The living and the dead

Last week three children drowned in the Jail Branch River in Barre while playing "army" in the woods. Even for someone who has only lived here a year it's easy to see the impact it's had on the town. Many people are stil in shock, and those who aren't carry a deep sadness around with them that you can almost see.

The tragedy has been hitting hard at my home as well. The children were older schoolmates of my two stepchildren, and they've been dealing with things in different ways. For my stepson it's been easier. He's six years old, and although he understands the concept of death and the fact that those three kids are never coming back, you can tell that there's a point where his brain simply refuses to ponder the issue anymore. He understands what happened, but he's too young for it to really hit him.

It hits my stepdaughter, who is weeks away from turning 9 and thought one of the boys was cute. She's been crying a lot, afraid to go to sleep for fear of nightmares. When my fiance and I took her for a walk along a local bike path she walked between us and held our hands when we were near the river. While her brother visited his father over the weekend she stayed home and got some extra attention from us, and I think that did her a lot of good. I know it did my fiance and I some good. Now that a few days have passed she's getting better, but I wonder how much of a reminder it will be for her to go back to school today, to see the flagpole where we and many others dropped off flowers and cards, to know that there are three kids she won't be seeing at recess.

In a TV show there would be a Lesson We All Can Learn From This, but that's not so certain in life. I think my stepson is too young for this tragedy to have much of an impact on him. My stepdaughter is old enough that this experience may hold onto her a little more tightly. If she can honestly learn something from this, if these terrible events can make one hard-to-instill idea stick in her head, I hope it is that youth is not the same as immortality. Children die. It doesn't just happen to anonymous people you hear about on the national news. It can happen to your friends, and it can happen to you. I don't want to scare her with this fact, and I don't want her to dwell on it. But if she keeps it in mind, if she has that little hard-wired understanding that there's no invisible force that will keep her from harm simply because she's young, I think that might serve her well. Maybe that will give her a little guidance in her looming headstrong teen years. I hope so. I hope it will help keep her safe, because as any parents could tell you, my fiance and I will take all the help we can get in that regard.

"All in, all in, all in a day
A day, it changes everything"

--Isis, "Weight"

Review: XTrac Hybrid mouse pad

The XTrac Hybrid: "Is that your pad? That's a nice pad."

Since making the move to optical mice several years ago I've pretty much forsaken mouse pads. After all, an optical (ball-less) mouse tracks just fine without one on most surfaces, so what's the point? Another place to stick a picture of a girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband/kid/pet? No thanks. A fun way to incorporate artwork of a castle, unicorn, or race car into my day? Blow me. Besides, I always hated hitting the edge of those damn things while doing anything, especially playing a game. I'd tried a couple trendy "gamer" mouse pads, and found that a hard plastic tray with little bumps in it doesn't make my optical mouse track any better, but it does make it feel like I'm sliding it along a dirt road. For years I've been using this revolutionary mousing surface called a "desktop", and have had no real complaints. (It's good for stacking stuff on, too.)

One thing that hasn't changed since the days of ball mice: mice get dirty. They just get dirty in a different, easier to reach place. With optical mice, crud accumulates on the feet--the soft pads on the underside of the mouse, and makes for a less than smooth experience (see previous dirt road analogy). I love my mouse--a Logitech MX700 cordless--but I've scraped the mouse fud off the feet so many times that the feet themselves are starting to get a little ragged. Since many of today's "hardcore gamer" mouse pads come with a complimentary foot job (More on that later--I promise.), I decided to give one a try. After a little research I decided to go with the XTrac Hybrid. It promises the slickness of a hard plastic or glass pad, but the flexibility of a cloth pad. At $25 it's half the cost of many of the more exotic glass and ultra-thin plastic pads too. Which is nice.

The Hybrid is a handsome, understated pad. It's flat black with a thin vertical stripe of the hexagonal pattern featured on some of XTrac's other pads. The Hybrid measures 10"x16", bigger than a standard 8.5"x11" pad, but considerably smaller than XTrac's "Monster Mats" models, which top out at 14"x17.75". (Who has that kind of desktop real estate, anyway?) At 3/16" it's thinner than those crappy old foam-n-cloth pads of yore, but not so thin that you can stick an end of it under your keyboard and not feel lopsided. On my desk I have the Hybrid standing on its short side, and that gives me plenty of mousing space.


The "LAN carry box." It's not just a box--it's an accessory!

The XTrac Hybrid is thin enough that you can roll it up for easy transportation, something LAN party frequenters should appreciate. To this end XTrac includes the "LAN carry box", which is listed proudly on the pad's website with the accessories. "Uh, it's the box," you might say, and you'd be right. But it's a sturdy and reasonably good looking box, and if you're gonna roll up the pad for transportation, it does come in handy. Those intending to roll the pad will also do well to read the instructions. Yes, it comes with instructions. Don't worry--they don't take long to read. The important thing to keep in mind when rolling the pad up is to always roll it with the top surface facing out; roll the other way and you'll wind up with permanent wrinkles in the surface. One very nice quality is that, once unrolled, the pad lays perfectly flat. Curling at the edges due to a memory effect is not an issue at all. Frequent travelers may use the LAN carry box without fear.

Now, about that foot job. It's common for high-end "performance" game pads to bundle in some form of covering for your mouse's feet. This could be a length of teflon tape you cut to your needs, a pre-shaped sticker, etc. XTrac pads come with a sheet of 12 round Mad Dotz "teflon coated mouse movement enhancers." For scientific accuracy, I tested the pad first without the Mad Dotz, and my impression was that it was a quality pad on its own. There was still friction, but it had a much nicer feel than my desktop. I'd call it smooth, but not slick. I turned my attention to applying the Mad Dotz.


My mouse, post foot job. Ahh...

Thanks to the wonders of digital photography, we can show you just how ugly the underside of a mouse can be! Refering to the flip side of the instructions, the first step toward installing the Mad Dotz is cleaning those cruddy feet with the included alcohol wipe. There was no such thing included within the confines of my LAN carry box, but living with a nurse is never having to say, "Honey, do we have any alcohol wipes?" XTrac probably expected my mouse to have four feet, as is the norm, thereby giving me three applications of Dotz out of the box. (The LAN carry box. Yeah.) But my MX700 (and many other Logitech mice), as you can see, has five. Lets see...carry the 3...OK, it doesn't come out even. No big deal. The Dotz are fairly large compared to the feet they cover, about 2cm wide, so even the spastic and the chronically ill-coordinated should have a fairly easy time sticking them on and pressing them down. My installation was made slightly trickier due to the close proximity of the mouse's LED and recharging contacts (the gold ovals at the bottom) to the feet. That meant I had to be a little more careful with the placement of my Dotz. At all five locations, the Mad Dotz are large enough to wrap up the sides of my mouse slightly. A little unsightly, but really not that noticable. When I eventually replace the Dotz I may try cutting one in half and covering two feet with it. The Dotz, by the way, are holding up just fine after five days of fairly heavy use. I haven't even cleaned them yet! Extra Dotz can be purchased for $5 for a 12-pack, $12 for a 36-pack, so they're not a great expense.

So how does it feel with the Mad Dotz installed? I have to say I was genuinely surprised. The combination of the Hybrid pad with the Dotz is incredibly slick. Slicker'n whale shit on an ice floe. You don't have to be a hardcore gamer to appreciate this product. It offers a clearly superior feel even in general Windows mousing. If you like a mouse that offers very little friction and glides smoothly with little effort, the XTrac Hybrid is worth your $25.

Good feel is one thing (a very big thing, in my book), but can the Hybrid really improve your game playing? Well, Stevie Ray Vaughan could play the hell out of a $5 guitar, and it's a poor musician who blames his instrument. Keeping that in mind, I was again pleasantly surprised. I fired up Doom 3, and immediately found the mouse to be much more responsive and acurate. It took a bit less effort to pan around my environs, and stopping on a dime to line up those oh so damaging head shots was much easier. The Hybrid can't do anything for your tactics and so won't transform a bottom feeder into a frag machine, but if you're having a hard time with fine aiming in first-person shooters, it seems a quality mouse pad can make a difference.

The XTrac Hybrid mouse pad gets gets high marks right across the board. It's generously sized but doesn't require a desk that would make Caligula blush. It's a flexible cloth pad and can be rolled up, but is extremely slick when used in conjunction with the included Mad Dotz. It can greatly improve both the feel and performance of your mouse, and it does all this for $25, which is much less than you can spend on a more exotic pad. I recommend it highly for anyone who wants a slicker, easier gliding mouse. And your mouse will thank you for the foot job and new slippers, if you have the desperate need to personify your computer peripherals.

To the victor...ow!

2nd session: the old me

Like a DJ who puts on the first side of Physical Graffiti and ducks out of the booth to smoke a joint, I've got a little back announcing to do. Sloppy blogging, I know. Someone should be fired for this. Well, you get what you pay for.

Last week I won the contest my fiance and I were having. I almost won a cheap victory by contracting what my doctor called the Barre Crud, which sapped my will to eat, but I'm happy to say that I won when my appetite had returned to normal. Thanks to a new timed-release version of one of my medications and some better snacking habbits I'm commonly slam dunking my 145 goal. That means it's time to get my leg worked on!

The above photo is my tattoo after two sessions. Although the photo is new, all the work you see in it is two years old. At $125 an hour for custom work, you don't just say, "Well, I've got some time to kill this afternoon. I think I'll stop by and have my tattoo worked on." I don't, anyway. As you can imagine, I was very excited to finally get some more work done on it. Wanna see the results? Sure ya do!


3rd session: still on the bench

He started off by going over the hilt of the sword-thing (by my ankle) with blue, then conentrated on the upper-middle section, using black to add a lot of detail and shading. (The red you see isn't ink. That's my skin asking, "What have I ever done to you?") The alien hand in the middle of that section is really starting to stand out. I like the new stuff a lot, and I'm very excited to see what'll come next.

When I decided to get a tattoo and figured out what I wanted, I asked around as to who in the Burlington area would be a good choice for some stuff inspired by H.R. Giger. (In case you don't know, he's the Swiss surrealist who designed the creatures and sets for the movie Alien.) The name I kept hearing was Bald Bill Henshaw of Yankee Tattoo in Burlington. I checked out a few shops and looked at selections of the artists' work. After seeing some of his stuff there was no doubt Bill was the man I was looking for. His work had great attention to detail and shading, and his wildlife pieces looked realistic, not cartoonish. I brought Bill a folder with 4 or 5 Giger printouts in it. I told him I wasn't looking to reproduce a paraticular print. Rather, I showed him elements of each print I liked and asked him to incorporate them into a design of his own. A few weeks later he showed me a pencil sketch that just blew me away! This is my first tattoo, and Bill has been a real pleasure to work with, answering all my noob questions and making it a very stress-free process. His design still blows me away, even after seeing it every day for the past two years plus. I'm proud that my tattoo will represent his art as well as Giger's unique vision. If you're within driving distance of Burlington, VT and want a tattoo, definitely check out Bill's stuff at Yankee Tattoo.