I saw one of these as a clearance item at MicroCenter yesterday, so I picked one up to try it out. In the tiny bit of time I’ve used it so far, the only annoyance (and a minor one at that) is turning the mouse on and off. I find it challenging to move the slider on the bottom of the mouse without clicking the mouse body a few times. I like the little trackball on the top for 360 degree scrolling (though I don’t find myself scrolling sideways much with a 24″ monitor). I haven’t played with the configuration tool much yet, but it appears to give you a wide variety of ways to customize the mouse’s behavior. We’ll see how the battery life is.
Month: February 2008
Taxes
For the first time in a number of years, I had a professional do my taxes. I’d been a TurboTax Online user for the past 6 years, but got a referral from a friend and figured I’d try them out. The parking situation wasn’t ideal, and the wait to be seen was long (over 3 hours for me), but the size of the refund I got back made it worthwhile. If you don’t mind a wait (or the fact that they’re cash-only), visit Newby Tax Service at 6315 Windsor Mill Rd, Gwynn Oak, MD 21207.
Rates are $150 for single filers, $300 for businesses. The charge for e-filing is an additional $80.
Null Coalescing Operator
I didn’t know about this C# 2.0 operator (??) until ReSharper suggested it as a replacement for a particular use of arithmetic if (?:) that I’d added to some code recently. I already prefer C# to VB.NET because of its terse syntax and stricter compiler, so this discovery tipped the scales just that much more.
The most recent blog post Google coughed up for this operator is this one, from Aaron Zupancic. Aaron links to another post that demonstrate its use for viewstate.