Windows updates, II

The wired mouse on my desktop has been intermittently iffy since Friday's Win10 update, and at times unusable. So last night I decided to end-run the problem and switch it out for something using an entirely different driver. So I swapped it out for the wireless mouse from my laptop, which immediately worked perfectly.

Out of curiousity I plugged the non-functioning wired mouse into the laptop, where it also works perfectly. At least until Win10 next updates on the laptop.

{Sigh} Computers!!!

In other news, pouring boiling coffee all over your hand turns out to be a really effective way of waking yourself up, but not really one I can recommend.  

Fortunately I got away without serious injury. I was pouring myself a cupful on Saturday morning, tried to lift it with my (weaker) left hand, which instantly started to shake, splashing itself with scalding hot coffee. To compound the issue, rather than drop the cup I tried to put it down on the floor, which just meant splashing more and more coffee onto myself. So I spent the next 20 minutes with my hand under the cold tap, and the rest of the morning with it wrapped in a damp cloth, and six hours later it was still stinging, but it never actually blistered. I had to give up on heading out for lunch, as using my hand for wheelchair propelling seemed like a bad idea, but it was fine by Saturday evening. Really, really lucky there!

One of my relatives asked if I hadn't learnt to avoid doing this kind of thing. I pointed out I do learn, I just keep finding new ways to do them!

Currently Reading

Bingeing in Norman Friedman's naval history stuff with two on the go. Almost finished British Cruisers of the Victorian Era, which I've been picking my way through over the Summer. It's been slow progress as it's a little on the early side for my interests. And about a quarter of the way into his Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery, which I bought myself for my birthday and, like his Naval Firepower on surface gunnery  is another of those rare books where you really do want more equations. The descriptions of how they managed to computerise AA gunnery in the period between the wars using purely mechanical means are gorgeously ingenious:

"You need the sine of the angle? Here, run a pointer over a sphere";

"You need to multiply X and Y, and multiplication is difficult? Well let's take Log(X) and Log(Y) and add them instead"

"You need to balance two complex equations? Here, take a total guess at each, put the results up for the operators and have them adjust the inputs until they're the same"

"You need to extract angles from what's essentially a section of a cone? Well approximate it as an ellipse, and approximate the ellipse by rotating a hoop in front of a light source, and have the operator read the tangent off the projection on a screen."

A couple of word origins have tickled my fancy as well. I though the "Board Margin" was the amount allowed in RN ship designs for unexpected weight growth during construction because of design changes. It actually turns out to be the amount allowed for weight growth during construction because "we don't actually know how much this bit will weigh until we build it". And then there's "Flyplane", which I just thought was the randomly created name of one of the gunnery systems; nope, the Flyplane is the plane defined by the course of an aircraft, and the position of the observer, which can be used as an alternative coordinate system for measuring this stuff.