You think Bing just copied all the features from Google and it’s now just trying to weasel itself in as a contender with silly ads? Think again!
I was trying to find a coordinate on a map, so I try it out on Google Earth. I get nothing, so maybe it’s time to RTFM. Yes, the sample coordinates work, but not “46 54 75.00 N, 122 57 92.00 W”!!!
Google earth fail:
Google maps fail:
Now here’s how Bing handles it:
Hey, that’s a win!
Back in March I got a ticket for second degree negligent driving. I hired an attorney, Heidi Hunt to contest it, and today they called me to give me the good news that it was thrown out. Sweet! I seriously thought this was going to stay, and insurance would be delighted to screw me of course.
So far, this is ticket #4 in the US. The first ticket I got was for doing 71 mph in a 35 mph zone just over a year ago was deferred. The second one for 79 in 60, on the highway, was dismissed, the third one was for not having proof of insurance was also dismissed (without a lawyer this time, just showed proof of insurance to the court). Total spent on lawyers: $1000. Total saved in fines: $1105. Fighting tickets does indeed pay for itself, but the feeling of beating the scammy system is priceless!
Bing is officially out tonight!
There was a special light show on the Space Needle to highlight the event. Here’s the view from the downtown Kirkland marina:
Among the features, the local search is great, with aggregated reviews, if only they could remove the fictional street going right through my condo on the maps, cashback (bing bling!), video search with previews and farecast! They even have a search provider for Firefox and it works great!
So check it out!
Saw this on the window of the Hallmark Realty offices in downtown Kirkland…
A couple of announcements this week from Microsoft!
Bing is our new search engine and will go live June third. Of course, it’s live since monday within the company, I’ve been using it and it’s really really good! You guys are in for a treat! I’ve attended several presentations from the team and they are really committed to being leaders in the search space. The Bing team is also holding a webcast to present the new features on June 10.
In other news, it appears that Microsoft decided to lift the infamous 3-app restriction on Starter editions of Windows 7 and market it worldwide, as opposed to just emerging markets. Netbooks are so going to rock with Windows 7!
Disclaimer: You’re not getting any privileged info here, this stuff’s all public. The only way to do that is of course beer, and lots of it, thanks to my French Canadian heritage… (and by beer, I don’t mean piss)
Yesterday I attended Ignite Seattle (warning, website sucks a bit), a special kind of conference where it starts off with a “make” project where you form a team and create something, the tallest paper & tape tower in yesterday’s case, and then it’s followed by a series of short-paced talks where the format is each speaker talks for 5 minutes, presents 20 slides, 15 seconds each slide. It’s hosted at the King Cat (6th & Blanchard) and it’s free!
I thought it was a pretty innovative conference format. Of course 5 minutes isn’t enough to go in-depth on a topic, but it provided an overview that will inspire you to dig more into it if you’re interested. All this provided you can get passed the high-on-java-compulsively-twittering-on-their-iPhone crowd 
They promise to be back quarterly now. I think it’s definitely worth checking out! I’ll post a link to their videos/slide decks if/when I find them.
Yet another Comcast sucks post. Why? because they just suck!
To start off, I did feel as if I were a bit too blunt in my last post, but it was more for entertainment value than anything else, so just a few days after getting rid of their money-draining DVR, I come home one night to discover that the Internet isn’t working right. It’ll drop anywhere between 10-30% of packets on pings, accessing a site takes multiple attempts, and high data volume applications like Remote Desktop simply don’t work.
I’ve called their support line every single day except for yesterday, where it seemed to be working properly for once. Their techs are completely worthless. All they can do is determine after 15 minutes on hold that it’s a neighborhood problem and apologize. I’ve asked for the supervisor once. She was just as useless with the exception that 1/2 an hour later I see a swarn of Comcast trucks in the neighborhood, and recently, when I call support, they often have the automated outage message.
I spoke to my neighbors, and it is indeed a neighborhood issue. I can understand a few hours, or maybe a few days outage, but seriously, over a week of issues like this is getting beyond ridiculous. What the fuck is the problem? I don’t live in the boonies, there are businesses around that are also affected by this! I’d expect a cable operator given a monopoly over an area to have competent people and equipment available to deal with issues like this. Seriously, I am in need of more than apologies and outage credits. I want my internets!!!!!!!!!
It seems that they’ve finally fixed it, it’s been working well since Wednesday night, although I see lots of Comcast trucks roaming around the neighborhood, so hopefully they’re not here to screw anything up again. Still, I am pretty pissed off that I had to live with that for over a week, in an area that boasts itself as the silicon valley of the north, in 2009. In a way I was lucky, going through the internet I noticed people with similar issues had to battle with Comcast for over a month. Absolutely ridiculous!
Today I got rid of my Comcast DVR. For a couple of reasons:
- I got a bill for $105 for TV alone this month, as my “introductory promotions” ran out. And NO, I did NOT order any porn channels or anything like that, that’s what torrents are for Generally, I watch TV rather infrequently, just catching up on my DVR’d series, like House, Heroes, The Office, Better off Ted, The Big Bang Theory, and a few others, local news, and CBUT (Vancouver’s CBC station) which Comcast distributes at a very poor quality for some reason. Does that justify me paying over $50 + $15 a month for the DVR when the Comcast CEO just took home an obscene $24.7 million last year? I believe not!
- The DVR is really a stupid fucking piece of shit. Granted, at least it’s easy to use, but beyond that, there’s not much to it. Accessing menu functions is slow as hell, the thing crashes all the time, it’s ridiculous! To add insult to injury, they gave me an old box without HDMI output, so I had to resort to analog component or DVI-to-HDMI. But, my main gripe with it is the tiny hard disk in the days of 1.5 TB hard disks being cheap and widely available. And, there’s no practical way to export recorded shows. The only possible way to do it would be to stream it through Firewire, which means that you have to “play” the show as there is no way of copying the contents of the hard disk directly, and even then, only local broadcast channels are decrypted.
- There are plenty of free options today to watch TV shows and movies, both legally and illegally, like Bittorrent, Hulu, Netflix (nice use of Silverlight!), with minimal to no advertisements, making TV-watching more efficient, and you don’t have to sit and watch irritating, screaming idiots trying to make you waste money on stupid useless shit. The quality is very decent too in comparison to cable or broadcast. In spite of all the “full HD” claims cable operators like to make, the audio and video on their services is still very highly compressed with fully visible compression artifacts, as there is still no cost-effective way of transmitting uncompressed full high definition content further than the HDMI cable run between devices.
So, now that I got an HTPC all set up, time to enjoy it! I decided to keep the “basic limited” TV service, as it only amounts to $5 a month over what I currently pay for Internet, with the “multiple service discount”, otherwise, I’d just get one of those HDTV antennae, which should give me good results since there arent many reception obstacles in my area, and if I get the urge to watch CNN, MTV, or any of this crap, there’s always the clubroom and gym in my condo.
Today I finally got a chance to order the remaining parts to the new machine I am building for myself. I’m calling it Aria. I plan to hook it up to my TV as a media center, as a file server, a torrent server and my occasional gaming needs which don’t really amount to much.
So, here are the specs:
Throwing that into an Antec P182 I got awhile ago.
It will be named Aria, after the top secret supercomputer in Eagle Eye
Update: it should be in by Friday
unhandledexception.net 
