I’m still trying to get a fire lit under P. to get dressed and actually go outside the house, though largely without success. I was sitting here, reading something or other, and in a comment, someone mentioned the irritating behaviour of Windows because if you have multiple windows open, focus does not follow the mouse, as it does in X-windows. That pisses me off because it’s an extra click, and if I’m using XP, I’m already pre-annoyed, so I thought, “Well, I’m not doing anything else, so I’ll reboot and change that…I think I have Tweak UI already.” I booted to XP, enabled the follow-mouse focus, and thought that since I was there anyway and not busy, I’d finally get around to changing the mouse behaviour to single-click, like I use in Gnome. Somehow, I managed to start the Logitech thing (control centre or whatever the fuck it’s called), and although I’d long ago disabled the annoying fucking automatic updates, it asked whether it could check for updates. Feeling magnanimous, I thought, “Meh, why not?” and let it do its stuff. Surprise, surprise; a new update was available. I don’t remember why I even installed the goddamned Logitech mouse software, since it’s only an ordinary two-button, one clicky scroll wheel USB optical mouse and works with whatever XP has (I think–can’t recall for certain), but I had, and couldn’t be arsed to uninstall it.
Finally, the update downloaded, and the install started. I clicked a couple of “Next”, thinking it would take only a minute or two–it’s a fucking mouse, facrissake, not the control mechanism for the Mars Rover–but nope. It took several minutes (so long, in fact, that I thought it had stopped responding), and just as I was getting annoyed enough to kill the process, it finally finished. I was presented with a window that said something to the effect of “Installation complete. Please restart your computer.” Now, be reasonable…I’m not restarting the goddamned computer for a mouse. Forget it–if the cursor moves and responds when I click, it works, and I’ll reboot when I’m good and goddamned ready. The only button option there was “Finish”, and I assumed I’d click that and the fucking Logitech window would go away. I was right…sort of. The window did indeed go away, but the next thing I knew, the screen went dark, and then to, “Saving your settings.” WTF??? The window said, “Please restart your computer,” not, “If you click the only button available to make the annoying, focus-stealing window go away, I’m going to immediately shut down everything without your permission, no matter what you were doing, and I’m going to reboot your computer.”
Fuck you, Logitech. I like your mice, but fuck you. For all your stupid software knew, I had sixteen seconds left on a file upload that had taken me twelve hours to do over my Stone Age capped upstream, or had twenty-five hours’ worth of unsaved changes to the only copy of my Ph.D. thesis. You don’t get to decide when my computer restarts…I do. It’s been so long that I can’t remember why I installed your stupid software in the first place, but I’m not doing it again. Whatever drivers XP can find to make the pointer move and the buttons click will do just nicely, and I’m not buying another Logitech mouse, even if I do like them. Maybe not a Logitech anything, though your webcams are pretty good. It didn’t matter that it rebooted because I was finished what I wanted to do and had nothing important going on, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. Fuck you. The computer belongs to me, not to Logitech, Microsoft or anyone else. To me, and it does what I tell it to do, when I tell it.
