keep on scrollin’, baby!

it feels good to scroll again!

…like a normal person, i mean.

they sure don’t make ’em like they used to. when i first set up this office setup (around 2009, i believe) i bought a dell wireless keyboard and mouse. i still had quite the hook up there since i’d only left a few months prior, and i basically got them for free with all the other shit i was buying at the time (NONE of it went for web retail pricing). it lasted about ten years and i had to order a replacement in early 2019, so i went with the best dell available (on amazon, which had a better price) and loved it, but the jog wheel on the mouse died within a year or two.

i guess technically it didn’t die, it just went “haywire” as my uncle says. you’d click two or three clicks down, it would go down one, but then up six. or sometimes just up, unless of course you were trying to scroll up, in which case it would go seven down or not move at all. and all responses were random, so you never quite knew what you were gonna get. now, i originally typed that sentence to end with, “…gonna get, but you knew it would move!” until i realized no, that honestly wasn’t true. sometimes, for no reason, it just wouldn’t respond with ANYTHING.

so, after only four years (and i swear more than two of it just going from bad to worse) i replaced it with this interesting looking thing:

it’s taking some getting used to, but so far, so good. it was less than thirty bucks (on sale) so we’ll see how well it does and, more importantly, how long it lasts. i’ve had several friends that went the vertical mouse route, back when it was almost a thing to get the weirder looking computer shit (same era as the ergo keyboard), so let’s see how long it stays running this smooth (this is being typed on day one).

maybe this ends the era of me getting the keyboard / mouse combo sets? i opted not to get the keyboard that went with this since it more than doubled the price and mine still works just fine.