MichaelGuo.com

• The snap of a mousetrap in the middle of the night
• The crunch of my glasses under my foot
• The screaming of our neighbor’s children

Sigh.

In my quest for an ergonomic bluetooth keyboard, I decided to plunk down $254.98 for the Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000, and Amazon-ly enough, it arrived less than 24 hours after I ordered it via A-1 Courier Services. The whole setup itself isn’t bad, and I didn’t even have to use the included Bluetooth adapter. It paired just fine with my MacBook. The recharging unit is especially nice. Though on the ugly side, I can live with the aesthetics. What I can’t deal with is the ridiculous keyboard layout. Why in the world did the Windows key become this stupid shiny badge the in the middle of the keyboard below the space bar? Is this even usable under Windows?

Usually, I have the Windows key remapped to option and the Alt key remapped to command to mimic a normal Mac keyboard. That’s worked quite well on my split keyboard for years. However, on this keyboard, the option key then migrates to that stupid shiny badge. Then, there’s this useless Fn key in between the ctrl and new command keys that can’t seem to be remapped to anything. Does anyone know a solution to this? If there’s something that can be done, then I won’t return or sell this keyboard. Otherwise, this has to go. I use it too frequently when typing, particularly for moving and highlighting word-by-word rather than character-by-character, for this to just be a minor annoyance. I can live without a number pad, I can live with the F keys being these weird bumps rather than keys, I can even live with seeing a Windows icon, but I really just can’t live with that Windows icon being a stupid shiny badge.

Overall, though, I’m impressed by the amount of support for Mac users built into this keyboard with IntelliType and IntelliPoint. On the other hand, why is the latest version on the Microsoft website older than the version on the included CD? That’s just silly and backwards.

Anyway, is there really so little market demand that Microsoft is the only company making ergonomic bluetooth keyboards? (And here, I use the term ergonomic quite loosely, as the comfort curve design barely qualifies compared to the split for me.) Are there really no other ergonomic bluetooth keyboards out there? I don’t have so much hope that someone would actually come out with a Mac-specific ergonomic bluetooth keyboard, but come on, someone else please come out with an ergonomic bluetooth keyboard. Logitech? Logitech?

WTF? Blingo suddenly switched over to Yahoo! Search, Live Search, and Ask from Google. The results are terrible, and it’s not showing the full URL anymore. I typed in “Dairy Queen” earlier, for example, and got the Canadian website. Ugh. Is it worth putting up with a crappy search engine in order to win prizes? This is a tough one.