Friday, January 12, 2007

I got a new mouse yesterday. Since I can actually feel several people nodding off reading that, I'll attempt to make "I got a new mouse yesterday" somehow interesting.

Ahem.

You pampered kids today, OMG. You have no idea how easy you have it. In my day, we didn't have all these fancy full-color monitors and MP3s and IMs and wireless networks. We measured our connection speed in baud, not "ma-bips", whatever they are. If monochrome was good enough for IBM, by God, it was good enough for us. You better believe, if we ever burned a CD in those days, the house would fill with noxious fumes and our parents would ground us from playing Castle Wolfenstein.

I tell you, anyone in my after school Dungeons and Dragons group would have strangled a prairie dog with his bare hands for something like the Logitech MX610 Laser Cordless Mouse, complete with five glorious and configurable LED-enhanced buttons. That's right – five buttons, which is two more than the number of brain cells in your average user today. We were lucky if our mice had one button, and here these pansies are running around with five! No wonder they say the Internet's such a dangerous place.

Quite simply, it is too much mousing power for a n00b.

But that ain't the half of it. It's wireless and optical (lasers!), so there's no mouse ball to get all gunked up with hair, dead skin cells, and Dorito crumbs. Where's the fun in that? They call it "Performance Laser Tracking" and "2.4GHz Digital Cordless," but I call it "computing for poseurs." Do these young asshats today deserve that kind of smooth movement and precise control? Like hell they do!

Silicon frictionless mouse feet?!?

And let's not even get started on the music these days. Gnarls Barkley? You gotta be kidding me! Who is that, one of those puppets off Sesame Street? Now, the Fixx…Level 42…Flock of Seagulls…that was some music!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Back in my day" much?

I think the word we are looking for here is 'seasoned'.

Or perhaps grizzled.

Joe said...

You might be an old codger if:

Back in my day we had Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. And we liked it!