Wesley Howe

I bought a laptop sufficient to run Maya on. It is not perhaps the fastest possible, but it does the job (Maya is powerful, and requires a lot of power to make use of the capabilities). But that isn’t the subject of this entry, it is the mouse I bought to use with it.
I generally dislike cordless mice, because they eat batteries. However this mouse (the Logitech Performance MX) has a rechargeable battery that can be charged from a cable that plugs into a USB port or one of those black box plug in the wall jobs. I generally run the computer plugged in, but with more than one cord, I manage to get everything tangled up if I want to get up and come back to work. On this mouse, there is a small receiver that plugs into a USB port, but it is much, much shorter than a memory stick, and that seems to be OK, it doesn’t stick out far enough to obstruct anything or appear to be liable to catch on something and break. The laptop allows me to disable the touch-pad when a mouse is plugged in, which is important because if you bump the pad otherwise, your mouse pointer jumps unexpectedly. This feature works with this mouse (the system recognizes it as a USB mouse).
The mouse hardware itself works pretty good, although it has one of those combined scroll-wheel/middle mouse buttons on it, and making the middle-mouse action work without scrolling takes some effort. But I think I will learn this trick, despite being a bit of an old dog. The middle-mouse is very important to using Maya well.
However, the Setpoint software that came on the CD with the mouse is not very awesome, and I had to uninstall it. Without that software all the extra buttons on the mouse do nothing, although the big selling point for me was the cordless+rechargeable features anyway.
With the Setpoint software installed, I got erratic mouse movements, sometimes with a flashing screen. I think that there was some internal conflict going on between their software and the Windows 7 system software, but I have no way to tell if that is what was the issue. However, uninstalling their software (and another reboot) put everything back to right.
I have used other Logitech mice before, and remember that I had issues with the Logitech Setpoint software before. They seem to have learned nothing over the years, because it is still unusable. I thought about sending the whole thing back (this setup costs as much as several ordinary mice would), but uninstalling their software fixed my big issues with it, so I will probably keep it, it is a nice looking and smooth operating piece of hardware, except for learning a different touch for the middle-mouse button.

I got interested in making videos from 3D mesh characters a while back. I have been working hard at learning how do do it (now, I just need to learn how to do it better). I finished a short animation of a cartoon dog, named Little Ludwig, and presented it to a meeting of the Autodesk Animation User Group of Austin last night. It was pretty well-received, and got some spontaneous laughter, which was what I had hoped for.

While there are technical flaws in the production, I learned a lot making it, including how much more I need to learn. I created the whole cartoon, right down to the sound effects and music. I put it up on YouTube, in case anyone wants to see it.