>>Ok, looks like my mouse is the culprit. It starts scrolling on its own.... sheesh. I go through mice so quickly!
>
>I'm back at my old desk, and just like the desks in between, the pattern on the faux wood drives my mice insane. The cursor will start drifting, at the rate of about minus 4-5 px/s (on both axes), and will eventually go home ("(0,0) sweet (0,0)). It's not OS dependent, happened since NT4. Haven't tried with Ubuntu, simply because I don't think this is a software problem - or at least not at any level where I can help it. Mouse pad solves it, but since it would interfere with my coffee space (back to the same old - ashtray, paper and pencil to the left, mouse and coffee to the right of the keyboard), I'd rather be amused with cursor dance every couple of days.
>
>But yesterday I had a funny case when the mouse behaved very quirky. The arrow would not follow my hand movements, or it would but would make random jumps a few pixels to either side. Quite unpredictable, and sort of funny, though it caused me to jumble a couple of lines of code. Nothing that ctrl+z and some keyboarding with the clipboard (or vice versa boarding) couldn't fix.
>
>A simple look at the underside of the mouse discovered the cause: there was a hair, right over the red eye :).

I'll clean it today just in case. The scroll button (which I use a lot) seems to be sticking too and causing problems. I've always had a problem on the UT where on my keyboard (at least I think it's my keyboard) while typing a message I manage to hit some key combination that causes the UT to either save the message I'm typing (in the middle of fixing a sentence that makes it unreadable) or refresh the message I'm responding to and my response totally disappears.

I guess when you got back home you gave up the "no smoking" policy? No anti-smoking mobs there yet? :o) I'm working on the opposite (again). Not gonna say how long - don't want to jinx myself. I read an article last week that stated San Francisco is now studying 3rd hand smoke and the health damages of it.... I was going to add a smart comment just now, but I'll leave it up to you :o)

Found it (it appears to go back some time):

2009
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-third-hand-smoke
2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35318118/ns/health-addictions/
2011
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/02/08/researchers-raise-concerns-about-%E2%80%98thirdhand-smoke%E2%80%99/

I wish someone would do a study on the danger of cooking smells seeping into condos, townhouses, and apartments from neighboring units. Those can be very aggravating :o) I once moved into a place where the smell was almost unbearable - the previous owner was Cuban and while I love the food and the culture, some of the scents from cooking seep into carpets and paint and are almost impossible to clean out completely.