Posted by Jim at February 26th, 2004

Both of my computers use modern mice. In short there are no balls inside them (a laser tracks their movement), they connect to the computer by USB rather than serial, and they have little wheels between the right and left mouse button.

This is kind of cool–mostly because it means that I no longer have to dismantle a mouse, take out the ball, and use my fingernail to scratch unidentifiable crud off the little wheels.

That’s the good news.

The bad news goes like this:

Owing to the little crevice on the bottom of the mouse, one of my newer, nicer mice now has unidentifiable fuzzy stuff in place that actually blocks the little laser. As I result I had to spend some time pulling the fuzzy crud out. Had I not done so, the mouse pointer would have continued to move only jerkily across the screen.

Oddly enough, jerky mouse movements were the same problem that used to cause me to clean the earlier generation of mice.

There’s some kind of moral here, but it escapes me.