Janice M Cali
Arrgh! My Mouse Froze
Non-functioning Mouse
Here comes a ranting from the unsane, remember the original name of the blog? Here comes one, I'm feeling somewhat unsane right now, so wait for it.
I was busy writing my other blog, “Anything About Food” now called “Food Mage” and my damned computer gave me trouble. It might help if I explained some of my background, or not, but I'm going to anyway, deal with it. Oh, remember flight of thought, it might be here too, so just wait and see.
In 1979 I started work in the computer industry at Burroughs Corporation in Detroit Michigan as a technical writer. I hated it but stuck with it until something better came along, but while I hated technical writing I loved computers, we agreed with each other. I could learn them quickly, I understood them, they agreed with my way of thinking, even my skewed way of thinking and that is saying something.
I stayed with Burroughs for a while, switched to Computer Operations where I got to play with the big boys, you know the Main Frames (for those of you who don't have a clue what a main frame is look it up in the history of computers, it would take to long to explain here), then the smaller, but still incredibly powerful computers. BTW for those of you to young to understand, here's a hint, a large main frame computer had about 1 megabyte of memory, an array of disk drives that took up ˝ of a very large computer room and consisted of approximately 500 kilobytes of disk storage, and supported about 200 users all at one time, and did not crash at the thought of that much work, and these were computer programmers who were writing code, testing code and many other things all of which ran simultaneously on one computer that didn't even have a clock speed of a megahertz. Think about it!
After I left Burroughs I went to Hughes Aircraft, their computer programming department, to write an instruction manual for their computer operators, then to be the assistant manager in computer operations, after that I became a user consultant for a bunch of programmers on one of their multiple projects, using Mini-computers, these had grown to 4 megabytes of memory, and had probably about 2 megabytes of disk storage, and about 250 users, again programmers writing, testing and running code on this one computer, again the clock was not even a megahertz.
Now, I write my blogs on a newish, a year old, laptop, I also have a desk top but it is slower, and not as easy to use while lounging in bed, which is where I frequently write. I'm comfortable here, yes, I'm writing from bed now, my dogs can curl up when I work here, it's harder for them when I work at a desk. Whoops, forgot to mention, the bed is adjustable. I, again, digress.
My computer, laptop, which I really like, because of the flexibility it gives me, I can take it anywhere, use it anytime, on-line or off, it has wireless built in, and it has 3 gigabytes, note gigabytes of memory, a 160 gigabyte disk drive, note again that's gigabytes, and a mouse that is built in, so I don't have to move it around on my desk, or somewhere else. And the clock speed is phenomenal 1.73 gigahertz! It is 1000 times faster than the first system I worked on.
Tonight, this wonder, this modern marvel, which is rapidly becoming outdated, froze on me while I was writing my other blog. My mouse quit moving, right in the middle, and I was almost done. I know how to do almost anything on a computer including, save a file, copy a file, open and close a file, open and close a program, all without a mouse. I know keyboard shortcuts, that a lot of you probably don't know exist, or maybe you do, so I used them. I copied my writing to another file, a word processor, saved it and then restarted my computer, all without the marvelous instrument the mouse which was invented just for my convenience. A mouse invented so I wouldn't have to use commands and a keyboard shrotcuts to make the computer do the things I wanted it to do, it was there but it wasn't working!
OK, now I've rebooted, old term for restarted, my computer, it is up and running, and my damn mouse is still frozen on my login page, yes I have my computer passworded, and I have two accounts on it, both have administrator privileges because of a program that went violently bad once and locked me out of my own computer, but I got past that too!
But my mouse wouldn't work, and I couldn't select either of those accounts, because there was no keyboard shortcut to get to them, I couldn't even shut the computer off, why? Because the keyboard shortcuts don't work if you aren't signed in to an account.
Genius that I am I decided it was time to take drastic action, turn the computer off with the button for turning it on. Guess what, that doesn't turn it off, it puts it to sleep, but not off. That means that not all the memory is cleared, not all cache is emptied of bad things, and it remembers all the states it was in, which isn't good when you have become locked out of your computer.
Miffed? Me, Miffed, hell no I was totally pissed off. I could unplug the damned thing and wait for two hours for the battery to go dead, which it would, then it would turn itself off, and I could plug it in and reboot, again, and probably it would work, but I didn't want to do that, not even a little.
A decision was made, clean the computer, perhaps something was in it that was causing things to stick, not function properly and yes, this can happen. Clean it I did, I used to do this too, so I did have a clue what I was doing.
It's real pretty now, shiny, clean inside and out. But that wasn't the problem. No the problem was, as it is 90% of the time, operator error. I'd goofed. When typing from bed my wrists rest on the side of the laptop, below the keyboard, and beside the mouse. Sometimes they move, of course, and evidentially one of the times they moved and accidentally pushed a little, tiny almost invisible button on the mouse pad. I didn't even know that button was there until about two weeks ago, and tonight, as I was cleaning the computer surface, I noticed that instead of the tiny, itsy bitsy little blue light that was usually there it was reddish orange. Immediately my feeble brain went, “Hey! Shouldn't that be blue? Why yes it should, why don't you try pushing that tiny little button and see what happens?” Lo and behold a miracle happened, my mouse worked.
I'm asking myself, why? Why would anyone put a tiny, almost invisible button, on a mouse pad to turn it off? You do have software switches that can turn it off if you want to plug in a real mouse, that should turn off the pad, doesn't it? Probably not, you probably, but I won't swear to this, have to physically turn off the pad to use a regular mouse. This is redundancy or something gone mad.
Computers are faster, have more memory, more disk space, and are smaller than ever dreamed of when my father worked on the first one with memory storage in 1950 and 1951, no one even dreamed of a home computer and now look at them. They so many things to modern life, we have the internet, we know, kind of, people all over the world, people we would have never met if we didn't have computers and the internet in our homes, but they are no smarter then they were, they still have to have human programmers, and they still need human operators.
The programmers are sloppier, use more memory, disk space and resources than ever before, why because they do not have to write efficient code. When they first started programming computers they counted every bit, not byte, if you don't know the difference, look it up. Now no one worries about these things, but they should, because the computer is for the user, not the programmer, and they seem to forget this little fact. They also forget the little fact that complicating the hardware with buttons that aren't really necessary is a silly and, yes, I'll say it, stupid way to build computers. They, the computer, should be simpler to use, should be something anyone can pick up and use, and in many ways they are, if you are young and start at 5 years old using one, but they are not fool proof and not experience proof, I proved that tonight. 20 years with computers and a little button caused me problems and frustration that were unnecessary.
Down with redundant buttons!
Is Why
Is Why