4th Apr 2005

Of Rodents and Users

This post on SimpleBits reminds me of the point in time when I briefly surrendered to a mousepad obsession; mulling over reviews, specification sheets and user comments, I spent about a week weighing up my options. Then I bought a RatPad and have barely thought about the subject since.

Focusing on a particular thing like that, for a short period of time, is an extremely effective way to make decisions. Do vast amounts of research, weigh up the options, make your choice, and stick with it. Then you can get on with life, secure in your choice (unless you have cause to regret it; however, minimising the chances of this is what the brief obession model is all about).

It’s been a few years, and the RatPad is slightly warped, the label is half rubbed off, and some of the rubber feet have been lost. However, it remains far and away the best mousepad I’ve ever owned. Doubtless at some point I’ll replace it with a new one, but for the moment it remains much as it was when I bought it: slick, durable, utilitarian. Every so often I take it downstairs and wash it (as you’d wash a plate, essentially—washing-up liquid and hot water).

I have a number of things like this: useful but almost invisible. Compaq keyboard (just the right size, just the right stickiness and sounds of key); pad of super sticky Post-it notes (actually stay stuck to things); Uni-ball Micro pens (thin black lines, a great feel). These small items shape our world without us noticing, allowing us to perform the tasks assigned to us that little bit more easily, lightening the load just enough to make it bearable.

8 responses

At home I have some kind of wood patterened linoleum-on-steel industrial desk surface from the 70’s. It is, in itself, the perfect mousepad. I clean the mouse and the area of dustclots with the trailing edge of a razor blade.

At work I’m less fortunate– all surfaces are that multithousand dollar black ceramic armor plating that is an absolute necessity in the lab– it won’t burn, or dissolve in the strongest organic solvents, acids, or bases. It’s also damn near perfectly smooth and reflective, which makes the poor mouse’s glowing red eye bleed. So I just put down couple of copies of last week’s lab meeting handout. There’s enough type on them to give the eye something to grab, and a few sheets of paper provide enough friction to keep the pad from sliding around on the surface.

~ SquidDNA

Besides the great surface (textured but still smooth, so it works for both ball and optical mice) one of the great advantages of the RatPad is the little rubber feet. I used to play Counter-Strike a fair bit, and it was a greatly improved experience for having a mousepad that didn’t slide and was big enough for me to do 180-degree spins pretty easily, and still retain accurate aiming control. Nowadays, that level of control remains useful, but for doing graphics rather than shooting people.

My desk’s solid pine, and optical mice track well on it, but I still prefer having an actual mousepad. I know optical mice were meant to be the death of mousepads, but I’ve found that having a consistent (albeit patterned) surface helps considerably, especially when control is needed.

~ Benedict

I can see the appeal of a professional mousing surface for improvements to CS, but that’s throwing good money after bad for me.

~ SquidDNA

I think to a great extent it depends on personal circumstances. In retrospect I think the RatPad would have been worth it even if I hadn’t been playing games (which, in general, I don’t anymore). This largely comes down to ‘feel’; I prefer the feel of the control I have when using the pad to the feel I get when just having the mouse on the desk. Partly this is probably simply an aesthetic preference, and partly it’s down to the particular circumstances of one’s usage.

~ Benedict

\o/ subscriptions!

~ ceejayoz

Comments are now formatted with Textile; I’ll look into creating a local page with a list of all Textile tags.

~ Benedict

After moving house about 3 weeks ago, I lost my long-lived Intel mousepad, so now I’m using… an A4 piece of brown cardboard. It actually seems to give my optical mouse finer control than with the Intel pad, go figure.

~ Assimilator

Cardboard’s pretty good, because of the texture; gives it the right amount of traction as well as suitably fine detail for the optics to latch onto. The only downside is that it tends to get battered and scruffy quite quickly with heavy use… but hey, it’s just cardboard, you can recycle it and get a nice piece.

~ Benedict