Daily Archives:September 17th, 2007

Of Mice and Men

mighty mouseI’m quite a fan of Apple’s Mighty Mouse – I have a few of the wired ones and miss them when I’m on a machine that doesn’t have them. They do have a downside, though, which is that it’s fairly easy for the scrollball to get a bit gunked up, and cleaning it is not trivial.

If you suffer from this, you need this page, which has a range of different remedies that have got people out of trouble, and I’ve just added my method to the list. Basically it involves stretching out a piece of Scotch Tape/Sellotape sticky side up and running the ball up and down on it… Not the easiest manouveur, but the results were splendid!

Anyway, all of this reminds me of a great story I read many many years ago, in a book about the Atari ST, back when mice were still a novelty, and they still had their balls on their underside… as it were. So you needed a mousemat, and these were also a novelty and rather expensive.

The author of the book – whose name I forget, sorry – said that you didn’t need to buy one of these expensive things because wetsuit material worked very well, and he told the story of going into his local watersports supplier, where they normally sold the stuff by the foot or the yard, and asking for a piece about 6 inches square.

When they asked why he wanted such a small piece of wetsuit material, he said, quite seriously:
“Oh, it’s for my mouse…”

Radio silence

I’d like to apologise to regular readers for the slightly lower rate of posting here recently. I’m in the middle of raising an angel funding round for my new startup and, as anyone who’s tried this before will know, it can be quite time-consuming, especially if you’re trying to run the business at the same time!

But never fear, Status-Q is alive and well, even if the status of Q is ‘a little more frazzled than usual’!

Oh, and if you might be interested in investing in the latest exciting new Cambridge venture then do let me know. 🙂 Things are going well, but we may still have a slot or two open…

Watch this space…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser