I love my Rosewill 8500 wireless mouse from NewEgg.com. I like it so much I bought an extra for work, and one for my desktop machine.

I’ve used the mouse quite a bit over the last three months. Two things have happened since then:

1) I killed the battery that came with the mouse.
2) The scroll wheel started to “jump” down about half a click when I used it.

The latter was a big deal. Sometimes I would scroll down a particularly long Web page and then the screen would move about two paragraphs. This was distracting and I often lost my place.

Even more annoying was that the problem with the scroll wheel didn’t happen all the time. At first it was every one out of ten spins. Then it was one in four. Then it was a 50/50 crap shoot for random scrolling insanity.

The Rosewill 8500 comes with a 30 day replacement guarantee from NewEgg, and then a year warranty from Rosewill. I didn’t want to mail in my $30 mouse and then be charged for a repair, so I decided to crack open the mouse myself to see what I could do.

If I succeeded, I’d have my favorite mouse back. If I failed, I had several others to replace it — and it’d make for an interesting Gibberish entry.
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About a month and a half ago I left for Georgia on vacation. My friend Grizzly Adams stayed here at the house to watch the dogs and keep an eye on the premises. When I came back, the upstairs was 78°F. The downstairs was 72°F and the air conditioning was running full-speed. Normally I keep the house at 68 – 72° at all times, and I have separate air conditioner units for each floor. I have a home owner’s warranty on the house (they replaced my upstairs unit already), but I was tired and wanted to go to sleep with cool air blowing through the house. I reset the breakers, waited awhile, and turned the unit back on. Everything seemed cool.
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I was headed into work on my 2004 BMW R1150R this morning and noticed that there was a HUGE traffic jam on the highway. I skittered off the highway, conveniently near the comic book shop where I play games from time to time. I filled Raider’s gas tank up, and went into a nearby Starbucks. I let my manager know I was going to be late due to the traffic jam, and enjoyed a tall Americano.

Twenty minutes later I was caffeinated and ready to brave the highway again. I mounted Raider, he started right up, and I motored to the intersection. My foot slipped a little as I came to a stop, which was kind of odd considering the road was bone dry a second before and the sky was clear. Then I smelled gas.
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Hey, what should one man with two motorcycles do? Buy a third one!

I’ve been wanting to accessorize/customize a motorcycle for awhile, but have been afraid to tinker with either one of my “real” bikes. A few months ago I started looking around for a motorcycle that I could buy for less than $2000.

This was harder than I thought it would be. ;)
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After considerately committing suicide a week before the warranty expired, Microsoft sent me a new (at least to me), Xbox 360 Elite as a replacement. The total turnaround time was a week, partially because UPS took a few extra days trying to deliver my busted console to Microsoft’s repair center in Texas.

My replacement unit was built in June of 2008, which I am pretty sure is still a Falcon motherboard. The Falcon is the second-generation motherboard for the 360 Elite. It features smaller chipsets that may increase reliability by reducing heat within the console. Looks like I missed the Jasper revision by a few months, but my 360 Core replacement will probably shit itself in time to pick up either a Jasper or even Opus revision.

Here’s to another year of gaming!

My birthday present to myself last year was an Xbox 360 Elite. I wanted a 360 for awhile, especially after Catan and Carcassonne were announced for Xbox Live!, but I had heard a lot about reliability issues. After almost a year of trouble-free service, my 360 started crashing on Thursday.
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