Thursday, August 23, 2007

My broken colon

My keyboard has been looking a little dusty, and I remember reading that you could clean them in the dishwasher. I didn't have time to be without my keyboard for that long, but I did take it to the kitchen sink and hose it off yesterday. I have to say, everything is working just fine, with one exception - the colon/semi-colon key is plain busted. I had hoped that after it dried out it would work, but it does not seem to be bouncing back. The question - how long can one keep using dashes ("-") in place of colons? So far I am doing OK, but I know that somewhere there is a problem I am not going to be able to solve with a dash, and when it happens - there'll be trouble.

By the way, have you watched it yet? I am going to keep asking.

5 comments:

Judy said...

Isn't there some "insert symbol" thing where you can insert a colon? You could copy it and then paste whenever you needed it.

Then again, you could spend about $10 and get a new keyboard, unless it is a fancy schmancy one.

I had to do a double-take on the whole "washing the keyboard" thing - since I'm on a laptop, I guess that wouldn't work out too well, eh?

Jeremy said...

Do you need a new keyboard? Because I have an extra one in the basement I'm not using. It's nice too, multimedia functions, hot keys, the works.

Next time, use canned air to clean your keyboard.

Or, you might want to check your key by prying it off with a butter knife and checking to see if the spring is stuck.

Or heck, sell it on craigslist for $1.

Jonathan said...

I pried it off with my screwdriver and poked the button for a while, and it is definitely broken, not stuck. It is a pretty cool keyboard, and it is tough to decide whether it is better dirty but functional or clean but without the colon key. Compressed air is great, but sometimes you need to do stuff like this just to see what will happen. So far, I have to say I am getting by pretty well with the other punctuation marks. Thanks for the offer though, I appreciate it.

Jeremy said...

You need to get one of these:

laser keyboard

Crumbs be damned!!!

Nate said...

Wow, Jon, with a title like that I was hoping for some personal disclosure about bouts of colitis. Colour me disappointed...

(Notice the silent u in Colour since my IP address will reflect that I'm coming from Canada...)