my mouse died
After numerous attempts to get my external hard drives working, I decided that I was going to replace one of my internal drives as my back up drive. I haven’t done any music for ages and my second internal drive was providing that function. So I took it out and put in the one that was in the hard drive caddy. Great, all went well for a few days. I had two finder windows open and was backing up each time I saved a document. Then, all of a sudden. My G4 stopped recognising the drive, asking me if I should initialise it and on the same day, my mouse died.
It never rains it pours as they say. For a moment I thought about getting a new machine. But then realised there would be teething troubles whatever short cut solution I thought about. I fiddled with the wire and tried unplugging and replugging, but to no avail. I did some movement, but then it was frozen again. I do hope it’s just the mouse and not the beginning of the end. Everything else seems to be ok. Well at least the things I have managed to access using only the keyboard. This post? From an internet cafe. And it has also shown me that I have haven’t tested my edited stylesheet in IE/Win so there are some things that don’t work. Luckily I have a PC at home for testing, but I was too lazy. So I bought a mouse and I will test it later tonight. How can I be a web designer if I have no computer? OK, I still have the PC laptop, but my most up to date works are on the Mac. The PC is really just for testing stylesheets. I can also get online with that. phew.
So I spent an hour, probably more I guess on deciding on a mouse. First I thought I’d just replace the one that died, but then when I did a bit of searching I found that this is a known problem and it usually occurs at the junction between the actual mouse and cable. The cable frays and makes it inoperable. There were lots of diagrams showing how it could be fixed. I’m usually game for that sort of thing, but if there is only a very small cost of replacement, then I really don’t have time for that. Maybe I’ll sell the dead one on ebay. Someone else was trying when I looked for a replacement for mine.
After I read about that I didn’t want to replace mine any more. The world has moved on from optical mice and is now on laser. And after four years, even though I have got used to it, I was a bit fed up of the one button mouse. I want to right click and I want a scroll wheel as well. So I got myself a Logitech V150 usb laser mouse. It’s a bit smaller than the apple usb optical one that I had, but let’s see how it shapes up. I tend to be more of a keyboard user than a mouse user and learn the keyboard shortcuts as soon as I start to use a new bit of software. I also use Dvorak which makes things even more difficult because some programs will have the shortcuts in Qwerty and others in Dvorak. So I just learn both. Good thing this internet cafe allows keyboard layout change – some don’t.
The big question is will the wife like it? Because she uses the mouse more than I do. She has got used to the one button thing, but being used to PC’s at work she also missed the right click and the scroll wheel. And her brother found it extremely frustrating logged in as a guest user. Well, he’ll be happy the next time he visits.