What does a good Logitech employee do during the first few weeks of his new job? Right. Take advantage of the employee discount. ;-)

The first item didn't actually cost me anything as it was a clear case for warranty. The Logitech Wireless Headphones for iPod that I had liked so much slowly started multiplying. (It's what I assume marketing people would call it when the headband snaps.) So, I got a pair of these instead:

Logitech FreePulse Wireless Headphones:

The first impression was not exactly good. The headband sat way too low in my neck, I felt like something was constantly strangling me and every time I moved my head it hurt my ears. So, after two days of not finding a way to adjust them and wanting to trade the new headphones in for the old broken ones and a tube of superglue, I finally came across a this review and continued trying until I found the solution: The rubber ear bands cannot be turned in place but they can be taken off and put back on very easily. New verdict: best wireless headphones I ever had. :-)

Of course, wireless headphones have their drawbacks. You can run out of battery and, due to their light design, they're not exactly great in a noisy environment. (If you've ever tried to listen to music in the BART you know what I'm talking about.) Again, Logitech to the rescue ...

Logitech Noise Cancelling Headphones:

To get a first impression of what noise cancelling technology can do I borrowed a pair of Sony ones and was heavily disappointed: the "negative noise" in a silent environment was about as loud as the noise that it tried to cancel. After reading a number of rather positive reviews of the Logitech ones I decided to go ahead and buy a pair. The ingenious part about them: once you put them on, most of the noise is already gone. The circumaural ear pads absorb already so well that the audio processing can easily remove the remaining (stationary) noise. Admitted, there is some ground noise introduced by the circuit but given the target environment--e.g. a plane or a train--that should be okay.

Having good music is all nice and great, but at the end of the day (and probably during the day, too) you still have to work. As some of you know, I've never been a big fan of mice. Nothing beats a keyboard shortcut or an editor like Vim where you can reduce any mouse user to a gasping spectator with the stroke of a few well chosen keys. So, for the few things where it's hard to avoid the mouse I'd like to be as efficient and precise as possible.

A great opportunity to test whether the new series of Revolution mice is revolutionary as promised. I decided to go for the VX notebook model and, indeed, it is very nice to handle. The movements are really precise and scrolling has never been that easy. I actually managed to scroll a 65,000 line Excel sheet from the bottom to the top with one swift motion of my index finger. Almost makes the Ctrl+Home shortcut obsolete. ;-)

Logitech VX Revolution:

In the past, the Logitech mouse drivers and applications have been infamous for their pathetic quality to the point where friends advised me not to tell people that I'm working on Logitech drivers--to avoid a spontaneous beating.

That must have been the reason why they came up with SetPoint, the successor to GrausWare (sorry, you need to know German for this one). Is it any better? Weeeelll ... At least it hasn't bluescreened my machine, which is already something. MouseWare took about one stand-by/resume cycle for that. But the software itself is still an exhibition of bugs (meaning they're so obvious, they can hardly be considered bugs) and it provides less functionality than some of the previous. Why, the hell, won't they let me assign the double click to the thumb button? I know it's lazy but I like it anyway! And browsing in the forums doesn't exactly do a lot to improve that impression.

It seems, though, that I'm not alone in my discontent. Somebody came up with an excellent hack called uberOptions that tweaks a bunch of configuration files and--voilà--more settings than you ever imagined. (Including the double click for the thumb button.) Integrate that piece of software into SetPoint, plan about a month of serious bug squishing and you have one of the greatest pointing devices available.

PS: We'll have the quality discussion again when the first product that I've worked on is shipping. ;-)