magic mouse?

They call it the magic mouse. I didn't know this when it came with packaged with my new iMac at work. See the smooth top surface? No buttons, just touch control. Not unlike the surface of an iPhone, I assume, but I don't know if it's the same technology. Something about the magic makes me less inclined to research.

Of course it's wireless, so when IT dude asked me if I wanted to keep it or get a "regular" mouse, I said I'd try this one. More because I dislike cabled mice so much I bought a wireless one for work on my own dime. Or my own $10, which was how ridiculously cheap wireless mice are these days.
Excluding this magic one, which is not so cheap.

Okay. So why a post about the humble and innocuous mouse? Because it triggered a phenomena that I hadn't expected nor experienced before.

20 years of mouse technology has seen dozens of changes that seemed significant to me. The addition of scroll bars. The transition from little wheels and balls (chock full of desktop bellybutton lint) for motion to laser sensors. And of course, wirelessness.

Some failures (for me) were Apple's first round mouse that looked cute but required visual "righting" because you couldn't tell quickly, by feel, which curve was the top. And the trackball: a large ball inserted into a stationary mouse–which some folks loved but not me. I draw with my hand and wrist in a movement that I couldn't quite transfer to just my fingertips. There's also the Wacom-style pads and styluses, which my coworker swears by. The tablet seems quite intuitive but I never have felt quite as comfortable with it.

All these things were nice little adjustments that happened over time and made computer life a little more pleasant. I played with the pristine little lozenge and thought its low profile might be a problem. It wasn't.

Here's the amazing thing: the touch movement, scrolling and clicking were so...intuitive I was unaware how quickly I'd adjusted. Within days, I was at home with my now Flintstone-like block-o-plastic mouse and realized I was dragging my finger over the completely non-responsive surface* of a mouse I'd used for years.

In less than one week, my decades-long training on clicking and scroll bar use was seamlessly supplanted. That is creepy and amazing. I hadn't personally experienced technological evolution at this speed before. If mice were a species [yes, I'm chuckling] this one would be the genetic super mouse that adapts as its ancestors die off. That is, if it wasn't priced $50-$60 in a market where you can get a decent wireless mouse for $10-$15.

The only drawback is that it's so sensitive that sometimes I'll be working in a palette window of one of my programs, adjusting an image size or line width. Then, I'll move the mouse to my main window when suddenly the 25% adjustment that I chose is racing up to 90% because the cursor was still active in the little field. It interpreted my innocent move as a command to scroll the numbers up.

The other surreal behavior is that when my fingers are just hovering over the top, Magic Mouse thinks I'm just asking for something very quietly and complies. Like a Ouija board planchette, it sometimes moves things around without my participation.

See? It really is a magic mouse.

*Like whispering at a rock concert, nothing is communicated.

new technology crab

Twitter sucks up the "real" blog writing.
Facebook sucks up the personal emails.

I miss that shit.

Feel like a tech-loving luddite. An oxymoron if there ever was one.

And someone get those damn kids off my lawn.

wifi weekend update

This past weekend was WiFi weekend at the B&E Show. That's right. I got my nerd groove on. More or less. Without making the low-tech among you succumb to the vapors from geek-speak, I will quickly sum up Saturday's activities:

• partition new external back up drive [stay with me, stay with me], check
• back up hard drives [for the first, oh-the-shame, time], check
• update operating system, scary check
• make sure numerous and expensive software programs still function, big check
• install wireless card correctly, proud check
• hook up wifi base station so as to share the DSL love with the family, oh shit. half-check!

Enter my good and dear friend SuperDave, renamed Tireless Wireless Techno Wizard, accompanied by his redefining-the-word-snazzilicious FI-ance, Dr. Ding.

Having used our friendship to lure them over to do my bidding offer tech support, I felt that the least I could do to thank them was to make real Dave's recent weird food/fantasy post: bacon cups*. For brunch. Filled with homemade fried potatoes 'n onions and scrambled eggs.

Ooo baby, ooo baby. That was a seriously unhealthy, exercise-cancelling, pig-juice-soaked breakfast. And if I do say so myself, it was damn fine. I'd have to walk to this Austin museum to compensate.

Tech service was more than worth the bacon braiding. (Truth be told, bacon braiding is its own reward, dear readers.) We have green lights and secure connections. Praise Dave and Local Area Network technology.

Oh, and every time Dave and I referred to modems, base stations, ip addresses , etc. both Barbara and Her Dingness began bushman-dialect-like clicking to demonstrate the foreign quality to our dialog. A great way to spend a Sunday, any way you look at it.

And now some footnote groveling:
*I should have written bacon cups by Megan at notmartha via Dave at abovetheaether. Poor documentation on my part, no offense intended to Megan and her culinary brilliance.