You never know when some old esoteric piece of knowledge is going to come in handy.

Lately, the optical mouse for my laptop has been getting clunky. It's just not as responsive as it used to be has this tendency to 'stick' a little. Since this is actually the replacement mouse, after the first one inexplicably broke down around half a year ago (though luckily still within the warranty period) I just assumed it was the fact that Logitech makes useless crap.

I happened to be on facebook the other day and saw a notice that a bunch of friends had joined a group about old Nintendo games. It got me thinking about why in the world we had to always blow on those damn games to make them work in the first place. How could a little bit of microscopic dust really screw up the connection? You don't see people today blowing on their DS games or blowing on their USB cables. I happened to look down at my mouse and a shrugging sort of a lightbulb lit up. I turned it upside down and blew a few times into the optical hole. It now works perfectly again.

Go figure.