Pointless gruntle about my keyboard's smirking revenge

[feren]

My left "Alt" key has decided that now is the time to be broken. Sometime between the time I left for Kenosha on Saturday morning and now it just up and quit working. This really shouldn't bother me, but the way I learned keyboarding means that I am highly dependent upon that left-side Alt key for the infamous "Alt-tab" sequence in Windows to flip between applications. At this point, after 15+ years of using (left) Alt-tab you can probably consider it "muscle memory." As if that's not enough -- you guessed it, I'm a complete geek and at any given moment I have something akin to eleven or thirteen applications open between my two monitors. I'm constantly flipping between them. When I want to rotate from Firefox to Putty I hit (left) Alt-Tab and expect the window to pop up. It doesn't. I groan inwardly and use the Alt key on the right-hand side of they keyboard.

Arrrrrgh, I just did it again. Three times in succession. Each time I had that quizzical "WTF?" expression on my face, though gradually 'WTF' was replaced with 'rage.'

This keyboard may well be thrown out the Blue Room of Death's window before this night is through. The insult to injury in all this is that my keyboard is the Natural Keyboard Pro ergonomic model from MS that was discontinued something like two years ago. Want to know how I know it's good? jwz, the most anti-MS man ever to walk the planet (MS did kill his company, after all) endorses it in his article My wrists and welcome to them. I do not want this crazy new "Elite Ergonomic Pro 4-Hojillion" keyboard from MS. I might end up with the Kinesis Contour keyboard since the Kinesis Evolution keyboard seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

Regardless, I am going to be so screwed.

That's right, your pain.

Comments

[jwz.livejournal.com]

I can confirm that the current model of MS Natural is a complete piece of shit. It's mushy and half the time keystrokes just vanish.

[spoothbrush.livejournal.com]

Man. I love my MS natural keyboards. LOVE.

[posicat.livejournal.com]

I can try to fix it if you want :) I'm often good with that kind of thing.

[geeked-freak.livejournal.com]

*giggles* *slaps hand over mouth* *giggles around hand* Sorry... I tried to stop myself but the image of the WTF face followed by rage just tickled me for some reason.

[captain18.livejournal.com]

Did you see this? Dunno if it's the same, but I thought it might be helpful.

[ya-wot-aver.livejournal.com]

Napalm fixes everything.