One of the presents I got for Christmas is a Microsoft Standard Wireless Mouse. Before receiving this mouse, the only experience I've had with a wireless mouse is my Wireless Intellimouse Explorer, which is a few years old. My Intellimouse didn't seem to be very accurate, and it would lag a bit if you stopped moving it for a few seconds. Because of these issues, I had been using my basic Logitech optical mouse.

The Standard Wireless Optical Mouse comes with a receiver which plugs into a USB port, and 2 AA batteries. It's supposed to get about 6 months of battery life. That would be nice. It also can operate on only 1 battery. It comes in black or white, mine is black.

When I got home on Christmas day, one of the first things I did was plug in my new mouse. I was suprised that it moved so much more smoothly than my Intellimouse. I guess a few years of technological advancement will do that. It also doesn't lag at all after it has gone into power saving mode. Overall I like my new mouse, it works well.

A while ago my old computer's power supply fizzled out. I bought a 430 watt Thermaltake power supply, but something was wrong with the motherboard (an Asus A7M266-D with 2 Athlon 1900 MP processors). I eventually replaced the motherboard with an Asus P5B Deluxe, an Intel Core 2 Duo 6600, with an Asus Radeon x1950pro video card.

The new computer is running great. I can finally play modern video games again. I have been playing a lot of F.E.A.R. Combat online. I just bought Quake 4 and FarCry, and have been having a lot of fun with both of them.

Now that I have a video card that supports shader model 3, I can finally mess around with the examples in my programming vertex and pixel shaders book. I started a new Visual Studio C++ project where I copied an example program from the DirectX 9 SDK. I have been making a basic framework for doing 3D stuff. So far it just shows a textured triangle strip plane spinning around.