{"id":1677,"date":"2006-12-01T13:02:10","date_gmt":"2006-12-01T16:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/bb\/viewtopic.php?p=2057"},"modified":"2010-05-08T19:24:51","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T22:24:51","slug":"milking-mice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2006\/12\/01\/milking-mice\/","title":{"rendered":"Milking Mice"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, there I was in my trusty BBEdit<\/a> (thanks Rich<\/a>!) twiddling HTML code for a friend’s website, trying to get stuff aligned “just so”, checking out the CSS, cleaning up some redundant markup – and of course reloading the browser after every change to be absolutely sure it worked. My friend, who knows how to operate her Mac but is otherwise non-technical, watched this with astonishment… after we were finished (took most of an evening) she exclaimed, in German, “Das ist ja zum M\u00e4usemelken!”<\/p>\n

I burst out laughing at this colloquial expression I hadn’t encountered before, and which literally means “that’s for milking mice<\/a>!”, but actually is used in the sense of “that’s extremely exasperating!”. Or so Google tells me. However, in the sense of twiddling with HTML code – or Objective-C code for that matter – it struck me that it can be taken literally. To quote Tom Digby’s “Little Tiny Eyes”<\/a> (found via Tim Bray<\/a>):<\/p>\n

“OH YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT<\/p>\n

LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY HANDS FOR MILKING MICE.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep, you have to position those little teeny hands just so and be extremely patient because it’ll take a long time to do it right and get enough… and it takes a very peculiar and determined kind of person to sit there N hours per day, day in and day out, just twiddling away at the little bits to get everything running “just so”.<\/p>\n

And that<\/em> is why my main page<\/a> has the subtitle “finely crafted software for the Macintosh”. Hm. Should I change this to “Digital Mice Milking” or something? But I suppose that, just because I put this title on this post, that Google will already put me somewhere on its mousemilking<\/a> results, forever after confusing hapless NIH researchers. But then, that’s the price of fame…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, there I was in my trusty BBEdit (thanks Rich!) twiddling HTML code for a friend’s website, trying to get stuff aligned “just so”, checking out the CSS, cleaning up some redundant markup – and of course reloading the browser after every change to be absolutely sure it worked. My friend, who knows how to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,19],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-1677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dev","category-software","tag-humor"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-r3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}