One of the more common issues that computer users experience is that their computer mice can sometimes fail to work on certain surfaces, particularly mirrored or reflective ones. What if you want to use your desk on a marble desk or a glass surface? The Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 can do that.

The key here is the revolutionary Microsoft BlueTrack Technology. The Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 isn’t the first device to use this technology, but you may not have used it in the past either. It has been designed specifically to work in more places, including granite counters, carpet, wood tables, and even unfinished park benches. It will work just about anywhere. This is better than laser and optical.

Other features include an ambidextrous design, 10-month battery life, plug-and-go USB transceiver that fits into the body of the mouse for easy storage, five customizable buttons, four-way scrolling, and reliable 2.4GHz wireless connectivity.

Find the Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 on sale for $40.49 on Amazon.ca, which represents a 32% savings off the regular price. In addition to the white version shown here, the mouse can also be found in black, purple, or red

We’ve got a little bit of everything for today’s speedlink session, so hold on to your hats as we blaze our way through the blogosphere.

Paul Mudhar is expecting a new bundle of joy and he couldn’t be happier. His wife is eight weeks along now, meaning that the “embryo” has graduated to “fetus” status. This is going to be a very exciting time for Paul and Mira. We wish them all the best and here’s looking forward to a happy and healthy baby.

Rebecca Bollwitt is one of the more popular Vancouver bloggers, because she has an intense local focus on her blog. While a lot of other people are focusing on the Olympics, Rebecca reminds us of the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad too. There are events happening all across the city for two solid months of entertainment. This is a multicultural town, so soak in everything that they have to offer.

Bob Buskirk was hard at work at the Consumer Electronics Show last weekend, but he knows how to have a good time too. He was at the Night Before CES Party at the Palms Place, as hosted by Futurelooks, Cooltronics, and Redux. Open bars and big giveaways are always a huge draw at parties like these. See you next year, Bob!

Keith Dsouza approaches a topic that should be of interest to any bloggers in the audience. Do you verify short URLs from the people who leave comments on your blog? Do you ensure that they aren’t linking to malware and other nasty places that you do not want associated with your blog? Services like bit.ly and TinyURL can be a blessing and a curse.

Sean Cranbury steps in for Joseph Planta from The Commentary as the latter takes a short vacation overseas. Sean takes a moment to interview Kris Krug, a man known as a “globe-trotting photographer, technologist, blogger, social media savant and cultural provocateur.” Listen to the conversation as it approaches a wide range of subject areas, including the arts scene in Shanghai.

Regular readers of Beyond the Rhetoric will know that I have been in Las Vegas for the last week covering the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show. This is the largest technology trade show in North America, covering everything from home theater to smartphones to computer equipment.

One observation that I have made is the difference in how the companies approach trade shows such as these. This is clearly a marketing opportunity for the different manufacturers, not only trying to attract press coverage, but also connecting with buyers, suppliers, and other people that would be involved in their business process.

Some companies find that they extract the greatest value from having a sizable booth on the trade show floor. This way, you can have the greatest number of eyes looking at your products, assuming that you have the appropriate representatives on the floor to answer any questions the passers-by may have. It is more difficult to make a personal connection using this format, however.

That’s why some other companies decide to take the route of hosting a suite in one of the nearby hotels. By doing this, you have a greater opportunity to forge long-term relationships, giving the visitors much more one-on-one time than you would with the booth. On the downside, you are much less likely to get random foot traffic, because visitors typically don’t wander through the hotel suites in the same way that they’d wander through the trade show floor.

Perhaps the best approach is to have both a booth and a suite, but this can be very cost prohibitive. If you were to attend a trade show like the CES, would you have your company erect a booth on the floor or host a suite for more personal visits?

Generally speaking, most of the blogs that you find on the Internet will make use of a single unified theme or template for the entirety of the site. Whether you are reading this single WordPress Wednesday post or one of the Marketing 101 posts on the BlueFur blog, you will see the same theme. What if you want to shake it up?

There are instances where you may choose to have a different theme based on the category or type of post. For instance, if you have a multi-author blog, you may want to have a slightly modified template based on the author of that particular post. How do you go about doing this without utilizing multiple WordPress installations?

A very handy plug-in for this purpose is called ThemePerPost. As you can probably guess from its name, this WordPress plug-in allows you to have different styles and themes for each of your posts. This can be great for landing pages, sub-sections, and other similar applications. Maybe you want a different theme for your About page.

This plug-in adds a custom field in the area where you would normally write or edit your blog posts and pages. From there, you can choose from the templates that you have uploaded to the regular themes directory in your WordPress installation.

For more information and to download the WordPress plug-in, point your web browser over to Steveify.com. A live demo is also hosted there.

As you’ll quickly discover, not all browsers render equally. Due to differing implementations (opinions) on the (X)HTML/CSS specifications, one browser may display your content as expected, while another may not. As such, web developers are forced to test their websites in multiple browsers (and even multiple operating systems).

However, don’t rush out and start installing multiple browsers and operating system virtual machines just yet. There is a way to get a general idea of how your website looks in other browsers/operating systems. There are two web tools that allow us to get screenshots of our website rendered by a specified browser.

The first is Adobe BrowserLab. This service, by Adobe, can provide us with screenshots from Internet Explorer 6/7/8 (Windows XP), Firefox 2.0/3.0/3.5 (Windows XP), Chrome 3.0 (Windows XP), Safari 3.0/4.0 (OS X) and Firefox 2.0/3.0/3.5 (OS X). These browsers support Javascript and Flash, and even allow you to specify a delay to wait before taking the screenshot (to compensate for any animations or Javascript executing). BrowserLabs provides quick delivery of screenshots and easy comparision of screenshots with multi-views and rulers. An Adobe account required to use BrowserLabs.

Browsershots is another such service. Browsershots gives you a greater selection of browsers and more control over them. Providing almost every browser made in the last 25 years and their various versions. Browsershots allows you to specify your preferred screen size, colour depth and Javascript/Java/Flash version or disable. Browsershots’ screenshot delivery is slower than BrowserLab’s and those screenshots may not always be full-length.

Now that you can view your website in multiple browsers, across multiple operating systems, you can start the gruelling task of tweaking your code to conform to all browsers.

Many people seem to avoid conflict and issues as if they were the plague. They do everything that they can to prevent these problems from arising in the first place, because it sounds like prevention is usually the best course of action. And yes, usually it is, but you also have to come to realization that very few solutions are even concocted without being first faced with major problems.

Some of the most innovative and successful products that have ever been invented are those that addressed a very specific issue that someone noticed. For example, patients were getting infected all the time until someone discovered the properties associated with penicillin. Similarly, we were faced with only having a few songs in our pockets until the larger MP3 players hit the market.

Depending on the circumstances, a major problem could be one of the best things that ever happened to your business. Yes, a problem bring about utter ruin, but it also could be perceived as a fantastic opportunity. By approaching your issues intelligently and respectfully, you can come up with some of the most innovative and valuable solutions. These can be very profitable!

It’s all about perspective. A problem can be seen as just that: a problem. On the other hand, it can be seen as an opportunity to innovate, succeed, and move up to the next level.