WARNING: This is one of those posts you'll read and realize you can never get that time back.

What I did while I was not working yesterday:

1. Made peanut butter krispies with the kids. They're still not quite WMU-cafeteria-like. I wonder if they'd give me their recipe.
2. Laundry
3. Took the kids to the library (now reading Spook Country by Gibson)
4. Dishes
5. Bought oil and fizzy gogurt at Walmart
6. Helped the kids draw a (slightly) "dark and cold garden forest"
7. Busted another Diet Coke in the freezer*

That right edge isn't a shadow. It's the inside of the can where it split.

*Doh!

Hey! Quick update:

• Vacation's over.
• Got a new laptop at work with Vista.
• Want to rant about something.

Normally I'd post a picture of the new laptop and gush a bit, but I don't have the camera with me. Anyway, it's a Vostro 1700, and it's been a bumpy and interesting road getting here, but I have to at least thank Jason for advising that we wait until Dell coughed up some Santa Rosa-ness.

So, Vista. Oy. Like it and hate it. Most of the hate is more just adjusting to something different, I think. Overall, in the two days I've been messing with it, it's a positive experience.

However, something I haven't found a fix or reasonable adaptation for is the drag-and-drop copy icon. It's terrible. It's at least 5 times the size that it needs to be, and it always appears with your cursor centered in the bottom middle of the icon. This seems completely counter-intuitive to me. It's like (no offense to left-handers meant, you guys are great, but) a left-handed person designed the UI. I've had some left-handed friends, and they tend to write/draw with their hand obscuring the text they've just written. I don't know how they'd do otherwise given our left to right English language...perhaps if they could compose their thoughts backwards across the paper.

In Vista, when you drag-and-drop some files, this GIANT icon obscures the area where you're attempting to drop the selected files/folders. See below.

I don't understand why anyone would ever think that's good. They've added this blue arrow thing at the bottom of the HUGE icon that is supposed to name the folder that you're copying or moving the files to. Ok, fine, but if you just let me SEE what I'm doing, then I wouldn't need you to write it out and take the time to read the destination in your handy tooltip (again) instead of just reading the name of the folder as I drop onto it. The blue arrow thing feels like an after-the-fact "hey, this ENORMOUS icon obscures where we're copying stuff to... well, the SUPERSIZED icon is critical, so what else can we do about that?"

In Windows Explorer in XP when you dragged and dropped the translucent image of what you were moving matched the image of the icon that you dragged it from. Meaning, if you liked viewing your files as icons and you moved them around, they looked like icons. Not REALLY BIG icons, just icons. Like this:

More importantly, if you were a smart individual, and you used detail view, your translucent drag-and-drop image looked like a detail icon, like this:

AND, if you were to drag from the left folder tree into the right pane, the image also looked like the detail view, as the left pane of Windows Explorer is basically a folder tree in detail view mode.

I can find no way to alter the size or positioning of this COLOSSAL drag-and-drop icon. It's always BIG. It never matches the icon size of your preference. It's especially annoying when you're moving anything onto an unopened folder in detail view mode, which is apparently what I do all the time. If anyone has suggestions, they'd be much appreciated.