Мышь also means mouse in the sense of a computer mouse. There are a lot of different kinds of mouses (mice?) out there, including:

When you talk about pressing a mouse button, a variety of verbs are used: нажимать/нажать “to press,” кликать/кликнуть “to click,” щелкать/щелкнуть “to click.” Sample sentences:

¹ Examples adapted from this source.

As I recall, back in 1997 nobody had cell phones in Russia.* Now they are all over the place. “Mobile phone” is trans­lated мобильный телефон or мобиль­ник, and cell phone is trans­lated сотовый телефон, although sometimes people just say сотовый. And young Russians send text messages like crazy. Properly speaking, the text message protocol is called SMS, the Short Message System. “Text message” is translated текстовое сообщение, but really almost no one says that. Usually people write СМС (pronounced эсэмэс) or смс-ка (pronounced эсэмэска), or sometimes they just write it in Latin letters as SMS.

In the early days of Russian texting, only Latin letters were available, so the Russians wrote things like:

That approach to writing Russian is often called транслит. There are several ways to go about transliterating Russian with Latin letters, and you can read about them in this Wikipedia article. The Russians aren't particularly consistent in how they use транслит, so the example we used above might come out “zdu teba u vhoda v biblioteku.” Sometimes that leads to humorous misunderstandings:

Here the texter meant “S Pashoi” to represent «С Пасхой», which is an Easter greeting. The other texter mistook the h to be part of ш, and thus a typo for «С Пашей» “With Paul.”

Although many Russian cell phones can now send/receive text messages in Cyrillic, often people send them still in Latin letters. Sometimes they do this because the person they are sending to has a phone that can't receive Cyrillic. But there is another reason that people write in Latin even when both sender and receiver have phones that work with Cyrillic. It turns out that for technical reasons a Cyrillic text message is limited to a maximum of 70 characters, whereas one written in Latin letters and numbers can have up to 160 characters.

Quick texters in English use T9 predictive keying. Not surprisingly, it has also been adapted to Russian:

Т9 - офигенно удобная штука, смс-ки сейчас набираю только ею. (source)	T9 is awesomely convenient. It's the only way I type text messages now.
А я всегда пользуюсь этой функцией… только смешно получается, если я что-то пишу, а слово получается не то, а я так и отправляю Например, если написать "сижу дома, скучаю, хорошо, что у меня пиво есть", то автоматом вместо "пиво" пишется "план" (Adapted from this source)	Well I always use this function… only it comes out funny if I write something and the wrong word comes out and I send it. For instance, if I write “I'm at home, bored, good thing I have beer,” then the algorithm writes “dope” instead of “beer.”

* For comparison's sake, I should say that I purchased my first cell phone in the States in 1998, although they were available before that.

The Russian word for blog is блог. What exactly is a blog? Ru.wikipedia.org describes it like this:

Юлия Третьякова, a blogger apparently from Томск, recently discussed the most popular blogs in Russia. Here's her list along with the reasons that people read them:

drugoi.livejournal.com

e_grishkovets.livejournal.com

temа.livejournal.com

dolboeb.livejournal.com

katechkina.livejournal.com

tanyant.livejournal.com

mi3ch.livejournal.com

kitya.livejournal.com

One of the great things about the internet is that it's really easy to access Russian language materials nowadays. One of the most amazing sites is livejournal.com. I'm not quite sure why, but livejournal quickly became a major center of Russian blogging. When you start look at these blogs and forums, you will encounter various words and phrases that are either unique to the internet or have a curious history buried in technology. For instance someone might write «У меня сдох винт». You look up винт and discover it's primary meaning is screw. My screw died? That doesn't make much sense. And then someone tells you that винт is computer jargon for hard disk. Ah, now you understand. But why the heck would the word for screw come to mean hard drive? A hard drive doesn't look like a screw. Sure, you can turn a screw, and a hard drive turns, but that's really stretching it. It turns out that there is a good reason. One of the early hard drives, the IBM 3340, was nicknamed "the Winchester," which in Russian gets transliterated Винчестер, which got shortened to винт.

One of things you'll see quite often when you start reading Russian-language forums and blogs is ЗЫ. Once again you go to the dictionary, and this time you don't find a blessed thing. You notice that the ЗЫ is usually toward the end of an entry or comment. You notice that it is often followed by a comma or a colon. So what's the scoop? Here's the explanation. Let's say you are typing at a computer, and the computer has a standard QWERTY keyboard. And let's say you are typing in the standard Russian keyboard mapping that comes with MS Windows. The letter З is on the P key, and the letter Ы is on the S key. PS = postscript! That's right. The Russians are basically writing PS, but they aren't being anal-retentive enough to switch their keyboard to English just to write those two letters. You can see an example of this here (mirror).

There are lots of other fun vocabulary bits in Russian internetspeak. For instance a smiley is called смайлик, and the @ symbol is called a собака. Okay, readers, let's hear your guesses where the Russian word for that last item comes from. If you want to have a bit of fun, read the Russian Wikipedia entry on Компьютерный сленг internet slang. It's great!

The Russian word for umbrella is зонт. Everyone should invest in an umbrella because it can help prevent a person from becoming wet on a rainy day. However, many people also enjoy using an umbrella on a hot day because it helps protect against sun burns. When I was a few years old, for the first time, I discovered that umbrellas are not only used on rainy days. It was a hot and sunny day when me and my mother went shopping. As we were walking, I saw an old lady walk down the street with an umbrella. I found it so odd that I began laughing and ran to the lady asking «Почему вы ходите с зонтом? Сегодня солнце сияет и погода очень жаркая!» “Why are you walking around with an umbrella? Today the sun is shining and the weather is very hot!” The old lady turned to me and with a grin on her face said «Потому что я не хочу получить ожог, дорогая» “Because I don’t want to get a burn, dear.” As I continued walking with my mother to the store, I was confused by what the lady told me and I thought «Как может зонт защитить человека от солнечного загара? » “How can an umbrella protect a person against a sun burn?” It was not until a few years later that I began to understand the reasoning behind this practice.