<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nSo, we’re off and running again after that nasty business<\/a>. <\/p>\n The first thing people say when they see my desktop is, “Why is your taskbar on the left? Clearly, you are a deviant and should be put down for the good of mankind.” <\/p>\n The taskbar is a strange beast. I first encountered it back in Windows 95. At the time I was a 3D modeler and using a program called Truespace. Truespace is to 3D content creation what Windows Movie Maker is to video editing. And Windows Movie Maker is to video editing what a deadly house fire is to cooking. You may accomplish your goal with this software, but you will learn the meaning of suffering and regret in the process. <\/p>\n At the time, Truespace used these horrible, inscrutable button bars that ran along the bottom of the screen. Since the program didn’t use any sort of meaningful hotkeys, you were constantly mousing down to the bottom of the screen to navigate these branching groups of minuscule 16×16 buttons. Sometimes one operation would require multiple trips through the squinty-button obstacle course. At 16×16, overshooting the button by just a couple of pixels would mean mis-clicking on the taskbar, which would mean suddenly switching to another window. In the days of only 4MB of memory, this was extremely painful and slow. This happened so often and was so infuriating that I had to move the taskbar to keep myself sane. After all, Windows 95 was new, the taskbar was new, and so what did I care where it was? I didn’t realize I was making a decision that would affect how I used the computer for the next decade and a half. <\/p>\n For a while I kept the taskbar at the top, but then I ran into a similar problem with all other programs. Reaching up to click on the menu bar might mean accidentally clicking in the taskbar. So eventually I settled on the left-side taskbar. After a few months this became routine. Routine became habit. Habit became law. <\/p>\n The left-taskbar was a bit annoying in the days of CRT’s, but in the age of wide-screen LCD monitors, it’s actually a good system. I spend a great deal of time reading. Reading documentation. Reading code. Reading webpages. When you’re reading there’s only so much horizontal space you can use at once. You don’t want your eyes to have to track from one edge of your wide-screen monitor to the other at the end of every line of text. Until we come up with an effortless way to cut things into magazine-styled columns (I’d love a system where you scrolled horizontally at the end of a column instead of vertically at the bottom of a page) then most web pages are going to have a vast expanse of white space on either side of the page. Assuming you’re not on a mobile, you’ve probably got a big ol’ white void on either side of the paragraph you’re reading right now. <\/p>\n The upshot is that I generally have a lot more horizontal space than I really need, and a lot less vertical than I’d like. Part of this is a result of the multi-purpose nature of the PC. We want our games, images, and movies in horizontal boxes to more closely resemble the way we see the world, but we want our prose in vertical boxes to make it easier to read. <\/p>\n Anyway. Left-handed taskbar. The point is, the only reason I use it this way is because of a program I haven’t used in 12 years.<\/p>\n The only thing left to install is Visual Studio. (True story: I just now accidentally typed that as “Visual Stupid”. Freudian slips say the darnedest things!) Before, I had to have Visual Studio 98 (woo! got it right that time) installed for my day job. But I also had Visual Studio 2008 (free edition) installed for private projects. VS 98 was needed for compiling immense legacy projects which were too costly to convert, and VS 2008 was needed for when I wanted to walk upright and work like a human being instead of a cave-dwelling animal. The problem was that having both on my machine at once was kind of annoying. <\/p>\n