In other news, my Apple Mighty Mouse came in the mail today, while I was comatose. I’m starting to think the love affair is over between me and Apple, because I just don’t like it.

Apple’s strengths have always been industrial design and integration — stuff just works, and it all works together. This just feels like it’s missed out on the last 10 years of computer mouse development. It doesn’t feel right to my hand, for one thing; their pill-shaped mouse design may look great in their ad photos, but isn’t so great for ergonomics (unless, I suppose, you’re left-handed).

They’ve finally added the right mouse button functionality, but it’s faked and it feels faked. Because it’s touch-sensitive, I have to take my index finger completely off the mouse for it to register a right mouse click. While knowing that there’s a touch sensor inside does appeal to the inner geek in me, it’s pretty damn impractical and I can’t see how that’s actually better than having an actual, physical second button. There’s no tactile feedback.

The “scroll ball” is their other big selling point, and I’m not impressed. Rubbing a nipple on my mouse just doesn’t feel right. The mouse itself is optical, which should be a requirement, but the scroll ball feels every bit as flimsy and gunk-up-able as the mouse balls of old. And it’s just not as good for actual scrolling — I never need to scroll in “any direction” as the ads claim I do, so I’d rather have something that is more responsive at just scrolling up and down.

And another problem with tactile feedback — the “buttons” on the sides are actually more like squeeze points; they don’t depress. So you still can’t use the left and right buttons to go back and forward through web pages on your browser (Safari, in my case), which is the biggest thing I miss since I switched from Windows. Instead, you squeeze them both at the same time, and it registers as a single input — by default, that brings up Expose, but I turned that off immediately after inadvertently triggering it the third time.

I realize it’s an exaggeration, but I have to say that this mouse sums up every complaint that people have about Apple. It’s overpriced, to start with — for $50 I could’ve gotten a top-of-the-line Microsoft mouse. It’s form over functon — it looks nice, but simply doesn’t feel comfortable. And it’s gratutitous technology over practicality — touch sensors are neat, but again, why not just make a real button?

I make “I’m getting old” jokes all the time, but I’m usually not all that serious about it. But I’m starting to wonder how much truth there is to it after days like today. I just don’t spring back from minor ailments the way I used to be able to. Okay, that’s inaccurate, because I’ve never exactly been a paragon of good health and proper nutrition; instead I’ve always been somewhat like those guys you read about in turn-of-the-century novels who were “wan and sickly” which explains why they spent so much time indoors becoming educated about Arts and Literature.

But still it seems like I can remember a time when getting sick didn’t knock me out for an entire day. Last night in mid-”Alias” recap, I started getting the feeling that something I ate wasn’t just disagreeing with me, it had serious problems with me as a person and wanted out of the relationship immediately. So not only was I up until the wee hours (so to speak) reading magazines (as it were), by the time I was finally able to get it all out of my system and get to bed, I was completely exhausted and ended up sleeping until late afternoon. And of course, this being summer in San Francisco, it’s dark and gray outside, which just drives home the point that I missed out an entire day. Before, I always blamed this on stress, or crunch mode, but now I’ve got to figure I’m just not as young as I used to be.

Hooooooooooooooooooooly crap!

I just finished watching the first episode on “Alias”, Season 2, Disc 4. There’s only one other time I can remember that I felt compelled to yell back at the screen during a TV show, and that was an episode of “Twin Peaks” where Bob crawls out from behind a planter in the Palmer living room. The only thing that kept me from screaming back “oh hell no you didn’t just do that” at the last 5 minutes of this episode is that I started watching it at 1 AM and I got neighbors. (Plus, I’m a suburban white guy, so I shouldn’t be saying that kind of thing anyway).

I know I said they don’t like to drag out plot lines, and instead just throw everything at you at once, but this is crazy!

Everything after this is a big SPOILER for “Alias,” so stop reading if you haven’t been watching the show and think you might want to at some point.
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