This is a royal pain in the ass if you don’t have a magically infinite monitor, since it takes up a surprising amount of real-estate without

1. Offering up sufficient functionality
2. Any obvious/easy way to disable this behaviour

Well, you’re in luck. The way I’ve come upon to “fix” this is really simple, with exactly three steps:

1. Go to chrome://flags/ from the Chrome URL bar/”Omnibox”.
2. Scroll down to “New Downloads UI” and click on “Enable”.
3. Restart Chrome.

Find the "New Downloads UI" and don't touch anything else on this page.

Once you’ve set this up, when you download things you will no longer get that annoying shelf at the bottom of the window. If you want to access your downloads, you can still do so by hitting Shift + Cmd + J (OS X), or Ctrl + J (Windows). I personally use that tab so much that I’ve got an extension that puts an entry in my context-menu to open up the Downloads tab.

Now you are a winner too.

• phota-blagging about the latest (stupidly easy) hardware mod I’ve made to my iPhone
• writing up some dialogues/monologues for a series of short skits for church
• having more Jammin’ Saturdays with Adwin and eventually playing on the team for Missions Conference
• getting some dak gal bee and catching up with Soojin
• checking out Design Our Tomorrow 2011 with at least Shivon and possibly Adwin also

5 of my most embarrassing injuries:

• Gut-Wrench: When I was a kid, I went to the park with my dad and my uncle Keith (mom’s younger brother) to play soccer, and they put me in net (I was tiny, they were/are dumb). Then my uncle kicked the ball (just at a tiny fraction of his adult strength) and I took it right in the solar plexus (that spot just under where your ribs meet in the front). The next five minutes involved me keeling over, dry retching/heaving. We all went home since I was in no condition to play anymore and I’m pretty sure I puked my guts out when we got back. Quality family time, right there.
• Frisbee-Fracture: Pretty sure I’ve talked about this one before, but basically lunch-break was over on day during Grade 7/8 and we were heading back into the school. My friend tossed a frisbee that I jumped up to catch. On concrete. By some freak consequence of how I contorted to catch the frisbee, I ended up horizontal (parallel to the concrete pavement) while suspended about four feet in the air (not so hard since I was air-planking, I don’t have mad hops). I landed a few seconds later with both my wrists/hands making a hadouken motion but from under my hips. I showed up to school the next day with a cast on my left arm and a severely sprained right hand/wrist. From frisbee.
• Nostril Stuffer: You know how when you’re a kid and people tell you not to put X in your mouth/ears/nose? And how you sort of ignore them completely? No? Well I took a bit off one of those stretchy arm toys and went exploring up my nose with it, and got (it) lost. I told my parents and they began freaking out (as all parents of first children do when their kid does something impossibly stupid for the first time). I was told to simply blow it out of my nose (like a plastic booger) but because everyone else was so panicked, I couldn’t get my wits about me and couldn’t get it out. My dad took me to the hospital and after a bit of waiting in the emergency ward/area, it sort of just fell out of my nose and we went home. Anti-climactic, but Herman still brings up the story whenever we need an example of how dumb I am sometimes.
• Camping Clothesline: After setting up tents at a church fellowship camp, I talked my friend (Grant) into joining me for a troll-run between the two girls’ tents in the dark. The plan was to holler and yelp while running in between them. Instead, the two of us ran full speed into an array of tent and tent-fly ropes that essentially tripped and clotheslined us to the ground, wheezing. Apparently, girls don’t know how to put up tents and decided to improvise by connecting their rain tarps to each other by a set of tightly strung, head-level ropes between the tents. I suppose that’s what we get for trying to mess with girls.
• Forward Pike Flop: I used to take swimming and first-aid/rescue lessons (I even got all the way up to a Bronze Medallion before I realized that being a lifeguard is really boring and still a lot of responsibility I didn’t want to take up). At a particular pool that I did my Ultra… 7 to 9 at, there was a high diving board and a low one. After class, we usually get one or two goes off the boards just for fun. I usually went and did the standard (pansy) pencil dive off either of the boards (it’s where you jump straight up and go feet first into the water with minimal risk of pain/tearing your shorts right the hell off). One day, I decided I’d show everyone how awesome I was and tried to do a forward pike dive (where you go up, make an upside down U shape, straighten out, and then enter the water headfirst). Instead, I went up, made the upside down U shape, and then proceeded to belly flop my way to extreme pain from about 8′ above the water’s surface, at the height of my jump. I told everyone I was fine and how much it didn’t hurt at all—between spurts of water vomit and an increasing degree of redness spreading across the entire front half of my body. Like a boss.