Of Mice and Men

A quick note to begin the day, mainly for the benefit of Googling fellow owners of the Logitech VX Nano mouse - if, like me, you suddenly find that the mouse wheel is free wheeling rather than being controlled by a detent then try clicking on the mouse wheel. The behaviour toggles!

OK, OK, I should have RTFM¹ but it's a mouse FFS, how hard can it be ... too hard for me it seems².

Meanwhile both Prince Philip and I seem to slowly be getting better (although I've just had to stop typing to try to cough some phlegm up, yuck). We were talking about Phil the Greek in the pub on Saturday and I clearly wasn't the only one with a deal of respect for him and some worry that he was in hospital. I remember only too well my next door neighbour who was still cycling to Tesco at the other end of the village into his early 90s and then got a virus one Christmas which turned nasty. He was in hospital for a couple of weeks. By the time he got out he'd lost all his strength and never really recovered. The prince is 86 now so he's not much younger ... but then who is.

And the Shannon Matthews saga continues. The latest bizarre twist is that her mother Karen has been arrested on "suspicion of perverting the course of justice" - whatever that means? When this finally comes to a conclusion it's going to make a great book. Just the horrendously complicated family tree should take up pages and pages: Karen is 32 and she's had seven children by five different fathers³ four of whom were living with her and her current boyfriend⁴, three with their fathers. But the real question that remains unclear is why Shannon disappeared in the first place? Even the BBC are referring the the 'kidnap' in quotation marks. It's a very strange affair all round.

1. Or even the product page, where is clearly says Hyper-fast scrolling: Fly through long documents at hyperspeed with the nearly frictionless scroll wheel, or shift instantly to precise scrolling although to be fair it doesn't define how you achieve this behaviour switch. For me, being used to clicking on the mouse wheel for middle mouse button (which you do a lot more with Linux than you do with Windoze) means I've been clicking it a lot, despite the mouse having a separate middle mouse button (for reasons I now understand!).
2. By the way if you've got a laptop and want a proper mouse I do recommend the VX Nano, as well as being a nice compact ambidextrous mouse the USB wireless transmitter is tiny, as you can see above, that's a USB plug with just a short lug of black plastic on the end of it. Not that cheap, but Amazon have it for £33.99 the moment.
3. Something she managed in nine years, starting when she was about 21, if this Times article is correct.
4. Who's only 22, and is now also under arrest of course, for possession of kiddie porn.