Archive for August, 2005

I stopped by the local Walgreen’s pharmacy on my way home from work, to pick up some medicine for Wife. The elderly woman at the checkstand started asking me about my Utilikilt.

“That’s a nice kilt. Why are you wearing a kilt, young man?”

“Frankly, because I hate wearing pants, and because it’s more comfortable.”

(She peers over the register, looks me over.)

“And where is that sort of kilt from? Ireland?”

“Actually, it’s from Seattle, it’s an American kilt, but it’s based on a Scottish garment…”

“So you’re Scottish, then? What clan are you with?”

“No, my family is mostly German…”

“I didn’t know Germans wore kilts.”

“Well, I do.”

(She gives me a slightly chiding look…)

“You have nice legs, young man. You could just wear shorts instead…”

At this point, I decided that it’d be best just to smile, thank her, take my medicine and go home. I probably should have fired back a snippy comment - I don’t particularly like the insinuation that shorts are an acceptable replacement for a kilt, nor are they a sizable improvement over pants.

But then again, she doesn’t have balls external genitalia to worry about. Wearing a kilt is a guy thing - she wouldn’t understand.

In this post and in all future posts, I will use the identifiers ‘Wife’, ‘Girl’ and ‘Boy’ to refer to my lovely spouse and our twin babies, whose genders are listed respectively. I do this to protect the privacy of my family. Unless you know me well, you don’t need to know my family’s real names anyway.

Last weekend, Wife and I decided to take our 4.5-month-old twin babies to the mall. We spent a few hours in the nice, air-conditioned mall, pushing the twins around in their posh dual stroller. Fortunately, they decided that today was one of their good days, and they were (mostly) little angels for the whole trip. Girl and Boy took turns sleeping in the stroller (they love being moved around, and seeing new sights) while Wife caught up on some long-delayed shopping for clothing.

We brought along two sets of bottles, containing the twins’ formula. Unfortunately, the formula was still rather chilly (since we had stored it in a cooler) and Girl was absolutely not into drinking cold formula, at all. She put up a bit of a fuss, and it took a while to get her calmed down to the point where her hunger overrode her discomfort at drinking cold formula. Meanwhile, she yelled and screamed in the courtyard of the mall, and got quite a few looks from passers-by.

Later that evening we decided to eat dinner at a nearby restaurant, and got a table with some free space for the twins’ stroller. However, by this time they were getting hungry again, so we had to feed them in the middle of the restaurant while food was being delivered to our table. Feeding hungry, fussy babies while trying to eat chunks of flaky seafood is not the easiest task. At our request, our waitress brought a small basin of hot water, in which we rested the bottles of formula to warm the contents. This time, Girl was a bit less fussy about the lukewarm formula, but Boy decided that he would spit up all over everything and everyone within aiming distance. Ah well.

We managed to finish our dinner and take home our leftover food. Taking twin babies out of the house is a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort, if only to hear the compliments of the passers-by: “Your babies are so cute!” Because, frankly, they are. And that’s what being a daddy is all about.

So I got myself a new Apple Mighty Mouse a few weeks ago, and I’ve been using it every day. This is probably the best optical mouse that I’ve ever used, period.

The tracking is smooth, without any skips or jumps. The mouse itself is very lightweight, yet not too light to control and skip all over the place. It tracks well and slides very smoothly on my black leather mousepad. The operation is simple, and the mouse-shell-click action is smoother and easier to use than I thought it would be. (I had briefly tried some of the earlier Apple Pro mice, and didn’t like the feel as much as the Mighty Mouse.) The scroll ball took some time to get used to, but works very well. I don’t have the occasion to scroll horizontally, that often, but it’s nice to have it.

And the touch-sensitive shell (to emulate a 2-button mouse) works very well. Amazingly well, I have to say.

My biggest nitpick so far lies not with the mouse, but with its accompanying driver software for Mac OS 10.4.x. The Mighty Mouse control panel gives me the option to change the actions of the mouse’s buttons. By default, clicking the scroll ball will open Exposé. I wanted to keep this feature, but still use my normal pointing device (a Fingerworks iGesture touchpad, the best mousing device *ever* created, period) configured with its normal 3-button mouse operations. No go. Mighty Mouse’s control panel decided to remap all middle-click events to the activation of Exposé, so I effectively lost my middle-click. I use middle-click heavily in Safari and Camino, so I was not amused. Therefore, I had to change the Mighty Mouse control panel back to sane defaults. (I don’t need to access Exposé from the mouse anyway - the F9 key is within easy reach.)

Kudos to Apple’s design team. This mouse is great! If I ever lost my iGesture and TouchStream touchpads and had to use a *real* mouse (i.e. one you have to actually move around) exclusively, the Mighty Mouse would be my pointer of choice.