My optical mouse started acting up today. The main clicky button (left) sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. And like any sane person, engineer or not, I whacked it on the desk a few times and it started working.

With the accumulated centuries of people whacking things you'd think there would be a plethora of studies about this. Studies identifying the whacking gene, why whacking works, why whacking won't work, why we whack, why some of us won't whack, and those that are whacked out. For all of the accumulated expertise I have yet to see a technical book or magazine cover the whacking issue. As part of a hardware review there'd be a section on potentially good whacking strategies. Like,

"This Lexmark inkjet printer rots big time but we think a two foot tune-up (drop from two feet above a hard surface) followed by a lateral whack near the control panel will improve color printing performance for most users. You might even manage to get another four or five pages from the supplied Lexmark print cartridge, almost doubling the normal cartridge output."

Which brings us back to the mouse. For all my whacking it refused to stay repaired. This can mean only one thing: time to take it apart. If you haven't cracked open an optical mouse you might not realize that there's a little digital camera inside, along with the flaky buttons. The camera is focused a few dog hairs from the bottom of the mouse onto your desktop. A thousand times a second it snaps a little mouse belly photograph and compares it to the previous snapshot. "Hey" it says, "that spec of dirt was a half a dog hair higher in the last photo, they must be moving the mouse!" Little digital alarms go off, electrons tunnel through PN junctions, and an urgent signal is sent to the computer, which responds by moving the cursor a bit.

You're thinking to yourself, "I've always wanted a digital camera and here I've had one all along." Yes, wouldn't it be fantastic if you could capture all of them mouse belly photos and sew them into a continuous tapestry? Rub the mouse all over your brother's face and end up with some crazy looking flat brother map? I googled for it but I don't think anyone has figured out how to do optical mouse photos yet. An untapped area waiting to be explored. ":^)

After passing the mouse around and letting all of the other engineers poke at it and look up the componenets we changed the flaky switch out with a good one and all is well again.

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