About a year or so ago, I picked up a new mouse for use with my laptop. I finally found a mouse that I would only ever replace with itself. It fits my personal checklist of what makes a great mouse.

Peripheral mice have been my what I use to answer my tech fetish cravings over the years, and the experience has taught me what it takes to interface between my right hand and all of the documents, code, games, email, chat, blogging, browsing, et al, ad nauseum, that I force through my system on an almost hourly basis.

It takes a lot. It takes the Logitech VX Revolution. This thing is brilliant.

Keep reading to see my mouse checklist!

We are fueling our technology on the refined souls of the dead, always as some type of oil...

Oil comes out of the ground and gets turned into gasoline and a million different products, starting with plastics. Some of us recall vague memories of being told that oil comes from dead dinosaurs that sank into tar pits or something (it was diatoms, actualy, not dinosaurs, but still a living organism). Even given that over-simplified version of where our oil comes from, it still indicates that something was alive, died, and then it's remains were condensed over the years into oil.

Whatever form that oil comes in, it was once alive.

Question: Just what kind of an idiot are you?

Answer: Dunno, how many different kinds are there?

One of the most common epithets heard amongst my friends is "I hate stoopid people!" Now, discounting the assumption that they might all just be a bunch of 'haters' (humorous in possibiities but unlikely on the whole) there is the blatant semantic error of stereotyping such a diverse range of categories under one term.

To this end, I propose that not all of the people so classified are actually stupid, per se. Keep reading to see a comprehence breakdown of of just how many flavors "stoopid" comes in.

It's been a week since I installed this thing, and now it's time to report in about it. This wasn't a game that I was actually anticipating, to tell you the truth. I mean, the genre is just so... done already. But, all that aside, you can still do a good job with a worn genre. With that in mind, this game truly excels.

Main highlights: guild cities, dynamic combat mechanics and boobyshake!

I hate local public broadcast radio. Hate it.

No matter where you go, you are virtually guaranteed to discover the largest collection of amalgamated crap ever heard if you take a trip across the dial of local radio stations. Whether its kitsch country or christian talk radio, top 40 or rap, you end up stuck with the refined essence of mediocrity.

Now, granted, they don't all suck all the time. Every once in a blue moon, a station will play a song that I like. It isn't often. It isn't even uncommon. It's downright rare.

Internet radio stations, on the other hand, are a completely different story. Of course, they can be difficult to stream to your car, but still: radio stations do exist that I can listen to without being made to feel gradually more and more misanthropic.

Which brings us back to that age-old question: what [product] defines me as a person?

For some time now, I find myself listening almost exclusively to the station Secret Agent on SomaFM. It is the self-described "soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life. Classic stylish lounge music and downtempo spy electronica."

Edgar Allan Poe used it to write.
Salvador Dali used it to paint.
Thomas Edison used it to invent.
I use it to code.

The hypnagogic state can be a creative lifesaver when you find yourself stumped for ideas. This state is what you arrive at after having stayed up all night and remaining conscious into the next day after the inevitable sunrise that lets you know it's too late to actually try for real sleep. Your eyes and ears can play tricks on you; indeed, this is part of the process that it is used for. Having exhausted your energy reserves during the preceeding night, but still not quite able to sleep, your mind can drift in strange directions. Your brain stops filtering out quite so much and the potential barrage of increased mental imagery uninhibited by realistic perspective (yer half asleep, but still walkin and talkin) is enough to let you come up with solutions that, well rested, you might not have considered.

But Edison used steel ball bearings that he'd hold on to until he started to nod off, at which point the ball bearings would drop onto a tin plate, creating a enough noise to wake him and immediately place him in a hypnagogic state to help work out whatever problems were on his mind.

After decades of dabbling with Tarot, runes and other western oracles, I finally decided to give eastern practices some time. The I-Ching is the most common eastern oracle used. Rather than grabbing a book on it, as is my usual habit, I found a translation for it which uses a deck of cards, one for each of the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching. Score one for usability. The I-Ching, like most other oracles, does not tell the future. It is a tool that allows one to examine their situation more objectively by providing a different perspective to it. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is in assuming that oracles can tell the future. They don't. An oracle is just a tool to gain a better perspective.

Ok, now that you've gotten over the initial shock of the complete site redesign, you want to know one of two things...

Where the hell is the image that you were trying to link to or visit from the old Pictures of You gallery collected on the Were-Here Just Conversation forum about people who now post on 12s?

-or-

What are you supposed to be looking for?

A pioneer in your field, you already have Firefox 3.0 installed. For convenient visitor tracking, you added Google Analytics to your site. Still a pioneer, you used the new version that is available. Finally, you started checking out some of the new site traffic diagnostic tools that Google has to offer you.

Lucky you, now you can get to your site, but it's covered by a huge semi-transparent image that you can't click past, courtesy of Google's added ga_shade div tag at the bottom of your page. It's a tag that you diidn't put in your code, the Analytics script did. And you can try as hard as you want to override the CSS for that sucker, but you probably won't succeed.

Neither did we, so it's back to Firefox 2.0 until we feel brave again...

Whenever I get to a new city, there is always this basic need to know where to go... for anything. Now, granted, some services are just never going to be advertised, or even publicly available, but certain basic necessities should be referenced in a central location for easy reference.

To this end, I bring you St.Ego's Austin.