Editorial
Microsoft Wins Okay?
When I asked readers to tell me what Net/computer/geek gift costing less than $200 they'd most like to receive for Christmas I was unprepared for the huge amount of consensus.

Love em or hate em -- it must be admitted that Microsoft's peripherals are made to a very high quality -- in fact the mouse I use the most here is a Microsoft one.

Mind you -- I never did warm to their bent keyboard but I know lots of people who love them.

Anyway... over 90 percent of all those responding to this week's survey said they'd like to receive the new Microsoft eunuch-mouse (that's the one with no ball) -- and I have to admit, I'd kind of like one too!

Other popular choices were ZIP drives and anti-virus software.

Well the nice folks at Microsoft have come to the party and are sponsoring this year's Aardvark Awards so some lucky Aardvark reader will win one of these incredibly desirable mice.

The nominations and voting will open on Monday and everyone who casts a vote will go into the draw to win a Microsoft Intelemouse.

Flying Pig Scores Some Kudos
For all the problems, mistakes and bad choices made by Flying Pig in their launch-phase, I have to take my hat off to them for their desire to ensure every customer ends up with a smile on their face.

One Aardvark reader wrote to me this week to say he'd seen a Psion handheld computer for sale on the e-porcine site with a price of just 90 cents and that he'd submitted an order for it.

Now we all know that this was a mistake, those Psions are worth at least a couple of bucks according to Bill Gates (and $995 according to everyone else) -- so both the writer and I were extremely interested to see how the Flying Pig people would handle this.

As one might expect, the customer was charged the correct price rather than the erroneously low one. However -- they did offer the guy a $200 credit to spend on the Flying Pig site as an apology.

That's a damned fine piece of PR on the part of the Pig and they deserve a special bouquet for being so magnanimous. They would have been quite within their rights to simply explain the error and offer the customer the option of a refund.

Aardvark Reviews... IHUG's StarNet Trade & Exchange www.listener.co.nz (Updated 26 Mar) MS Image Composer Sony Mavica FD7 Epson 600 iomega ZIP