Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
But yes they need cleaning much like a keyboard needs the crumbs shaken out now and then.
That's crazy! What do you think the mouse is for. DUH!! (on a side note, is it really supposed to squeak every time I 'click' it?)

Seriously, I only clean out the keyboard once in a lifetime. In fact, the last time I tried cleaning my keyboard, I dislodged the bones of a new species of dinosaur, and found a colony of tiny, intelligent, swamp beings that communicated in a quaint amish dialect and sacrificed cheetos to the "Thunder God". It was a very disturbing experience,and I haven't tried cleaning a keyboard since.

@0-Green: I had a PDA. I was sorely challenged to find something useful to do with it. There were a few things that were marginally useful, but none of them could really justify the cost. However, I got the PDA for testing a program that really WAS useful, but was also such an utter niche that it mostly served to highlight the limits of the device. The program was a fish creel survey program which would be used by creel clerks in a VERY remote area. They had no connectivity, nor expectation of connectivity, but the program allowed them to easily collect survey information into a fairly robust database that could then be downloaded onto a laptop at the end of the shift. A smartphone app could be written to do the same thing, these days, but they didn't exist at the time.

From that I learned that a PDA was a useful device for recording certain types of complex data as long as the data acquisition was of limitted duration, required great mobility on the part of the user, and was in a tolerable environment. Pretty narrow specs, really.