travail en cours

It’s a wondrous age. I count my blessings to be living in a time of power-steering, major advances in psychiatry and neuroscience, zero-calorie soft drink and the imminent life-changing promise of cloud-computing. (Although I would be happy to give that all up to be jetting about in a Vespa, my hair pinned up in a perfectly stiff and intact beehive, sans-helmet in 1960s Paris, even if I would be shifting uncomfortably on the seat from a primitively-size sanitary pad). But how is that on an ordinary day I can experience such modern-day marvels like going to a restaurant bathroom and pressing a button to change the toilet seat cover or witness a pre-speech infant swipe a television screen thinking that it would change the channel like a touch-screen iPad and still have the problem of a permanently sticky mouse and trackpad?! You would think some enterprising programmer/inventor/tinkerer with a penchant for consuming sweet snacks while browsing gaming forums would have put his/her brilliant mind to the question of how to keep these surfaces ‘sugar-free’. 

Let’s take inspiration from nature - mice groom themselves. (Although some mice with PTSD get a bit OCD about it and it’s quite heartbreaking to see them lick themselves bald.) Why can’t my computer mouse be self-cleaning? Why can’t my trackpad have a little auto-wiper to sweep away the crumbs, miscellaneous debris and the icing-powder from my kourambiedes?

Now that’s an engineering problem worth solving. Consider it a ‘green’ solution in the quest to curb climate change. Using up a steady supply of moist towelettes is getting to my eco-conscience. But not enough to stop me eating cake and blogging simultaneously.