#FF00AA

Windows XP is gonna make me crazy. For real. I mean, globally, it works very well. There’s just that thing. Well, there probably are several others, but there’s one that’s gonna make me crazy, as I was saying at the beginning, and it hasn’t been long since, so you really shouldn’t have been lost by now. So I’ve gotten a habit: when I want to delete a file, I press Del (okay, you’re following me so far, it’s not that conceptual) immediately followed, in the same motion, with Enter (which confirms the deletion, in case you’d never have used a computer in your life and you’d be reading this through an RSS aggregator embedded in your TV set) (well, I’ve got to take into account future readers who’ll access my archives ten years from now, haven’t I?) (anyhoo). Only that, on XP, it doesn’t work. On XP, when I press Del and Enter, it deletes and executes the file. Makes sense, huh. And since my machine is pretty much faster than the previous, I’m sure it’s not the OS that’s being slow, but it’s a conscious decision. A well-intentioned one (for once, someone with good intentions at Microsoft—I guess he must have been fired since): it’s preventing false maneuvers, accidental deletions. Yeah. Except that the chances of accidentally pressing Del then Enter are rather minimal. And that, for 99% of users, the deleted file will end up in the trash can—actually, as I’m writing this, I can imagine many a system administrator applauding this preventive measure against accidental deletion of network files. But the result, for power users migrating from previous versions (that’s me here), is absurd: you press Del and Enter as you’ve been doing for years, the delete confirmation dialog pops up, then the file opens. Makes sense, huh. Phew. That was a long, tedious paragraph that didn’t go anywhere. I’m a bit overworked these days, and I don’t work. And I don’t sleep too well either. Not sure why.