{"id":23203,"date":"2008-03-05T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-05T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/03\/05\/not-my-finest-hour-using-the-wrong-mouse\/"},"modified":"2008-03-05T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-05T10:00:00","slug":"not-my-finest-hour-using-the-wrong-mouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080305-00\/?p=23203","title":{"rendered":"Not my finest hour: Using the wrong mouse"},"content":{"rendered":"

I used the wrong mouse for nearly an entire day.\n There are a good number of computers in my office, but they all funnel through to two sets of mice, keyboards, and monitors. One set is connected to the machine I use for day-to-day activities; the other set is connected through a switch box to a collection of machines which I used for testing and a variety of other secondary purposes.\n The switch box that controls the second set of mouse, keyboard and monitor makes no attempt to be smart, and if I move the mouse while it is connected to a computer that is broken into the kernel debugger, the switch box will often lose track of the mouse state, rendering it non-functional in all of the machines. To get the mouse to work in a particular machine, I have to reboot it. Since the machines are doing useful (although secondary) work, I don’t want to reboot them. Whenever the mouse gets messed up like this, I just rely much more heavily on keyboard shortcuts, and when there’s something that really needs a mouse, I fire up MouseKeys<\/a> and use the numeric keypad to simulate a physical mouse.\n One day, I spilled my drink on my desk, and I had to mop it up with some paper towels. And then after I cleaned up the mess, I found that the mouse didn’t work. This didn’t phase me much, since the mouse had a tendency to wonk out and I just went into my fallback mode of relying on the keyboard for getting stuff done. It’s a bit more cumbersome, but it’s not the end of the world.\n It wasn’t until near the end of the day that I realized that my mouse was just fine. It was a simple PEBKAC<\/a>: I was using the wrong mouse.\n There are three mice on my desk, even though there are only two mouse\/keyboard\/monitor sets. Originally, the mouse on the first set was a PS\/2 mouse, but I later replaced it with a USB laser mouse since I was getting tired of cleaning the gunk off of the mouse ball. As a belt-and-suspenders sort of thing, I left the PS\/2 mouse plugged in even though I didn’t use it any more, figuring I could use it if this whole USB thing didn’t pan out. Of course, the USB mouse works just fine, so the PS\/2 mouse just sat on my desk, taking up space but otherwise not causing trouble.\n Until I started using the PS\/2 mouse thinking that it belonged to the second mouse\/keyboard\/monitor set. I didn’t notice that the mouse was actually controlling the first<\/i> computer because I wasn’t looking at the first monitor when I used the PS\/2 mouse; I was looking at the second monitor. And the cursor didn’t move on the second monitor.<\/p>\n

Once I realized what I was doing, I went ahead and unplugged the PS\/2 mouse. The USB mouse on the first computer runs just fine. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I used the wrong mouse for nearly an entire day. There are a good number of computers in my office, but they all funnel through to two sets of mice, keyboards, and monitors. One set is connected to the machine I use for day-to-day activities; the other set is connected through a switch box to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-23203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

I used the wrong mouse for nearly an entire day. There are a good number of computers in my office, but they all funnel through to two sets of mice, keyboards, and monitors. One set is connected to the machine I use for day-to-day activities; the other set is connected through a switch box to […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}