I'm quite possibly the last person on earth to notice this, but damn, anisotropic filtering makes things look much nicer. I usually leave it off, because it tends to hurt the framerate in most games a bit, but I was playing around with render states today and I noticed it makes my textures look about 500x sharper.

Incidentally, on the subject of me being an idiot, I just spent the last two hours trying to figure out a good way to integrate collision callback notifications from the physics engine into my scene graph, when I realized I had actually just solved this problem about 3 months ago and completly forgotten I had done it. Oops. Apparently my past self was smarter too, as the old solution was way better than the new solution I came up with.