Windows rant, playing games over Christmas break

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Holy cow you mean to say that I haven't updated hwan.com in 11 days? Yikes. That is.. well, I am sorry. Not that sorry, but surprised certainly. Actually, I'm here to write about windows, er, Windows. In particular, reordering of items in the Start menu. For the longest time I would, when tidying up my Start programs, press really hard on the mouse button, sometimes getting the item to drag and sometimes not, not really knowing why it would or wouldn't work. Irrational I know, but it just felt that doing so would help. I finally figured it out just now -- if you drag a folder, you have to wait for Windows to expand it. Otherwise, the expand animation unsets the click and doesn't recognize that you are attempting a drag action.

THIS IS STUPID!!! Oh WOW that bugs me ever so much. How did this possibly get past user testing? How is it that this has been this way since.. since dragging of expandable Start Menu items was allowed? Windows Explorer certainly doesn't act this way. I just realized.. WHY THE HECK DOES WINDOWS HAVE TO FADE MY BLOODY START MENU! It's the most used interface on my computer and I've been sitting around waiting for the damned thing to animate!? That's it, I'm turning that crap off right now. Hmm.. how do I remove the delay? Oh c'mon Windows, don't tell me you need time to render a few icons and text? Surely not! Hmmm.. oh I see. Apparently, Windows defaults the following registry key value to 400:

My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay

Which is the biggest piece of rubbish ever. Oh, I do shake my head so.

I woke up at some fiendish hour today, maybe around 6 or 7 AM? Left work around 7 or 8? Playing StarCraft, yeah. Anyway, I can't concentrate on more than one thing right now, which probably explains why my gaming was so terrible. And a minute ago I was talking to my mom on the phone and I glanced at something on the screen and totally blanked out of the conversation. We were talking about my dad's birthday and I have NO recollection of what she said, oh dear.

Hmm.. but my mental state did not deter me from dropping a bit of fun money on some Steam games -- Prince Of Persia, Mass Effect and Sid Meier's Pirates! Steam has a funtastic little special on everything right now, and what with the economy the way it is, I decided to do a little bit of extra saving. Before 2009. Not that I need a reason to be irrational.

Christmas was alright, yeah. I spent it in Markham with the parents and sister. Ate a whole lot, stomach now on the flabtastic side. Came home Friday night, and spent much of the weekend playing the new Red Alert 3. Video games! Why aren't more people playing them? Shamus may know: Reset Button: Most Innovative Game of 2008.

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