Pet of the day
Apr 19th 2006Wallabynerd alert & thesis
Pet peeve of the day: Someone who insists on wearing gloves to protect his hands from chemicals — good. And then he sits down to use a (shared) computer in the lab where he was doing his experiment. With the gloves on.
Yep, might as well just dip the mouse in whatever he was working with. Why yes, he does have a PhD already. Yes, people have mentioned this to him before.
It’s actually a real pain to do stuff like that correctly. The right way to do it is to remove the gloves as soon as one turns away from the bench. It’s pretty easy to go through a whole box of gloves that way in a single morning, though, and I’ve never found gloves that didn’t irritate my hands with that many changes. And when the experiment consists of ten seconds of “lab work” (needing gloves) and then ten seconds of computer work to tell the computer to take the next data point… well, it’s not hard to see why he was doing it that way.
I wonder if there’s sort of a “keyboard glove”…. a thin plastic cover that could be dropped over the keyboard and mouse to protect them from dirty hands, and then disposed of when the experiment’s done. Saran wrap would work but it’d be a pain to drape over it and too hard to type with it wrapped tight.
Sorry for the short supply of updates lately — I’m trying to get my thesis finished up by May 1 and there’s miles to go still. Or at least chapters.
2 Responses to “Pet of the day”
allan on 19 Apr 2006 at 6:46 pm #
That happens in my lab a fair bit too. But then people, looking at the gross computer, opt to keep their gloves on so they don’t have to touch what others left behind, exacerbating the whole situation.
ABC says on 23 Apr 2006 at 10:21 pm #
I have two suggestions, maybe one is helpful:
1) Get a footswitch, if a single click is needed, and connect to the game port. Then tell software to look for the footswitch event as a surrogate for the keyboard event needed.
2) Get a keyboard cover, of soft vinyl plastic, to put over standard keyboard.
3) (Cannot count tonight;) Voice recognition software trigger: “Igor, take the next point!”
4) (Still another) Get a capacitance switch (membrane) keyboard such as restaurants use. This can have a plastic film roll beside it so that you can tear off a strip and anchor it with masking tape.
Or use method 2 or 4 with wearing your own gloves (comment 1), and, at day’s end, wash (if (2)) or tear off and dispose (if (4)).