Cursed Cursor
I use a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop that's a little over 2 years old. I am mostly happy with it, especially after I jacked the ram to the max, but I have this recurring problem where my cursor becomes unmoored and scurries across the screen to cower in the margins. The main pointer device (when I don't have a real mouse plugged in) is a Synaptics touchpad. There's also a pencil-eraser device in the middle of the keyboard, but it doesn't have nearly the sensitivity of the touchpad. When the cursor has pinned itself against one of the margins, though, I can sometimes use the eraser-mouse to muscle it back out so I can at least save some valuable piece of work. It turns out that the problem is loose or damaged connections somewhere under the wrist-rests, as I can press them and the cursor dances as if hit with a cattle prod. Sometimes it gets pissed and starts to record left-clicks as it careens about St. Vitus-like, deleting stuff, exiting programs and, once, doing Start-Shutdown-Restart. I treat it with a little more respect now that I know it has a temper.
I have a service contract on the laptop, and can call Dell to get it serviced. I've used this service a couple of times - once, when my screen was going south and I was working in Milwaukee, one of their guys showed up at my client's site and replaced the screen. The client was mucho jealous. Another time, when I was having this cursor problem the first time, and a guy came to the house to replace something under the keyboard. It's worked fine until about 2 weeks ago, when the cursor got wanderlust again. You, gentle reader, are allowed to flee from my writing if it displeases you, but I pay the damn cursor to sit there quietly until I need to cut, paste or flat-out ditch some screed I'm working on.
I'll call Dell soon, but it makes me weary right now to think of dealing with a rookie helpdesk person as he/she works through a checklist of dead-end diagnostics. I'll probably have to uninstall & install drivers, reboot several times, at least once in 'Safe' mode, before I get passed on to someone who has the authority to dispatch someone to apply the solution I already know is needed. Noblesse oblige - we all started our computer careers as quaking, clueless helpdesk fodder dreading the next call.
Work Weak
Speaking of dead-end and clueless, this has been sort of a blah week, workwise. My plane got in late Sunday night/Monday morning, and I've been short on sleep ever since. Also, I've had extended periods of struggle with the niggling stuff that clients can't see. And after reading Kat's http://blogs.salon.com/0001068/ experience today, I begin to suspect that she's working with software that's a lot more interesting than mine. Looking forward to my flight back home tomorrow night.
9:59:15 PM 
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Perils of Caffeine in the Evening
