I don’t know if this bugs you.

I use all of my fingers for typing and rest my hands on the wrist rests on the bottom of keyboard when I do so. If you have a laptop that has one of those touch pads and want to type using the laptop’s keyboard you have to put up with your cursor jumping about to some arbitrary place on the screen that depends upon where the mouse pointer is sitting, even if you don’t think you’ve touched the thing. Very annoying. If you have a cheapy laptop like me you can’t switch it off when you’re using a mouse, either. I can’t adjust the sensitivity and there doesn’t seem to be anything in the BIOS.

Finally I had a brain wave. I took an old dry-cleaning loyalty card and cut it to the same shape as the touchpad. I can now sit here typing with the laptop’s keyboard and not have the cursor jump around if I catch the touchpad with my thumb. Weirdly the touchpad still works through the loyalty card. Anybody want the keyboard I bought? (keeping it because it’s much better than the laptop one).

Joy.

Wireless PCMCIA Network Cards

Got a D-Link G650 from ebay because the US Robotics one was acting up since I installed XP service pack 2. Suspect you need to turn off the “let windows manage this connectio” thing. It was working OK until about 2 patches ago. I will EBay the USR one, of course being honest about the SP2 thing. Also move to 802.11g and getting 54 MBPS, probably cooking my poor brain. Works a treat.

Work

Job hunt continues. Lots of interesting work around, but the main reason for looking is financial. I’m quite a way down (20%) from what I had when I was when I lost my job a while back and struggling. I still hate Oracle forms, they’ve done NOTHING with making it easier to get stuff done. If you’ve ever used a modern IDE with method name completion and documentation a right-click or function key away. I won’t cry never to have to use the damn thing again and it is definitely part of my wanting to move on, but not enough on its own. (I won’t mention having to restart Forms every couple of hours because it screws up, either, or the crap library management system that corrupts things or the bug where you can’t navigate between fields with a mouse at certain patch levels). That said, if the market demanded it and offered big bucks it would be churlish to refuse.

Anybody looking for an experienced software designer in the North of England?