h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just caught up with "When will the americans get over..." thread, noticed your enquiry about cursor movement:

Are you using windows?
If you shock your mouse again (and I have to admit to being curious about that), and need to move your cursor without it, then go to control panel, accesibility options, hit the mouse tab, and activiate MouseKeys, which uses your numeric keyboard to guide the cursor, and 5 as first mouse button.

If its a recurring problem then setting up am accesibility options shortcut which can be launched by some keyboard combination is a good idea, so you dont have to mess around too much with the tab key.

Of course, if you are typing into the AddThread dialogue box, then hitting tab twice takes you to the Pst Message button, then hitting space bar will post the message.

see ya around, vp

oh yeah, and Jeff Minter is a hero isnt he

Thanks, that may well prove invaluable information. I have no idea what causes the mouse "shock". (It's covered in chrome, that's the only thing that makes sense). Weird thing is, the mouse unfreezes if the machine is reset, which would suggest a problem with the software, not the hardware. I feel a sort of "crick" in the finger that touches the mouse, which I'm guessing is a very mild electric current.

Jeff Minter is brilliant.

A mouse that bites
A chrome mouse sounds interesting... what kind of mousemat do you use? Tis a comletely random wild shot in the dark of course, but if you were using one of those ones covered in cloth, maybe rubbing the mouse across it is causing a build up of static.... a random pulse of electricity headed down the wire towards your mouse driver could certainly be enough to terminally confuse your mouse driver - drivers are not particularly robust at the best of times...

Anyway, glad to be of assistance

Sad to say we never had a speccy or an amiga - we did have an acorn electron though, which was kind of the father of the might bbc, and it had frogger on it, which I miss to this day...

I'm sure a PC version of frogger has been written and is available somewhere. Try doing a google search for it

Superb idea, and one I must avoid implimenting until after my dissertation is in, otherwise I could be in major trouble

Its bad enough in the lab using a computer that has Spider solitaire on it - if I had frogger at home as well I would just never get any work done... speaking of which, back to my introduction to fluorescence spectroscopy...