You plug it into the wall and the USB port on your computer, and the conveyor belts inside the thing move in sync with realtouch-enhanced pornography.

I don’t know.  I don’t really want to stick my dick inside anything with “dual belt drives.”  The anti-DRM crowd may not like this device for other reasons, as it requires an online activation.

My new keyboard (and mouse) arrived today.  I’m quite happy with my purchases.  The Logitech Wave keyboard didn’t really take any getting used to as some user reviews I read had suggested it would.  I also had no problem using this keyboard while playing games, which was another common complaint in reviews.  The curve of the keys is just slight enough to feel natural without screwing up my 15 years of keyboard usage.  The keys have a decent amount of “click” to them (unlike the laptop-style keys that are somewhat popular nowadays), but they’re still soft and quiet.  Time will tell how well the keyboard is built, but it seems like it should last a while.

I felt comfortable spending a little more on my new mouse, since they usually last a couple years.  So I picked up the Logitech G9 gaming mouse.  Unlike the keyboard, the mouse did take a little getting used to, it’s a very different shape than the MX518 style mouse which I used for a very long time.  It’s got all sorts of crazy features that you can read about on that product page I linked to.  I especially like the clicky/smooth toggleable scroll wheel, the mouse profile system for using different button assignments for different applications and games, and the precision grip which has a very rough feel (which is good for people like me who have excessively oily fingers).  And on the whole it just feels a lot more solid than the 518 did.  Expensive, but pretty much worth it.

On an unrelated note, my website went down while I was writing this post. Which was disappointing, since I just moved to a new host last week to avoid this kind of thing. But an important difference here is that I got an unsolicited e-mail from the host owner within a few minutes explaining that he was aware of the situation and working to fix it and make sure it never happens again. On my old host, no one ever e-mailed me about anything. In fact they had a service status page specifically to detail server problems and my problems never showed up there. It was like they had put me on a server that they stuck in a closet somewhere and forgot it existed.