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October 28, 2003

Of Mice and Women

Of all the hardware that makes up a PC, the mouse is usually the least expensive and given the least thought. Yet it is the part, along with the keyboard, with which we have the most physical contact. I started out with an IBM mouse at home and never thought about it. At work, I never liked the MicroSoft mice provided, but face it, you take what you get. Only when it was time to replace the old IBM, did I pay attention to the differences in them.

My hands are small. The MS mice are simply too long for me. Logitech's mouse is smaller and fits my hand better, producing less stress on my wrist. I suspect, like many things, the designers of mice create them for men and never think about a woman's generally smaller hand. It's time they did.
Gyration Ultra Gyroscopic Mouse
Recently I needed a new mouse and began searching for the perfect one. The choices now are mind boggling compared to in the past. Some mice are nearly a keyboard in your hand, replete with side buttons to control all manner of functions. There are trackballs, scrolls, regular, USB, optical, cordless and more. We had picked up a Kensington optical USB mouse for $5 with rebate a few months back just to have on hand. I began using it. The size is fine, but it has issues. When left alone a while, it sometimes simply dies and requires unplugging and replugging a couple of times to revive it.

My requirements are simple. It must fit my hand, be optical, scroll, and corded to connect by USB to my keyboard. The cordless ones have batteries, and besides, I would be searching for it all the time along with the phone and my keys.

The Puter Ho picked up a laptop mouse for me, thinking it's small size would be perfect. It was too small. Starting to sound like "The Three Bears," huh? However, if you have a small child on a computer, it would be wonderful. I'm happily back with a Logitech. Simple and a perfect fit.

What might be the ultimate mouse is the one above from ThinkGeek. It's cordless, requires no surface, and works from up to 25 feet away. It uses high performance NiMH rechargeable batteries. Just wave the magic mouse. This would be great for giving presentations and game play. At $79.99 though, it is a bit pricey

So, think about your mouse, and the next time you visit a computer emporium take the time to test drive a few. You may find there is something you would be much happier with.

And please, somebody build a better mouse for women.

Posted by Rockelle at 11:13 AM | | Comments (2)

October 2, 2003

Blog Comment Spam

Recently I've gotten some strange comments on some very old entries to this blog. Simply some person's name RULES! The email address and the URL are bogus. They are always on the same entry though. I've simply deleted them, wondering what their purpose could possible be.

Today the Puter Ho sent me this link, in which someone much more technically savvy than I discusses the phenomenon. As I understand it, the comments are markers, places the marauder can return and do evil. Probably the "attack" would likely consist of a lot of spam comments being dumped on your blog to try to get clicks from people who come to read what you wrote. In my mind, that is the most benign possibility.

Soon we could have spambots clogging up our blog comments the way spam currently reeks havoc in our email. It's actually kind of disappointing to me. So mundane compared to my visions of espionage. I was entertaining images of spies and terrorists using my blog to send secret messages. :)

Update for this entry here

Posted by Rockelle at 2:42 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

August 25, 2003

OE/Eudora/Mozilla

I'm over on the new machine. Well sort of. The thing sat in the dining room for weeks as the Puter Ho got it all loaded up with everything I need and desire. The problem is we cannot get my email to work. It will work, but we can't import all the stuff from my old drive. I've used Outlook Express for some time and I know it is a piece of crap, but like an unhappy marriage, one tends to stay just because it's easier that way.

At this point, we simply put my old drive in with the new and I'm still booting off the old drive so I can access all my email accounts and the various folders created in OE over time. The old drive is loaded up with crap and I am very unhappy with the situation. The Puter Ho tried everything, ran an OE backup he found, but nothing worked. He uses Mozilla Mail and likes it. He also runs Linux, which obviously has kick ass screensavers and is smooth, but I also sit and listen to him grumble as he tries to get software to work on it.

I'm not ready for Linux. Microsoft still has me in their noose, but OE is about to go. I run Windows 2000 and have absolutely no desire to change that. It's the only stable Windows platform I've used. I'm looking and it seems I'll go with either Eudora or Mozilla Mail. It will mean a lot of cutting and pasting to carry everything along, but hopefully, I'll end up with something I can live with. And I'll be reducing my dependence on Microsoft, which is always a good thing.

As it is, I'm mostly all new. I'm faster, smarter, and better all around. I even got a new case, though not the black one or the blue neon water cooled one (Actually I'm not that fast) I wished for. My CDROM will open even if there isn't a disc in it. :)

If anyone reads this and has suggestions for a new mail client, please tell me. I'm open to all suggestions. And, honestly, if you know a way to get OE to import everything, let me know that too. I'm lazy. I hate trudging through a 40GB swamp of .dlls, etc.

I'll be right here, slowing tranferring data, dreaming that someday I get to drive in the fast lane.

Posted by Rockelle at 10:34 AM | | Comments (2)

April 10, 2003

Concorde To Be Retired

It's a sad day. One more little dream on my list that will never come true. I just read that British Airways and Air France, the only two airlines to operate Concorde, will take the glamorous but hugely expensive jets out of service by the end of October because of falling passenger demand and rising maintenance costs. It seems the remaining jets will end up in museums.

I remember when they were being developed and how cool it was when the first one flew with passengers on board from Paris to Rio de Janeiro in 1976. I knew that someday I would be on one. Of course, my vision at that time also included having late night suppers in Paris.

More realistically, I assumed that someday everyone would fly that way. It seemed that we would all be speeding around the globe, safely and inexpensively. However, with fare for round trip across the Atlantic at $9,300, there really weren't that many people flying. In fact, the day the end of services was announced Air France only had 12 passengers on board. Sad, huh?

So hats off to the French for designing such an elegant, sexy, and mercurial machine. And a moment of silence for it's passing.

Posted by Rockelle at 4:30 PM | | Comments (0)

April 7, 2003

Taxes & Death

I've worked on the tax return most of the morning. This year I'm using TaxCut from H&R Block. Always before, or at least as long as software was available, I used Turbo Tax. I didn't want to change, but the following excerpt from John's site will explain:

January 03, 2003
Question: "How do I benefit from this approach?" Answer: "You don't."

Before you make the mistake of purchasing TurboTax this year be sure you understand that you are not buying their software, you are just "licensing" it. Intuit TurboTax Technical Support

Yup. I thought it was really neat when I got a CD case last month with the new TurboTax in it in my mailbox. I thought that somebody had finally clued into the fact that you can send a disc out for a small amount and get people to try out your product. They are especially likely to when it's something they've bought several years in a row. But I opened it up to find that the "deal" they were offering a long-time customer was worse than what I could get from going to the store. Thanks a lot Intuit.

But I made the mistake of thinking that was as far as the insult went. I was willing to forgive the attempt to gouge me and still buy the product until I found out that they've added a Microsoft Windows XP like "activation" system to the new software. So your installation is tied to a specific machine and you can't give it to anyone else or sell it after you are done using it (even if you uninstall)... So just kiss the doctrine of "first sale" goodbye. You no longer "own" the product, you merely "license" it now for just as much as you used to pay to buy it.

Whil Whim likens it to buying a book that you can only use with one lamp. Woe unto you should you change the lightbulb, break the lamp, or wish to get rid of the book but not the lamp.

All I can say now is "%&@) YOU" Intuit. I'm one long time customer who will NOT buy this years product or next years or any other years as long as this is the way you run things.

So you see, NO WAY was I going to be able to use TurboTax. I totally agreed with him, but I was concerned about importing last years return. TaxCut promises that will be no problem. Well yeah, if all you want are the names, social security numbers and list of W-2s from the previous year. Only a small part of the data from the previous return is brought in and what is is difficult to update. Maybe it's just my unfamiliarity with the software, but I had to hand delete much of the old stuff to fill in new values for this year. And on forms and such that didn't pertain to this year, I couldn't just delete them as a whole, they had to be done line by friggin' line. ARGGGHHHH. As for last year's deductions, I just had to go find the hard copy. As we tend to contribute to the same organizations year after year, it was nice in TurboTax to have all the details brought forward. The TaxCut interface is so screwy that every time you hit enter you go back to the top of the page when you should have gone to the next line. Have you guessed yet that I hate it??

I know that preparing taxes is a hair pulling undertaking and we are still waiting for some much needed schedules necessary to file so it isn't all TaxCut's fault that I'm bald. But given the choice again, I would choose TurboTax. Sitting down with a pencil might even be preferable. If you are only going to open it on one machine and you are doing only one return, opt for TurboTax.

Even if you have to do it on the sly.

Posted by Rockelle at 1:39 PM | | Comments (0)