Experimental Blip

Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft (formerly LiveSearch). It has gone live in a preview format on www.bing.com. Google has been the dominant search engine for many years now, offering stripped down graphics and fast results. Yahoo on the other hand gives you a busy, congested looking page. I’ve always been turned off by Yahoo and its search page. (Does anyone even use Yahoo search anymore?) Bing offers some things Yahoo does, like travel and hotel cost results in searches where Google does not. Bing also apparently has a great health and symptom related search where Google steers you more towards their GoogleHealth service. Both Bing and Google appear to have good satellite images for maps, but I think Google still wins that one with Street View. I so far like the sidebar of Bing but I have not used it too much overall yet and need further thoughts on it. Don’t expect me to say “Bing It” though… I’m going to start using Bing for fun and see how it goes. Maybe it’ll be more efficient than Google, but we’ll see. This is Microsoft remember!

PC World did a recent Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo and gives their results here.

The city I work in, and lived previously most my life, Waukesha, sure has issues when it comes to a safe intersection. There is an intersection right outside my office that was re-done recently and it has only gotten worse. It is a five way intersection and the way the lights are confuses most of the drivers each day. As you turn right (Northbound) from going Eastbound, people stop directly in the middle of the intersection because the next light they see is red. The light they just went through was green and they pass this “do not block intersection” sign.. yet they block it anyways and stop of the lines of paint that show you cannot stop there. (The pic below is before the revised intersection)

Next, we have Sunset and St. Paul Ave. For almost 15 years now this intersection has been programmed wrong. The East/Westbound traffic enjoys a nice 7 second light most times where the North/Southbound traffic get a 60-90 second light. The Westbound traffic builds up in both lanes that end up one quick lane right after the lights. This equals lots of accidents and horns. This has been voiced on, and many written gripes in the paper, but it remains unchanged.

You see, Waukesha doesn’t care about how people gripe about their roads. It doesn’t matter to them. I can tell you we have called no less than three times to the city about the intersection by the office. Each time they say “there is a sign though that says do not block” and we say “yes we know”. They just can’t admit their brand new intersection is very flawed, since they don’t have money to re-do it. We even alerted them today that a police officer was even blocking traffic and didn’t know he was supposed to keep going through the intersection and “not block traffic”. They just don’t and never will get it. In fact for humor sake, I have counted 3 cars that were laying on the horn in this 10 min it took me to get the pictures and words for this blog post. Times that by each hour and hours in the work day. I bet you could count 50 horns daily easily in my work day from this intersection! I just shake my head… Oh and no, most of the pot holes still exist from the previous two winters…

Whether you believe or not in the afterlife, ghosts, entities, or something that can exist in the same dimension as our human world, you have to leave the door open to a possibility at least. People all around the world each day have witnessed things they can’t explain. People you would least expect first off. I’ve never encountered such a thing, but do believe something can exist in this world. What about the world of animals? There are claims all over of ghost animals throughout the world and history. Castles with ghost dog sounds, and other things.

Last year, Milton our cat was adopted and spent a few weeks with our other cat Skittles. Skittles had been dealing with heart and kidney failure for 3 years and was on constant medication. Skittles passed not soon after last year. They were mostly separated in two rooms but knew each other was there. At times we’d let them see each other and sometimes see what they’d do without being held back. It was always just stare downs and a few growls of getting used to each other.

Last night we heard a noise and suddenly Milton was under the futon extremely frightened. Nothing had been knocked over or out of place. When a cat clumsily falls, or knocks something over they get over it in seconds. Milton wouldn’t move. I finally got her out, and she was just sitting there looking around between the hall and the back room. She crouched slowly, puffed her tail, and was extremely nervous looking. It took her about a half hour to start going back in the back room again. Eventually she just went back to routine and sitting in the living room. A couple hours later one of us made a noise for no real reason, and Milton got up from laying down and ran in the kitchen looking where the sound came from. I thought about it and that random noise sounded very cat meow like for some reason to me. Wasn’t intended that way, but that’s how it came out. Apparently Milton reacted to it strongly and this was hours after her initial scare.

One thing tells me Milton heard something to freak her out. She’s pretty brave and I’ve never seen a cat get so scared, even in a thunderstorm. Two, she seemed very alert to a sound that was very cat like, in fact immediately following it. I’ve had cat noises on computers, tv’s and cats usually just look up like “whats that?”. I’ve never seen one chase the noise before so intense like that. If I had a guess, I’d say Skittles came back to say hello… but I’m not going to jump to conclusions, I’ll never know what she saw/heard but she was definitely scared out of her mind.

Yeah Menards…. you still suck.

I can’t simply win at all with this place. I went last night for something so simple… 4 cycle lawnmower oil. I walk around and I can’t find it anywhere. I found one bottle of 2 cycle oil, and that was it. So I wander for 3-4 minutes back and forth in the same isles, then to the tools area, then back. No one is around to help me. I got near the registers, and they have two open with about four in each line. Thinking it was time to give up, I walked out (seems like a usual move for me there) and went home… I even went to the Kwik Trip and they actually did have lots of mower oil, but only 2 cycle. Funny – they had more stock than Menards did!

I’ll have to go back to Ace, where they seem to always have what you need. They ask you what you need (without being annoying like Best Buy) soon after you get there too. Kudos to Ace Hardware.

A made by fans for fans movie releasing May 3, online. It looks just like a real Lords of the Ring production, pretty amazing actually. It runs 40min in length, check the trailer out and be prepared to be excited.

http://www.thehuntforgollum.com/

Four weeks left of the semester… Not going to miss this one by any means. The work load isn’t terrible like Fall was with VB. I’ve just had to deal with on and off efforts on a group project taking up 75% of the semester in one class. Last week the group leader was doing the entire powerpoint and lost it. We need it to be able to tell who is doing what for this Wednesday’s presentation. So here we are Wednesday night last week and our group leader stating that he’ll get it back to us with our roles Sat or Sun. Nothing yet… two nights to prepare for a 35min presentation.

I’m ready to say this is what I’m doing, you figure out the rest. I’m taking off Summer and Fall to give my head a rest and to get ready for Oct 9th. I’ve been going nine straight semesters with only a couple weeks in between. I’ve probably driven everyone in my life away from trying to maintain my 3.8 GPA. I’ve still got about 2 years (part time) to go. If I take too much at once I can’t handle it. Some people are good at that – but I get my head too overwhelmed for no reason usually if I have too much going on at once.

For anyone who has heard me talk about “Hank the angry neighbor” – he has finally shipped off. He had his moving truck out on Saturday. Too bad I didn’t know ahead of time…could’ve organized a neighbor hood bucket party.

Someone had posted this so I had to show it here too.. it is from the United Countries of Baseball. It’s pretty truthful I think!

Watch this animation of WalMart expanding like the plague over the years….

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… “A dirty Target is always better than the cleanest WalMart.”

(Now compare the light pollution of the United States with the store map of WalMart… hmmm….no wonder!)

It may be time for the film industry to go from a four star system, to a five star system. The ratings are just not making much sense… I’m sure this is all opinion based but I think I have a good point…

Example:
Employee of the Month – 3 star rating.
Would I ever buy this? No. Was it any good? I’ve seen worse, it wasn’t awful but not 3 stars.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby – 3 star rating.
Was it good? I saw it once, that was probably enough. It wasn’t awful, but it’s nothing I’d buy. Is it a good Will Ferrell movie? Not his best, just like Anchorman was not that good.

Pearl Harbor – 2 star rating.
Was it a documentary? No. Was it good? It was decent. It wasn’t a 4 star movie, but it sure beats the above movies.

Cast Away – 2 star rating.
It wasn’t the best Tom Hanks movie, but I thought it was a good one. Sure it was based in the same place for 75% of the movie, but they actually took time to make it. You think Employee of the Month took a long time to make? C’mon…

Sure you can spend three years making a piece of crap, but come on… You’re telling me the above movies are worthy of three stars?? Who decided that was a good idea?

It just seems there are many three star movies out there that don’t deserve a three star rating. A three star rating is one away from four stars obviously…so you tell me Employee of the Month and Ricky Bobby were just one little star away from Casablanca and Gone with the Wind? I find it pointless to continue with this rating system.. I guess though when was the last time a critic was believed on their thoughts on a movie? Many times we still find the movie good that the critics seem to tear apart. I guess the point is.. ignore critics, ignore stars, go watch what you like and tell the world it doesn’t matter what they think!

Funny to think what we didn’t have on the internet in 1996… No social networking sites, YouTube, etc etc.. In some cases maybe that era was better w/o all the flash and rich media advertising and increase in spam. In any case this is a good example of two eras. First you have the older web users and the younger ones who never have lived without Facebook or MySpace. Its like that eras of vinyl v. cds, vhs v. DVD, cable w/13 channels v. cable w/200 channels. Another tale to haunt future generations… “I remember when the internet didn’t have YouTube!” Take a 10 year old addicted to YouTube and put them online in 1996…I bet they’d rather play outside.