Mouse funnies

A new mouse jumped out and joined me today. Yes, a computer mouse, not one of those flitting little furry creatures!

This mouse made me laugh... it's a wireless mouse, and it has a magnify button, good for eyes that occasionally strain to read the too small text in some windows (mostly web pages where the web developer didn't provide a reasonable way to size the text). The first time I tried magnification, I hit the button, and things popped off of the screen at me. Nice. But then, I couldn't reverse the magnification. Why? It takes a light touch, and I was holding the button in too long. Funny though, holding the button in and scrolling the mouse wheel makes the text even bigger (or smaller, depending on the rolling direction). OK mouse, I've got it now, a light touch turns magnification on, and another light touch turns it off again. That works for me.

After my laughter, I thought maybe I should check the mouse's instructions to see if I was missing something else. Nope, I wasn't missing any features. But I did get another laugh reading about surfaces where an optical mouse may have difficulty. The warnings started with the statement "sometimes an optical mouse will not work on surfaces that do not have visible detail". It went on to give some surfaces to be avoided, including "surfaces with red colors". What? I don't have any red surfaces near my computer, but that one caught me by surprise.