Archives January 2012

Something that has bugged me for a long time in Windows 7 is how the taskbar right-click functionality was changed.  Since Windows 95, when you right clicked on an item in the taskbar, you were presented with a menu to Restore, Minimize, Maximize, Close, and with some programs, some nifty custom options (like PuTTY’s custom menu, which since I use it  a lot, is the main source of my gripes here).

But, for some reason in Windows 7, Microsoft decided to do away with all of that and change what the right click does.  Right clicking now brings up Windows 7’s jump lists.  A feature that is absolutely worthless to a good 95% of the programs that run on Windows.  It was so incredibly frustrating to me to right click on running program and not be presenting with a useful menu, and right clicking on the program name in the jump list presenting you with an equally worthless menu.  Even more frustrating was there is an alternate way to access jumplists, by clicking and dragging up, they didn’t have to change the right click functionality!  The final straw was when they (as usual) gave you no setting to change this option back to the classic right click menu.  Now, I realize you can hold the Shift key and right click on a taskbar item to get the classic menu, but I want that to be the default function, not something that his hidden behind the shift key.

Well, as you may have guessed, I have a fix for this.  A little free program called 7 Taskbar Tweaker.  This program will let you change the right click function back to the classic menu (and a slew of other tweaks)!  And even more so, if you do use jump lists for something, you can still access them by the other method of clicking and dragging up like I mentioned above.  The only slight downside is that the program must run in the system tray for the changes to remain in effect as it actually has to inject a dll and hook in to the explorer process since there are no registry options for the tweaks it applies.  Fortunately, the memory footprint is fairly small, clocking in at only around 2mb of ram used, so it’s not going to have an adverse effect on systems, even those with only a couple gigs of ram.

So, you can change this:

Back in to something useful:

What a wild last year it has been.  From planning a destination wedding, to getting married, to the honeymoon, and the reception, then Vegas.  It was an extremely busy year, and possibly the best one I’ve ever had.  I can’t believe the photo project is over already, but here we are.

My original goal of this photo project was to basically force myself to get out, shoot pictures, and learn more about my camera.  I feel like I was pretty successful in that regard.  I definitely learned a lot, but I also have so much more to learn.  I had a great time taking all the pictures, and while I love most of them, there are certainly those I wish I could re-do.  However, just because my project is “done” doesn’t mean I’m going to stop shooting.  I still plan on taking a lot of pictures, and hopefully posting some to this blog.  Looking forward to 2012, I also hope to write some more computer-related articles again.  I hardly wrote any last year because I was pretty busy with the weekly photo project and everything else that was going on, so hopefully I can get some of those thrown back in the mix as well.

Keep an eye out towards the end of the month, some friends and I are goin on a Bald Eagle trip, so I’ll hopefully have some cool shots from that I will post.

What will 2012 hold?

Here are all of my Photo Project 52 photos, in one gallery.  Hope you enjoy them!

[Show as slideshow]

Here we are, the final week of my year long photo project.  I decided to get out to a place that sort of kicked off this whole project, a year ago, almost to the day.  When I was still considering whether I was going to do the photo project or not, I went out to find an old drive-in theater.  I wasn’t sure where it was, and in my adventures that day I never found it.  Earlier this year I happened to drive by it and stored in the ole noggin where it was located.

On the West edge of Carlinville Illinois there sits an old dilapidated drive-in theater.  This is the Diane Drive-In (some sites referred to it as the Diana Drive-In, but most of them call it the Diane Drive-In so that is what I’m going with).

It opened in 1952, and could hold 300 cars at the time.  It was known for its bright neon lights and large ornate screen.  The theater enjoyed a fairly long success.  In 1978 the original screen caught fire, and was replaced with a smaller less elaborate screen.  The Diane Drive-In shut its gates in 1981, as did many drive-in’s around this time.

Much of it sits intact to this day.  Most of the screen is still standing, as well as the ticket booth and the concession building.  I could have actually entered the concession building, but I was by myself and didn’t quite feel comfortable doing that.

This shot is taken from inside the ticket booth, looking out toward the screen the where cars would have once parked.  You can even see some of the old neon tubes hanging down from the roof of the ticket booth.  It must have been a pretty neat looking place back in its prime.

Bonus:  While I wouldn’t normally post the rest of the photos I took during an outing, I’m going to make an exception for this place.  There seem to be a lot of people interested in old Drive-In’s out there, and I’d hate to deprive them of seeing the rest of the photos of this place.  You can see the rest of them over here at my Picasa web album.

“Decay”