well, I suppose this has been a growing up experience for me. This is the first time I’ve had an apartment all to myself, and I naively thought that I preferred an old building with “character” to the microscopic, marble countertop’d gut renos I looked at below Houston St, which all seemed too fancy and too impractical for my tastes. Now I know better– next time I will happily trade a marble countertop for a couple uneven square feet of floorspace. I’m looking forward to my lease expiring at the end of August.

I just saw an amazing documentary movie last night, The Corporation. I remember when this film came out in 2003, and I remember dismissing it as just another preachy and hysterical rant. Well, I was very wrong.

The movie’s rather sensational “hook” is that if you observe the behavior of modern-day corporations in the context of an individual (since corporations are, in a certain legal sense, people) you get a personality profile not unlike criminal sociopathy. What’s great about the film, though, is that they let the Captains of Industry speak out in their own words. These guys are really deluded– one exec (sorry, I can’t remember from which company because I am a flake) waxes rhapsodic about a world in which every natural resource, from the air we breathe to rainwater from the sky, is bought and sold in a global marketplace. Basically, these guys tell themselves that they are protecting the environment by attempting to own every molecule of it. (This is the basic idea behind the “emissions credits” that Bush has been yakking about.)

On the other hand, there’s also an interview with Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, one of the world’s largest carpet manufacturers, who’s on a personal mission to bring “100% sustainability” to his industry. He’s actually been fairly successful in the past ten years reducing things like oil consumption and water use in his own company, while increasing profits. This guy is leading the good fight– but all of this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the marketplace.

Anyway, none of these issues is in and of itself new to me, but this is the first time I’d seen it all brought together in such an entertaining whole. Depressing, but entertaining. Rent it!

Hey, Google. Isn’t it about time to take that silly little word BETA out of your Gmail logo? Don’t your users– and, I’m just guessing here– number in the tens of millions, and aren’t you only like the richest and fastest-growing corporation on the planet, and don’t you have Bill Gates lying awake every night in a cold sweat? So, time to stand behind the quality of your product. My grampa uses Gmail. It’s gone past the “testing” phase, seriously.

And you, Yahoo!. So, you bought this funny little photo sharing site from some guys in Vancouver. And sure, there were some small bugs. And they warned people of this by pointing out that the site was still in BETA. But, most of your users now are actually paying a small hunk of change to use this service, and you, while no Google, are certainly pretty freakin’ far from a small handful of hackers in a rented office somewhere in Vancouver. So, get with the program already and stop charging people money for something that you proudly claim is only half-baked.

Friendster, I had words for you, but now I see that you’ve actually graduated from BETA status into full-fledged, grown up, mature website product. And for that, I congratulate you.

And audible.com, I’m sorry, but you can’t just go back into BETA after eight years on the web. It just doesn’t work that way.  That’s like me saying I’m 26.

And to Fotolog, Vimeo, Last.fm, and all the other genuinely small, indie, ingenious, punk-rock sites on the web: thank you for not throwing some silly word around like it’s the new Internet AIDS ribbon.

Anyone spot any other egregious misuses of the word BETA?