Day Ninety-two: evening of November 2nd 2009

No video gaming, so far, maybe I’ll sneak in a little bit of Uncharted 2, after the family is a sleep.

I did get a new mouse today. I had been using a Microsoft Bluetooth portable. It was more reliable compared to the touch pad, but still quirky at times. The select of sections was very difficult with the touch pad, a bit less so with the Bluetooth mouse, and almost no problem at all with the new mouse. Another issue was jumpy text insertion. I’ll be typing along and all of a sudden the text will begin appearing elsewhere on the page. I’m not touch typist, so I’m looking at the keyboard all the time. So when I looked up and saw the words that were expected appearing somewhere else, I was confused, and after awhile angry. I played around with the touch pad and mouse settings (note: it happened again as I was entering the ‘ing’ of setting). I’m wondered if it is the location of my thumb hovering over the touch pad that just caused that. It doesn’t occur with my Mac (now or ever). But I decided to get another mouse to see I could see if it was about the older mouse (apparently not).

I decided to get a gaming mouse, not that I play that many games on the netbook, but the response of the gaming mouse I have is significantly better that the Bluetooth mouse. The drawbacks are personal: it’s large and the programmable nature of the mouse takes time to adjust to each application. Another plus is related to the response and that is accuracy, which I appreciate in the graphics programs that I do use. So that was why I was happy to find a dual mode portable mouse from Razer - the Orochi. Dual mode means it can operate as a Bluetooth mouse and as a USB device (wired or wireless). Although, I didn’t notice that at the time I purchased it. I also didn’t know that there were Mac drivers for it. Installation for both modes, Bluetooth and USB, went smoothly following the directions in the included manual. Using the Razer control panel requires an understanding of the application/game that you plan to use it with, but the default setting is fine. It was a bit pricey ($79.99), but after using it a bit, I feel very comfortable with it.