I've never been a fan of the Windows QuickLaunch bar. (For those that don't know, it's that area of the Taskbar just to the right of the Start Menu where you can put shortcuts to the programs you use frequently.) Don't get me wrong - I understand its purpose, and for a lot of people I can see how it would be useful. But my problem is that I'm a tiny bit obsessed with using my keyboard for, well, anything I can. In fact, my #1 least favorite "feature" of Windows Vista is the quick search thingy in the Start menu, because it took away the ability to effectively launch programs with the keyboard. In XP, you could hit the Windows key to bring up the Start menu, and then just hit the first letter of a program. So long as no other programs on the menu started with the same letter, it would just launch. For example, I have Firefox set as my default browser, so it shows up on the menu as "Internet". In XP, I could simply hit the Windows key, then "i", and Firefox would launch. But that stupid quick search on the Start menu got rid of that capability.

So anyway ... where was I? Oh, yeah - the QuickLaunch bar. As I was saying, I used to pretty much avoid using it because, until today, I thought that they only way to launch something from it was with the mouse. But then I read about a cool keyboard shortcut. It turns out that in Vista (and as far as I know, this is a Vista-only thing), you can simply press and hold the Windows key, and the press 1 to launch whatever program is first (the furthest to the left) in the Quicklaunch bar. Windows-2 launches the second program, and so forth.

Obviously, this is limited to only ten items (Windows-0 launches the tenth), but it's still a great shortcut. I've gone in and rearranged the QuickLaunch bar so that the ten programs I use the most will now be much easier to access.

Just for the record: I'm not anywhere near mentally ready for it to be football season already. Still, I know it doesn't count or anything, but any day that's a loss for Indianapolis is a good day...

This evening, I came downstairs from putting Jess to bed and there, sitting innocently in my inbox was a little message from Olen, a simple link to Hulu.com and ... DOCTOR HORRIBLE!!! Yeah! I get to see it without having to infect my computer with iTunes! Yeah!

Loved it. Loved it loved it loved it. It's funny, the tunes are catchy, and even Nathan Fillion's "singing" doesn't spoil the show too much. They left themselves nicely open for more ... oh it's great.

And you can even buy one of those super-cool Capt. Hammer groupie t-shirts!