A lack of J

You know the nursery song about the alphabet? Well, my keyboard currently goes "a b c d e f g, h i..."

And stops there.

The letter... um, the letter that comes after I and before K, won't type on my keyboard.  The only way I can get it is if I find it in a document or on a web page and copy and paste it in.

And then when you do that, the letter tends to keep the properties from the original source so you end up with words that look like:

 jam

and...

juice

and even...

Juniper

And as a result the words don't always fit with the formatting of the rest of the text.

Not only do I have this to contend with, but my mouse also seems to be dying. I'm not sure what is going on, but I have two mice, and both of them seem to be at breaking point, either refusing to work altogether or being very erky - i mean... hang on.

I meant to say that the mouse is being very Jerky.

Stay tuned for the next exciting adventures of Man With a Broken User Interface!

Mousey Satisfaction

Today I'm writing about mice, the sort that you control your computer from.  It's a solidly geeky post, so if you don't want to read about mouse, here's a story about cats.

For many years, I used a Logitech G5 mouse.  The best mouse I ever used, it was hard wearing, a pleasure to use, accurate, looked reasonably cool (cooler than a standard office mouse yet not over the top with millions of buttons like some gaming mice)

The Logitech G5 mouse, beloved.  Image attribution: Cncplyr at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I think I got the G5 originally at a LAN party years back, and it didn't disappoint.  But sadly, eventually after many years of use (and I mean many - it lasted a lot longer than the Logitech G15 keyboard I bought around the same time, for three times the money!), it became less responsive and a replacement was in order.  I turned to a Microsoft Wheel Mouse.

Microsoft mice aren't something you'd immediately think of as a gaming mouse, but they're decent quality, reliable mice.  I did work experience for a few months at Hull College as a student, and at the time a Microsoft IntelliMouse was a good piece of kit to get your hands on.  Having an optical sensor rather than a ball made the mouse more accurate, not prone to jamming up with dirt, and couldn't be sabotaged by one of your college mates taking the ball out.

I had a Microsoft mouse in my box of computer bits, so it was put to work, and again was fine to work with for a while, until it too started to play up.

Then, like a fool, I thought "Hey, that Logitech G5 was amazing, another Logitech must be great!"

Not this one.

The Logitech M100.  It's evil, it clicks, and it's nasty.

Now before you think all Logitech mice are rubbish, this is one of their cheapest (if not the cheapest) one that Logitech offers.  Having a quick look at their shop, I see some REALLY nice mice.  But this isn't one - it's light, it's a little too small, it scrapes over the desk, and the scroll mouse making a really noisy clicking sound when in use, like a row of cockroaches being stood on.

I'm now using a Cyborg RAT 5 mouse which I got with my current computer, I wasn't overwhelmed by the shape of it when I first saw one of these (at another LAN party) but now I'm using one I have to admit it's pretty nice, it's solid and comfortable, and even has a nice little shelf to rest your thumb on in between clicks.  I'm finding it occasionally a little unresponsive but I'm not sure if that's down to the mouse or something computer-related.

One day, however, I will buy myself a really good Logitech mouse again.  One day.

Time Out

We've got a mouse in the house at the moment.  I'm not a fan of mice (read here for more) in the house, in the wild they're absolutely fine, but not in the house.

Anyway, I was in the kitchen this evening, and it decided to pop its head out from under a kitchen cabinet and look at me.  This particularly annoys me, as I'm convinced that it knows innately that what it ought to do is keep out of sight, and only run around when no one else is in the room, but it refuses to even do this, and is obviously only showing itself to frustrate me.  So I jumped up and down, banged on the counter, shouted at it, and prodded a knife under the cabinet where it was lurking, to show that I really meant business.

However, I'd overlooked that recently we've been very firm in enforcing the "no shouting" rule with my son recently, and he came in the kitchen, and told me to go and sit on the stairs on time out.

And my wife backed him up.  Off to the staircase I went.

At least I got a couple of photos out of it :)

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