That was my biggest complaint with 7 until I found I could click on the directory names in the location bar; it's simplicity itself.

Yes to rowing! I was 5'10", 170lbs (5-6% body fat means that BMI is WRONG here) Now I wish I had counted my calories while in HS so I could compare, but I would joke about my 2000 Calorie lunch (2 sandwiches, apple, ~1L juice, cookies, chips, and whatever else my friends wouldn't finish), then I could eat a pound of pasta for dinner and still be hungry. When I went to college, my mom told me that the grocery bill was cut in half! Fast-forward 10 years and my metabolism is still fast, but I find myself eating a LOT less than in HS...

My decision to block ads while browsing is much simpler than that; I block them to protect my computer from viruses. Even the legit ad companies don't catch 100% of the malware ads, so I'm just stopping them as close to the source as I can.

Check out the Razer Copperhead. 4 side buttons (2 each side), on-the-fly DPI adjustment, and totally symmetrical.

I was probably 9 or 10 when I started watching The Mechanical Universe (biased article warning) with my dad. He'd seen it a few times, liked it, and taped it. I'd always wanted to know how things worked, and one time when I asked a particularly tricky question about my bicycle, he pulled out the episode about the fundamental forces of physics and sat through it with me. When he saw that I liked the show he asked if I'd like to watch another (one of the episodes that references Sagan's Cosmos), and it quickly turned into a weekly event.

I really have to give my father and this series a lot of credit for my academic performance from middle school on up, because it's not a dumbed-down "watch this go boom, it's science!" show, but a real explanation of college-level physics complete with the necessary math (animated math, even). As a result, I already had a grasp of algebra and even some calculus concepts before I ever took a course in them.