• New background image, courtesy of Dotter. Dotter generates a polka dot background picture based on colours you specify.
• New CSS to make things look more web 2.0-ish.
• You need to solve a CAPTCHA to post a comment, so spammers can’t pollute the comment moderation queue.

Let me know what you think of the new design, and most importantly, if you find display bugs.

Happy holidays and happy new year.

Edit: Here’s how the old theme looked like, for archival purposes:

Here in Seattle, the big fad nowadays is for politicians to come out and state that the budget has a huge deficit, and that if people don’t allow them to raise taxes they will have to cut essential services. But they’re also spending like drunken sailors on light rail, road tunnels, bridges, you name it! The Seattle P-I’s story placement today is just brilliant:

Sure, a new bridge, seawall, tunnel, etc are useful projects, but right now I’d rather have them wait the recession out instead of cutting essential services and/or raising taxes during a recession. It’s just one more way to kill what’s left of the middle class and screw the less fortunate members of society.

I came across this interesting page on TunnelFacts.com. For instance, with 4.2 billion, you could prevent any city bus service cuts for 3 years, hire all school teachers laid off in May (and many more) for 10 years, get sidewalks for every block that needs them, give 5 reusable shopping bags to each Seattleite, pay the rent for 5 years for 8000 bums in Seattle, and get a bike for each adult in Seattle! All for $4.2 billion!

Maybe I’m just very pessimistic and in 10-20 years from now when the tunnel opens there will be a few average Joes left who’ll be able to afford the gas to drive in the tunnel…

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!

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…

Bing!!!!!!

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.

Netbooks

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)

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!!!!!!!!!

Update

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!