Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Real Men Use 18-Button Mice

The new OpenOfficeMouse has been generating a lot of buzz lately, mostly because of its proud array of buttons — 18 in all — and its built-in joystick:

Now, what can you do with 18 buttons, 52 commands, and a joystick? The answer is anything you like. The ability to assign application functions to both clicks and double-clicks, combined with the ability to use the joystick as an analog joystick or as the equivalent of 4,8, or 16 additional mouse buttons, significantly expands your options beyond the mere addition of more buttons.

The thing that all the haters aren’t considering is that an 18-button mouse gives you 262144 potential click combinations — enough to assign a click for pretty much any action, or series of actions, imaginable.

Say you wanted to launch a browser, navigate to your third favorite celebrity gossip site, compose a pre-emptive tweet about the indiscretions of Starlet X, and start a little game of solitaire. With the OpenOfficeMouse, it’s simple! Just click buttons 1 and 3 and 5 and 9 and 10 and 13 and 17 while rotating your joystick -36 degrees off its central axis. Just be careful not to click button 12 as well, because that would shut down your computer. Or possibly alphabetize the icons on your desktop. It’s unclear.

My understanding is that the manufacturers of this device will soon announce a bevy of new products, including:

1. The OpenOfficeKeyboard, which does away with the tedium of shift- and control-key combinations by providing a dedicated key for every possible OpenOffice function. This doesn’t just mean separate keys for big O and little o and umlaut ö, but a separate key for things like Copy and Paste and Insert Date and Select Font as well. The keyboard goes into production as soon as a large enough blimp hanger can be located to build a prototype in.
2. The OpenOfficeUSBKey, 432 terabytes of storage convenience, right at your fingertips! As long as your fingertips are manipulating a crane powerful enough to lift it, of course. Comes with its own trailer, which you can conveniently hitch to the back of your car in the event that you wish to transport it to a different location¹.
3. The OpenOfficeMonitor, which is actually a series of connected monitors, each dedicated to a single window! No more tedious opening and dragging and minimizing². With the OOMonitor, all your windows are there, all the time. And, in the unlikely event that you actually want to close one, you can simply snap off the associated monitor/window module and put it under your desk. The default configuration comes with 6 separate monitor/window modules, and it’s super-easy to snap on additional ones, as your multi-tasking needs dictate.

I’ve found the recent, Apple-inspired trends toward smallness and simplicity deeply disturbing. It’s wonderful to see a company doing something about it.

Please tell me this is a spoof!

Only a little. I think the mouse is real.

God I love geeks.