redshifter.org

OK, this is dorky but I just had a delightful customer service experience from none other than the Evil Empire itself, Microsoft. Despite MS's shady nature, they do actually make a few good products, and one of which is their Intellimouse Explorer. It's optical, which means super-precise tracking and no grody gunk to clean out of your mouse every week, and the greatest part is the thumb buttons, which you can map to whatever key combination you'd like. I have 'em set to "back" and "forward," which makes for snappy Web surfing. And of course I can't function without the scroll wheel.

Problem is, they still haven't released drivers for Mac OSX, so although the mouse tracks and the basic left- and right-click buttons work, the scroll wheel and the fancy thumb buttons are dead in the water. It's been this way for months. So in early December I sent an email to MS customer service to see what the deal is. I mean, they're releasing new software for OSX with more and more frequency, so why not let us use the hardware we bought over a year ago?

Well, I received a friendly email from a guy named Steve (no, not Ballmer), who told me that the driver was due Real Soon Now. "Sure it is," I thought.

Lo and behold, upon arriving home from work tonight, there in my inbox was another email from good old Steve, addressed to me and about a dozen others, whom I can only assume also wrote MS about the mouse driver situation and got routed to our man in the Customer Service department. The great part? Attached to his email was a beta driver! So here I am sitting in front of good old OSX, scrolling and thumb-buttoning with my fancy laser-eye mouse. It's the little things, you know?

In related news, Netscape is suing Microsoft. Personally, I feel like suing Netscape, because Netscape version 4.x is the biggest piece of crap on this planet, and 95% of my job is making sure that code I write will actually work for that junk browser. If you're still using Netscape 4, please, please stop. Stop now. Go download a better freakin' browser and make my life a teensy bit easier.

So ends today's sermon.