Joss Whedon was a contributor to the Toy Story screenplay.

Seriously, this guy needs to stop hogging all the awesome, and let some of us plebs have some.

In honor of my first attempt at snowboarding today, a link to my first skiing experience. Skiing, a Rant.

Interestingly enough snowboarding is hard and painful. As is the snow. Ha! Fortunately this time it was windy and snowing causing me to get pelted with painful, painful ice.

On the plus side, before the snowboarding lesson I was able to ski for a couple hours. Awesome snow (again, except for being pelted in the face with ice) and that was fun. Not only that, I also had the most spectacular fall of my life (tied for first, I guess, with the time I fell bowling and backflipped because I crossed the foul line. That lane is slippery!). This time I was skiing, hit some clump of snow, fell forward. Just about when I thought it was over I realized my body was actually going into a front roll — if I knew I wasn’t going to break my neck I would have enjoyed it.

Well, I’m going at least twice more — I prepaid for three days (three days including lesson, lift ticket, and rental is only $99 — quite the bargain).

In a tradition that now spans the two times I’ve been to Snoqualmie, I got to eat pancakes. This time I got to ski first though, which was a plus.

Here we go, I’ve been frustrated by these long enough that I can’t quietly suffer anymore. Here are things that some PM needs to be kicked in the head for. These only work on Windows, obviously.

1) Hit Windows-F. Up pops Windows Find. Windows Find took a book out of Office’s “Book of Crap” and has some stupid animated character show up to “help” you search. In the default instance it is a dog. The dog walks up and asks you what you want to search for. A cute little animation. A cute little animation that blocks the use of the search menu until the animation is complete. At what point did someone decide the animation was more important than usability? Oh and the best part is when you realize this is why those links don’t work, and you disable the stupid dog, you have to watch a 6 second animated clip of the dog going away before you can use find. Oh man, oh man, I hate that dog.

2) I forgot number 2 because I had to reenable the dog to see how long the dog walking away took, and it pissed me off.

3) Everything has a tooltip. Let me tell you something: tooltips are mostly useless. For example, Communicator (an IM program like AIM) does not need to tell me, if my mouse happens to be over the message pane, that these are the “messages that have been sent and received.” To be honest, anyone who doesn’t realize that’s what is going on probably shouldn’t be on the internet anyway. All the tooltip does is cover up text I may be trying to look at and OH MAN I JUST THOUGHT ABOUT THAT STUPID DOG AGAIN.