My New Apple Aluminum Keyboard, Me, and Electromagnetic Disturbances?

A couple of days ago, we bought me a new keyboard, the wired Apple aluminum keyboard. This, despite me using a PC, not a Mac, for my notebook. apple keyboard, aluminum, wired

We don’t have a lot of keyboard choices here in Sri Lanka – mostly, the keyboards are cheap (Rs.1000/US$10 or less, but usually in the Rs.600/US$6 or less range), and being cheap, the keys are stiff, sticky, and take a lot of force to use. Think elephant.

Enter my genetic collagen disorder, aka Ehlers Danlos syndrome, and the hypermobility aspect of it, which translates into my fingers dislocating while I type. Yeah, not a pretty image, huh?

And ergonomic, by the way, doesn’t exist here.

A keyboard with a lighter touch, one that requires less work to press the keys, would be better. Unfortunately, in this country, that leaves us with one choice and one choice only.

The aforementioned keyboard. It has a very nice, light touch, and my fingers don’t dislocate or hurt when I use it.

We bought the keyboard a little over a week ago Monday after dropping off my passport to get my spousal visa extended another 2 years.

It worked perfectly fine for a week.

Then, Tuesday, yesterday, I started having odd problems.

Using the right shift key, I couldn’t get a capital w, s, or x. Using the left shift key, I couldn’t get a capital w. But I could get those letters capitalized if I used the caps lock key.

But more disturbing than that, I started getting miscellaneous windows popping up, as if I was using key combinations or keyboard shortcuts, to start up new programs, click on the Start button on the taskbar, or to access other parts of the program I was currently using. This happened when I was typing – an email, a blog post – where I most certainly was not using a function key or the CTRL, ALT, or COMMAND keys.

Or, worse yet, when I didn’t even have my hands on the keyboard or mouse.

We tried the keyboard on Fahim’s MacBook – works perfectly. And I do mean perfectly. Back to mine – funky odd stuff. What???????

lightning We’re now in troubleshooting mode, trying to figure out if it’s the lack of drivers (other people with Windows XP had the right drivers show up automatically, but not me) or if it’s my usual electromagnetic disturbance thingie.

Cuz, yeah, I seem to have something funky going on. Electronic devices that I use seem to have bizarre problems. Either I get a lot of lemons, or my body has too much electricity running through it. Or something.

*le sigh*