Like Microsoft really needed the money.

The trackball on my PC mysteriously died last night, just as I was finishing a touch-up of Lens Filter Advisor. Too stubborn to wait until I could buy a new pointing device, I tried to reactivate the "Microsoft Accessibility" software I had installed as an experiment two years ago. It's supposed to let me use the keyboard's arrow keys to control the pointer, but somehow all I managed to do was reset the default font on my web browser. Damn you, Bill Gates.

I managed to finish the website update using the painfully old-fashioned method of tabbing from icon to icon and button to button, then resolved to buy a new mouse the next day. (I'm still unemployed, so another trackball is too much of a luxury.) Office Depot was the closest place likely to carry mice. Oddly, Office Depot did not have parallel aisles like a normal store. Instead, their aisles were in some bizarre starfish-like pattern, with cash registers at the middle of the star, and mice in two different aisles -- one aisle for expensive mice, and one aisle for cheap mice. Guess which aisle was harder to find.

I ended up buying a Microsoft Wheel Mouse because it was the cheapest mouse they sold. The "ClickLock" doesn't seem to work with my non-MS web browser, and I keep getting wrist cramps. Damn you again, Bill Gates.

Posted at 11:25:15 PM EST on 25 November 2003 from Trenton, MI