I haven't randomly rambled for a while, so here's an anecdote from work. My office is Apple-only, so we have a proliferation of ergonomically-questionable white and silver "designer" hardware around, including several instances of Apple's Magic Mouse. Aside from it being slightly too small to be comfortable in my hand, I've started to appreciate how it works - I'd just like the next size up, please.

However, over the past couple of weeks the Magic Mouse we use to run the Spotify box in the office (it does other things, but none so important as playing music) began to work intermittently. The Magic Mouse would randomly turn itself off, and take several attempts at fiddling with the switch, removing batteries, re-inserting batteries and hurling obscenities before it turned back on. Then on Friday, mine started doing the same thing, dropping out regularly until it wouldn't turn back on at all.

By lunchtime Monday we had 3 'Magic' Mice which had been reduced to worthless shiny pebbles. Just as the decision had been made to take them to the Apple store and get some corded mice instead, we put two and two together and realised that the problems on all three mice had started after we'd changed the batteries, from the Energizers they had in them originally to Duracell batteries from the newsagent across the road.

That couldn't be it, surely? After a hunt around Soho for somewhere which sold a different brand, sure enough, it was the Duracell's which the Magic Mice didn't like.

There's only one thing I could think of which might have upset them - we were using Duracell Plus batteries with "Super Conductive Graphite Technology", or "magic pencil ring" as I've come to refer to it. You can tell these batteries - they look like someone's taken a thick pencil and drawn a ring around both ends. I'm pointing my finger at the 'super conductive graphite' for now...

It seems like a week of battery woes - I ordered some 7dayshop.com AAA batteries for my portable mouse and keyboard, but the knobby bit isn't large enough so you have to stuff some foil in between the battery and connections to make them work correctly. On Friday I resorted to buying Polos to use the foil wrapper for this purpose (and had to scrape said foil off the plastic backing)...