Sharepoint Designer 2010 Reusable Workflows - well sort of

ahhh so annoying - so you've created a parent content type and you've associated it with multiple child content types and you want to associate it to a workflow for them, they are really similar BUT not with every damned content type in the box - can you do it? NOPE. SO ANNOYING, the solution is that you'll have to create workflows for each of your content types. Before you say it - yes I know you can probably solve this in Visual studio but are you familiar with change management in big companies -  lots of not fun and puts the mockers on doing any development. So that's off the agenda. I know someone who built a WHOLE CMDB application in SPD on a development box just to avoid any change management oooh the irony, the upshot is it featurized, of course not , is it supportable , you'd hope....
I digress, so the only solution is to use the ability of globally reusable workflows to be copied and modified, to speed the process up BUT I am not relishing the request that will inevitably come for changes to the workflow.

Sharepoint Designer 2010 List views

Can I find anything good on how these work? - can I heck as like ... not a sausage. Well that's not entirely true there are three blog posts , here is the first:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2009/11/16/sharepoint-2010-list-view-blog-series-part-1-introduction-to-the-new-list-view.aspx by Greg Chan, but though he promises oodles of posts we have but three. So like the Flash Gordon style cliff-hangers of old we are left not knowing how Flash escapes certain doom, in our case we don't know how we are to get out of list view doom.
Don't get me wrong, list view are good because they look to scale much better than what we had before but but how do you do any of the things we'd do in DVWP's I've not found out yet, excepting to say that jquery looks to come to our aid for the purpose of representing lists in whatever way we need for example you want horizontal lists, here is some jquery that looks to do the trick http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointcustomization/thread/ef43f6bd-1276-4760-8996-a6c9eedf75db
I am hoping there are great untapped depth in this that I just haven't got to the bottom of yet.

Totals in Sharepoint Designer

It turns out that this is pretty straightforward - but woh betide you if you try putting sum against currency - it just doesn't want to know - but if you follow these instructions http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2009/04/24/how-to-total-calculated-columns-in-a-sharepoint-list.aspx should see you right.

Server Variables in Sharepoint Designer

This looks to me to be away of creating something like a view with permissions - grrrreat

http://blogs.msdn.com/spdsupport/archive/2008/07/25/data-view-data-form-parameters-you-don-t-know-about.aspx

use the server variable for the logged on user against a column in a list and you can create a paramaterized page with permissions on it - least ways that is what I am thinking I can do - need to try it out.