New job, blogging and mouse speed

It's been a long period since my last post with a lot of things that happened. So here is the short story.

I bought a new house last year and had to sell my own house. I'm glad that I was able to sell my house in time so that I'm not having double costs now. I even decided to sell it before our new house was ready... so we lived for about 4 months with my parents. That was fun with the four of us filling up my parents house (with them also there of course). That was in a normal, not too big, Dutch house.

The day before we got the key of our new house, an unexpected surprise came along. The financial situation of my employer was getting worse and they had to act unfortunately by cutting costs. I was one of the people that were "cut away" to make the future survival easier.

It was no fun to look for jobs during the summer season combined with a crisis still going on. But I did have quite a lot of interviews and finally one of my early interviews seemed to be the beginning of a new start.

I'm working now with pleasure at Backbase, the Next Generation Portal Software creator. A great product and a great company with much potential!

As a Manager Development I'll support the R&D teams to deliver great software and to improve the overall performance step by step.

Blogging has been tough the last 10 months, but I want to proceed again. From my various experiences and insights I want to write about Agile and Scrum, as a ScrumMaster, Manager and Agile Coach. My intention is to proceed with my blogging.

Mouse speed
While setting up my MacBook I wanted to speed up the tracking speed of my mouse. I like to use less desk space for my mouse to safe some energy and moves. Although I wanted to use the magic trackpad instead of the magic mouse, I didn't get it yet... Could it prevent RSI, I guess it will or at least makes you less RSI-receptive?

The magic mouse ain't bad! But the speed is too limited by the mouse settings in the System Preferences. By default there is a speed of max 3.

I found a solution (here) and that is to use a command line property changing the tracking speed. You can read the current speed and you can set (write) the new/wanted speed. The settings on the System Preferences|Mouse do not really adapt so a change there resets your speed back to the default tracking range (max 3).

So, use this to read the current value:

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

Set the new value (I use 15 now):

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling 15

Be aware of logging out and in before the new setting are activated.

UPDATE (2011-12):
If this mouse speed thing is also one of your issues.... I ran into MagicPrefs which makes a lot of customizations possible for the magic mouse and trackpad. Maybe that's worth looking at.

Have fun!