In Continuum.

I think it is important to be objective in life. It is not possible to be a hundred percent objective in anything we do, but we can try at it. If you are all one-sided, then you end up being labeled as being a fanatic, or someone who cannot consider both sides of the coin. It's kind of like my sister in that regard, someone who finds no fault in those Japanese boy bands that she loves so blindly. She never has been able to come up with a good enough reason other than "I like it", and I've always associated her love for music with fanaticism. She was the kind of teenage fan who used to chase after her favorite celebrities and to camp at the hotels that they stayed in. She doesn't do that anymore, claiming that she has grown out of it. Yet, her love for Japanese celebrities was the only reason why she bought an external hard drive that is one terabyte in size, all of which to fit her craving for music videos and pictures. Anyway, my fanaticism for Apple is nowhere near as crazy as hers. For the most part, I do consider myself to be a rational human being. If there is something about Apple products that need improvements, I say it. If there is something that sucks about an Apple product, I complain about it. I think I am as objective as it gets, and that is what I will try to do in this blog entry.

I love Apple products, and my friends should know that. Most of the time, they are the epitome of what products should be like - an emphasis on both the exterior and the interior. I haven't been a user for a very long time (a little more than two years to be accurate), but let's just say that I've been a fan ever since. Anyway, most of the time, I have no problems with its products. People complain often about the compatibility issues and the fact that there aren't a lot of Mac-related applications. For one, I personally don't have many compatibility issues ever since I started using this platform, and I have found replacements for most, if not all of the programs that I used to use in my old PC. I'd vehemently defend the brand if somebody says something that is grossly untrue about it, and I'd not hesitate to start a debate because of that too. With that said, though, I still have a lot of complaints regarding the brand, some may seem really minor to most people, but they are really annoying to me. For example, Mail is probably one of the poorest applications in a Mac. I have troubles downloading attachments through the applications, and there isn't a progress bar for me to know if something has been downloaded or not. However, this blog entry is to address a greater issue that I have been fighting with ever since I got my first Mac.

If you are a Mac user, you'd have definitely tried your hands on a Mighty Mouse. I remember my first day with a Mighty Mouse, and the first question I asked was "Where is the right-click button?" and "Where do I put the batteries?". True to many Apple designed products, they are slick to look at and they feel even better in your hands. I love how the mouse didn't look like a mouse, but like a small white pebble that was carefully polished with a sandpaper. That is exactly what it looked like, and I've always like that vibe in anything that I find. You know, like those doors to bathrooms that look more like closet doors? You get my point then. Anyway, it was love at first sight, and I fell in love with it again when I started using it. The fact that the mouse scrolled all 360 degrees, not to mention the fact that it had five buttons on all sides, the complete integration into the operating system completely blew me away. The smoothness of the scroll ball will completely blow your clothes off, and the need to have mouses (spelling?) that don't have that clicking sound whenever I click on them became so important to me. Everything was fine and dandy for the first couple of months, and I was even impressed by the battery life of that small little thing - until, a couple of months ago.

Like many users of the Mighty Mouse, my Mighty Mouse's scroll ball stopped working. It refused to scroll up, and would only scroll in every other direction. Going online, I realized that the problem was due to dirt being gathered within the mouse itself, something that happens to all mouses (again, spelling?) out there. I remember unscrewing the bottom of my old mouse a long time ago and screamed because of the amount of dirt that came pouring out from within. It was an awful sight, and perhaps that was the reason why Apple thought that it'd be smart to seal everything up on the Mighty Mouse. When I tried to open the damn thing, I couldn't find any screws for me to open, and that was when I realized that the edges were actually fixed together by super glue, and breaking it would void my warranty altogether. At that point in time, I was still covered by warranty, but I didn't want to bring it all the way down to an Epicenter just to have the attendants there clean my mouse anyway. So I cleaned it according to the instructions online, and they suggest any users to turn the mouse upside down and run it on a moist piece of cloth. The scroll ball worked again, and I continued using.

Then, of course, like any lousy product, the same thing happened again all over again. I swear by this, but I have tried every single possible solutions to this problem. I have tried running the mouse upside down over a moist piece of cloth, and that only worked for so long. Then I decided to try running the mouse upside down over paper, and that only worked for some time before it decided to bail out on me. For more radical methods, I even used scotch tape in an attempt to get those stubborn dirt out. What I did was to cut tiny strips of scotch tape out, and then I carefully rolled them into the mouse and through the underside. If you have enough patience, you can go ahead and try what I did. It was probably the most tedious cleaning effort, and the one that is the most useless as well. Don't even bother trying to use a scotch tape to stick things out, because nothing is going to stick at all. I also read about using compressed air to blow the dirt out from within, but I have no idea where you find compressed air. In a desperate attempt to make my mouse functional again, I started blowing at the scroll ball really hard. That didn't work, and so I was back to square one all over again. Running it on cloth works most of the time, but the trouble became more and more pronounced over time.

The scroll ball aside, the buttons started to malfunction after some time. A point to note, though, I receive a wireless Mighty Mouse for free when I bought my Macbook, and a wired Mighty Mouse came with the iMac when I bought it a few months later. The wired Mighty Mouse completely broke down, and I actually had to revert back to using the wireless Mighty Mouse for some time. The right click button on the wireless mouse stopped working properly after some time, and there'd be times when I'd have to bang furiously on the mouse just to do something on the computer screen. If I want to right click on something, it'd almost always end up as being a left click, and I'd have to turn off and then turn on the wireless mouse for things to work properly, though only for a few minutes before the same thing happens again. Not only that, the mouse would suddenly jump from one point on the screen to another without you moving the mouse. Like, if you try to move your mouse in a straight line, the cursor would go in a straight line for a while before it suddenly skips to some random point on the screen. It became really annoying, and I attributed it to bad battery initially. I even cleaned the area on the table, thinking that it was dirt gathered there over time. Yet, the problem persisted.

Back to the scroll ball, it still continued to break down from time to time. At last, I decided to do the unthinkable - I broke the mouse apart. Not by force of course, or anything out of anger and frustration. First, I carefully inserted a blade in between the mouse's body and the plastic base ring. I slowly dug around it a dozen times over before the super glue came apart. The base ring came off along with the rubber ring, and then I had to push a bunch of levers out to take the inside of the mouse apart. I then had to disconnect two cables inside to remove the top cover from the bottom unit, and that took some work on its own. I unscrewed the frame of the scroll ball, and then took apart the rest of that unit to clean the inside of the scroll ball. I started with the magnetic wheels inside, the frame itself, and then the ball. I cleaned everything with a piece of wet tissue, and then dried everything with tissue paper before fixing everything back one piece at a time. It was a tedious process, but it made me feel like MacGyver for a moment there. It felt good to take something apart and put it back again, and then it was the moment of truth. The mouse worked like a charm! The ball was working, and everything was as good as new... until about two days ago.

First of all, the routine break down occurred again. The mouse wouldn't scroll down, and when it did decide that it wanted to scroll down, it didn't want to scroll back up. Then the right click problem kicked in, and then it was made worse when left click became right click altogether. I swear, I was so pissed at the mouse that I tossed it onto my bed and threatened to smash it with a hammer. To put things into perspective as to how pissed off I was with the mouse, I actually borrowed the Asus mouse from my mother's laptop and used it for one whole day. The irony was that the night before, I was just asking Alvin about a Logitech wireless mouse that he was selling on Twitter, and then the mouse broke down twenty-four hours later. The coincidence was uncanny, but timely nonetheless. Right now, although I have to sacrifice one USB port on my iMac keyboard and the fact that I have this black plastic thing as a mouse instead of that white colored one that fitted the rest of the setup, at least this one is working perfectly so far. It's not that this one will not give me problems in the future, but I am pretty damn sure that it will not give me the same problems as the ones I had before. The Mighty Mouse looks good and works well, but only if it is within the first three months. If you are using the Mighty Mouse, you are BOUND to run into this problem, and I advise you against the worst Apple invention in the history of Apple inventions.