Technology is wonderful these days. You can read Arseblog on your phone first thing in the morning as you go about your daily ablutions, you can watch HD video on tiny devices with more computing power than the highest spec PC from a few years ago, there’s the ‘Internet of Things’ where your TV, fridge, fitness wrist wotsit and all kinds of other things are connected via the magic of wireless and Bluetooth and WiFi, and, let’s not forget, Twitter gives the common man the ability to call people he’s never met all kinds of disgusting and disturbing names at any time of the day or night.
So it’s particularly vexing when you get up in the morning and something as simple as the mouse not working utterly stifles you from doing your work. I have one of those Apple Magic Mouse things. If you’ve got one, you know the deal – it’s the kind that eats batteries like Grant Holt eats cakes and pies. Every few days it munches its way through a couple before it starts acting up like some kind of Nasri.
This morning the computer said it couldn’t find the mouse so I figured it needed new ones – even though I’d just replaced them the other day. I put new ones in and said, “Now I have fed you oh tiny-fit-in-my-fist Dark Lord, reward me by moving the cursor around the screen”, but it did not. It kept telling me it couldn’t find the mouse then it just gave up all that helpful stuff completely.
I then went through the usual troubleshooting routine: I turned it (the mouse) on and off a few times. No go. I called the mouse a ‘poxy little geebag’, nothing. This then called for the serious techy solution, the failsafe if you will: I whacked it off the desk a few times. NOTHING. At which point all the options available to me exhausted. I am mouseless. My mouse is no more. It is an ex-mouse. It is pining for the fjords, it is most certainly not magic.
Unless, of course, it is doing a trick on me and will rouse itself from the dead any moment now. The situation was made more irritating by the fact that a few weeks ago, during one of my sporadic tidyings of the office (in which I make room for more junk and stuff I don’t need by throwing out some of the junk and stuff I really don’t need), I chucked away a couple of old meeses. The ones with an actual USB cable coming out of the back of them.
“Look at these ancient things,” I said to myself, “like cars with crank shafts or bi-planes or Harry Redknapp. Completely redundant and useless in the modern world. I will never have need of them again. In the bin with you!”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why hoarding stuff is a good idea. I was almost at my wits end, unable to start my day, when I remembered some years ago Arseblog Tom waxed lyrical on the qualities of a track-pad device which I, being the trusting type, bought immediately and then, after one use, decided I hated it. Thankfully that wasn’t involved in the cull and the great throwing out of March 2015, so it’s with that device that I have been able to bring you today’s blog.
On the downside, however, is the fact that there’s very little going on in the Arsenal world this morning. Well, not as far as we know anyway. There might well be all kinds of stuff happening behind the scenes with Ivan Gazidis and Dick Law and Arsene Wenger working like Trojans on deals and transfers and exciting developments, but like the terrible Luddites they are they are not doing it live in Periscope so how do we know?!
The most interesting thing I can find this morning is news that Southampton’s Morgan Schneiderlin looks like he’s going to Manchester United in a £24m deal. If we were a people without Coq, the Coqless, this news might be irritating, but the Frenchman’s emergence has changed our priorities in terms of midfield recruitment. I’m of the opinion that his importance is such that we really do have to consider an addition in that area, simply because I don’t see another player in the squad who can really do what he does.
However, his form and performances have made it difficult for the manager. As we’ve touched on before, does he spend big on a player whose transfer fee means he’s going to have to play? Even in this era of vastly inflated prices, you don’t spend £24m on back-up or an understudy. Or does he look at what Coquelin has done and bring in somebody who can provide the depth we need and the required competition without the weight and expectation of the price-tag?
Anyway, those decisions are why he’s paid the big bucks and I’m just some bloke without a mouse forced into discussing a transfer that, in all likelihood, has nothing to do with us. For some extra reading this morning, you can check out Tim Stillman’s column on Petr Cech right here (which kinda tallies with something I wrote for ESPN the other day too).
Other than that it’s a slow, post-season Friday so my suggestion is to let the day go by and at the appropriate time drink a beer or two. Is 11am that time? I couldn’t possibly say.
Till tomorrow.
