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The Worst Foods to Eat Over a Keyboard
An anonymous reader writes "Pasta? Pizza? Keyboards are often subject to the harshest of conditions -- spaghetti sauce, coffee spill, et al. ZDNet is running a list of worst-food nominations. What is your pick?"
Every time I spill Coke on my keyboard (yes, it's happened more than once) I've had to replace the whole thing because the coke at away at the circuitry. When I clean off the soda, the solder and wiring come with it.
My vote would definatly be a mango. The stickyness gets everywhere and combined with the fact that they are VERY juicy, you are left with one large sticky mess. Ever spill a nice can of pop on your keyboard? Same thing.
:)
Good fruit though.
Orange Juice is the most insidious. I spilt OJ on my Dell laptop keyboard. Then I took the extreme measure of using water to wash it out (I didn't take the keyboard off the laptop as I didn't know I could). Everything seemed fine for a few months. Then, gradually, one-by-one, keys started to get sticky. Eventually, about eight months laters, my keyboard became unusable and I had to replace it.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
smoking, and ashes, although not food, are the worst. my keyboards may have survived incidental coffee and other drinks, but my smoking habits costs me about 3 or 4 keyboards/year, especially the area from tab/escape to 4/'r' gets damaged (i smoke 'left handed'), causing keys to lock in the end...
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
If you are about to wash a keyboard with some dishwasher or washing powder -- don't forget to use some antistatic agent. Otherwise in just a couple of days your keyboard will become dirtier than ever.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
There was program on the BBC the showed how potentially dangerous eating at your desk is. They took samples from the journalists desk, and a toilet from Glastonbury Festivals after it had been used/abused for three days (think steaming pile of shit and piss). There was nearly 100x more dangerous bacteria on the desk than on the toilet seat.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I think it's better to go with types of food rather than individual foods. Here are my top 3:
1. Food that can crumble into small pieces that are hard or hardens because when they get stuck under the keys u can't really push down on the keys to type anything. Sometimes shaking it will make it go under other keys. Will have to spend a while removing the key caps and cleaning. Chips, bread crumbs, etc.
2. Sticky foods, or foods/drinks that turn sticky when dried up. Examples are soda water and BBQ sauce. When u spill coke and don't clean it all up, it's going to dry and turn sticky, thus trapping in foods in #1.
3. Stinky food....I eat stuff sometimes by dipping in fish sauce. when that stuff gets on the keyboard it's hard to get rid of the smell unless u do a full blown cleanup
Indeed, why are you wasting your time reading this?
/. should probably have a Humour section (perhaps with Python-style cartoon banner instead of the usual logo) so you can disable it in your preferences, but personally, I'd much rather read this than another story about RFID, Google or Steve Jobs scratching his ass in a particular way.
/. for bringing a little smile to my Monday morning - trust me, some of us need the humour fix.
Lighten up, it's humour - granted,
You want serious 'News for Nerds'? There's plenty of other stories on the front page - you could try; - NASA's Plans for the Future,
- Open Source Java? or even
- ASIMO and Research Celebrated in Brussels -
hey, how about that?
Just because you don't want to read it doesn't mean others don't - some of us are slogging through the early hours of cube life and want a little comic relief about how Johnny Slashdotter once destroyed his computer with a kiwi fruit.
Shame on Slashdot for not having a humour section you can block in your Preferences, but shame on you for not only assuming that an article titled The Worst Foods to Eat Over a Keyboard was going to be an accurately-calculated technological critique, but for then wasting even more of your time by bothering to post a comment about "who cares?". I'm here, in a cube-farm, being bored to tears by the most tedious job you can possibly imagine and I'd like to thank
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Though I have spilled an entire cup of coffee right on a keyboard before, spilling food directly on a keyboard isn't the danger. The danger/annoyance is getting food on your fingers, then having to type. When I eat at the computer, I eat left-handed and type with my right. Anybody else do this?
I really won't get any more ridiculous than one-hand typing, because let's face it - it's geeky to an ugly degree if you can't leave the computer for the ten minutes or so it takes to eat. Fatass.
Meanwhile, I know a guy with an ergo-centric, never going to get carpal tunnel syndrome, wierdo layout with the keyboard split, that he paid $59 for. He has to replace it every 18 months or so. He even has a no food or drink policy in his computer room. And nobody can type on it, not even him.
Keyboards are one of the few things with computers where cheaper is better. Save the extra money for ram.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Agreed, for years I ate almost every meal hovering above my model M. It never, ever, required cleaning to be functional, only to not look like the aftermath of Food Wars V.
It is, without a doubt, the best keyboard in the world, if you can deal with the sound of the clickety-clacking. And it's actually quite easy and cheap to obtain.
I may be going out on a limb here, and I'm usually pretty picky about what I post (I'm a karma whore I admit it) but I just have to speak up. Am I the only one who fell in love with the 5151 style keyboards?
These were the keyboards with TWO square keyapds. That is, there is a full square set of navigation keys instead of the silly inverted-T or plus arrow keypads. In other words, it was like having two numeric keypads with one permanently with the num lock off.
Now, before all of you who are used to the inverted-T scream murder, you should really take a look at how efficient the square keypad is once you learn it. In fact, if you want to improve productivity, I suggest you unlock the num locks and get used to using the square navigation key set.
I know that I can navigate an editor or word processor at about quadruple the speed of the average person.
I can do this because I have access to more navigation keys completely by feel. I suppose you could learn the inverted keys by feel but since they are separated, I'm pretty sure this would be slower.
For example, I can go beginning of line, end of line, beginning of document (with CTRL), end of document (with CTRL), page up, page down, select document (CTRL-5/center key) and enter. It drives me nuts when people left-arrow to the beginning of the line, down-arrow down a long doc (pg down is 30x faster) etc. I just find it too slow.
Yes, I know you can just hit the num-lock key but there was something nice about having the numeric keypad there as well. I know there is also some space savings with the inverted-T, but if that is the real factor, I'd rather not have it at all. Personally, I never use it.
I may be in the minority but somehow I feel like there are other people who have found the magic performance enhancement of havng a full set of nav keys. I just tried putting my fingers on the + nav (microsoft natural keyboard) and my fingers just aren't comfortable. But with index on 4, middle on 8, thumb on 2, and ring finger on 6 with a pinky on enter, I can out-nav anybody. note: thumb for end, index for home, and ring finger for pgup/pgdn and del. Also thumb for ins (though I don't find that I use insert often).
Sunny
Be my Friend
The worst that I ever had get on and in my keyboard/laptop has to be honey. I had placed my keyboard on the kitchen counter and was looking in the cupboards for something to snack on when a jar of honey fell, broke on the sink and went oozing all over the laptop and started to disappear in the keyboard.
Was I freaking out. At first I just stood there in shock, then I ripped out the battery as fast as I could, turn the laptop upside down. The clean up after was horrible. Thankfully nothing was damaged. Save of course for the occasional sticky key I get every now and then.
I once worked in a department where we tested laptop based software for a large insurance company. One of my collegues spilt his mulligatawny soup he was having mid-morning all over a poor little IBM T21.
Luckily, the soup was really thick so turning the thing upside down was good enough to prevent it running into the innards of the laptop.
Unfortunately, it was really hard to clean off (remove all the keys...) and there was some stuff that had obviously got somewhere warm inside the laptop as after a bit of use, the laptop started circulating air that smelt of stale curry...
Not quite as bad was the incident with the exploding can of irn-bru. Super sticky goop, but at least not quite as smelly...
We figured we'd clean up the mess in the morning. Turns out, by morning the spit had eaten its way through the plastic membrane that forms the circuitry in cheap keyboards. Nothing there to clean off -- the circuits were gone. Kinda reminds me of a "stainless carpet" ad, where they admit that their carpet can't withstand battery acid, and show a picture of the holes it will cause.
Coffee is another annoying substance, though not for a keyboard. If you spill it near your case, it will seep up into the groove between the case base and cover. And then dry, forming a very good seal. I once spent about 1/2 hour with a knife trying to cut that seal open.
For those of us who learned to touch-type on real typewriters back in the 1970s, a crappy keyboard slows us down considerably. For example, I have had the same ancient IBM keyboard on my PC at work for the last 10 years or so. I've gone through 4 PCs in that time, and each time they come with a shiny new Dell keyboard, it gets replaced with the old IBM beater. No "Windows" keys, but I guess that's the price you pay for no-progress. I have a Microsoft keyboard at home, and I don't like it. The keys are slower than the IBM keys, offer slightly more resistance, and the break point isn't the same.
I can barely tolerate using someone else's keyboard when they have something like a cheap-o "Cherry" brand. I may as well be typing with mittens on, they feel so awful.
John
I am not sure if you have these in America: but they are thick milk chocolate surrounding fondant and caramel in an egg shape.
My dad used to be a college lecturer and had a student place a creme egg on the keyboard (unwrapped) and then lift the keybord hard into the monitor support. Apparently the student's letter of explanation had "no matter what anyone said, it was an accident." in the hope that admitting gross stupidity was his best course of action.
I've seen an ibook come in with the keyboard saturated with beer. Funny part about that was the customer had no idea what was wrong with it. (his roommate had tipped a can of bud into it the previous evening) But yes, the musk of beer on keyboard definitely is beaten hands down by chocolate cow. Not only does it jam up the keys, but it reeks to high heaven for a few weeks. That was on a pro keyboard... they asked me if it could be fixed. I said yep, we have new ones right on the shelf over there.
I've heard two reports of possibly worse though, thankfully experienced and repaired by other people - one had his cat piss on his ibook's keyboard, another fellow had a drunk visitor vomit on his powerbook. ewwwww
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
05:38
My g/f quickly realized the other night that when I am in my Counter Strike zone there is no amount of hooter jiggling and butt shaking she can do to get me awayfrom the key board...well maybe if she brought a friend in but that ain't happening.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
...flaky, crumbly, AND sticky.
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