Mice are Nice... or are they?


One of our fine faculty members recently received a shiny, new MacBook Air, and was looking for a nice mouse to use with it. He was curious about the Magic Mouse, and it seems pretty cool until you see the price -- $69. I had recently given him a very capable Kensington wired mouse we purchased from CDW-G for $6.47, which means for the same price as the Magic Mouse we could purchase ten Kensington mice and still have change left over. You may argue that the Magic Mouse is a Bluetooth device and hence more costly, so we also looked at other Bluetooth mice and found the Microsoft Bluetooth 5000 Mouse and the Logitech V470, both for about $40 instead of $69. Now $40 is still quite a bit for a mouse, but it is a lot cheaper than $69. Searching on NewEgg.com, I did find some Bluetooth mice selling for $20 to $30 from some off name brands, but with shipping they were almost $40 anyway, so it seemed safer to stick with the Microsoft or Logitech (we get free shipping all the time from CDW-G!) What is really so horrible about having a wired mouse anyway? I think our $6 Kensington mice work just great!

And speaking of mice, I must relate a story about our car. This past summer we noticed when we turned our air conditioner blower up to position 3 or 4 it would make a horrible noise, and even at 2 it would make a little more noise than even last winter, so we took it into the Hyundai dealer for a look. What they had found was that some rodent (a mouse? squirrel?) had gnawed through our air filter cover and filled our blower compartment with acorns! So that horrible noise we heard were the acorns rattling around in our blower. They cleaned it out and put a new filter cover in place so now our A/C blows with gusto again and with hardly a noise. If only our overweight and lazy, gray cat would go out into the garage and hunt down whatever did this to our car. But alas he is just a big, fat lazy blob of a cat.

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