Unfortunately, some of these products are unavoidable. Most video drivers want to install two or three background tasks - one to apply the hardware settings, one to provide an overcomplicated control panel, and another to provide a cluttery system tray icon. Adobe Reader installs a service that is supposed to make it launch faster the two times per month you need to read a PDF. Visio insists on creating a My Shapes folder for the 1% of users who will create custom shapes. Someone should create a software user’s bill of rights to popularize the notion among developers that these behaviors are bad.

I develop software for a living, primarily for Microsoft platforms. Thus, Microsoft Visual Studio is unavoidable for me. VS is generally a good actor, but it has one annoying vice: it wants to create a folder in My Documents named Visual Studio 2005 (or 2008 if you’re hip). VS wants you to put your projects in this folder. Other things like settings and templates live here as well. Now I find this rather annoying, as I have an existing Projects folder elsewhere that contains my work. I don’t want VS settings or templates to go there. Plus, I find the name “Projects” more correct than “Visual Studio 2008″. One says “Here are the projects that I work on”, and the other says “Here is the stuff I do with Visual Studio”. So the VS default location is less than optimal for me.

Luckily, the Visual Studio folder is fairly easy to move. There are some settings in VS’s Options dialog that look like they do the trick, but they don’t do a complete job. To fully move the folder, you need to edit the registry. The process is the same in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, save for the folder name:

1. Launch Visual Studio for the first time. VS will create its folder in My Documents and numerous registry keys referring to this folder.
2. Decide where your project code should live. In My Documents, I have a Projects folder already.
3. Decide where you want the other VS files to live. I created an Application Data folder in My Documents to make a home for my Visual Studio folder. Another good choice would be to use the local application data folder.
4. Search the registry for “\Visual Studio 2008″. Edit the matching values to reference the new locations you picked in steps 2 and 3.  On my system, there were about 25 values to change.
5. Move the actual Visual Studio 2008 folder to the new location.
6. Create en empty file named Visual Studio 2008 (no extension) in the place where the VS folder was.
7. Run the following command on the empty file:
   ATTRIB +S +H +R “Visual Studio 2008″

Steps 6 and 7 make it more difficult for Visual Studio to create a new folder in the wrong place. As there is an existing file of the same name, the create should fail. By applying the system and hidden attributes, the file is not visible in Windows Explorer under typical settings.

Japan has an interesting shape – skinny with an elbow. There’s northern Japan, and there’s western Japan. The elbow, of course, is Tokyo, the geographical and cultural fulcrum of the nation.

The reddish line on the map shows my travel path. The circles represent represent the places we visited. The places are, in order from southwest to northeast:

• Itsukushima, aka Miyajima
• Hiroshima
• Himeji
• Osaka
• Nara
• Kyoto
• Tokyo (the big circle)
• Utsunomiya
• Nikko
• Fukushima
• Sendai
• Matsushima
• Morioka

Note that we didn’t visit in that order. Actually, we started in Tokyo and made separate jaunts to the west and to the north. Outside of Tokyo, we spent no more than a day at any single location. Tokyo itself was allotted a full week of exploration time. Traveling with a wonderful pair of native guides – my in-laws – we packed an amazing number of experiences into a two-week span.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting a separate article for each destination, along with articles about particularly fascinating aspects of Japanese culture.

Despite having been a spectator of the blogosphere for a decade (i.e. since before our species actually knew the word blog), I have resisted any temptation to set up my own blog. I’m just a random guy, living in a place, going to work, doing things — nothing spectacular. To me, blogs are not only for people who have something to say; they are also for an audience that wants to listen. What’s the point of wasting hundreds of hours editing articles which nobody will read? That makes as much sense as write-only memory. It’s much easier to be a consumer rather than a producer.

Basically, this blog is my wife’s idea. She has this enormous network of family and friends spread across the planet. I have a tiny family and few friends, most of them living within a fifteen minute drive. Part of being married is that these friend-family sets eventually merge. It’s now my task to help in the upkeep of our merging network — providing updates, distributing photos, sending gifts, etc. So, there is now a sizable audience and the mandate to communicate with them. For the first time since there were blogs, there is now actual reason for me to have a blog.