Click, Roll, Squeeze and Scroll

Just recently I’ve dug my Mighty Mouse back out of the drawer it was in and plugged it in again. I say plugged it in because Apple still haven’t made this mouse wireless yet. The swines! Straight away I notice how light it is compared to the bluetooth Apple Pro mouse I normally use and I also notice how good it is to have that little ball for scrolling. I didn’t realise it, but I miss that little scroll ball. Apple have the mouse set up so that clicking the ball invokes the dashboard, and squeezing the sides invokes expose, but squeezing isn’t a natural movement to do with your mouse, and I rarely use my dashboard to be honest. Expose on the other hand is brilliant and I use it all the time, so I’ve reversed these two actions, then disabled the squeeze in my system preferences.
However I’m elaborating too much here, I wanted to share a little tip I found out today after having a few problems with the scroll ball. You see I noticed I could scroll down the way, but not up the way. This was weird in itself because surely you would think if there was a problem scrolling one way there would also be a problem scrolling the other way, but apparently not. After a quick Google search I discovered lots of others were having the same problem. Some could scroll up, but not down and vice versa.

The solution:
Press down firmly on your ball and rotate it in both directions (fnar, fnar!)
I find it easier to turn the mouse over and press the ball against the mousepad and drag the mouse up and down on the pad.
I can only assume that there’s some dirt and crap getting down there clogging something up. No doubt after another couple of weeks I’ll have to preform the turn, press and drag maneuver again.