Author: Carl Setzer

I’m exploring Microsoft’s latest effort in the search category, Bing. As there has been a number of articles, and some ads touting its features, I felt it was time to give it a test-drive. M$ has learned from Google. The interface is nice and clean, very much like Google’s. Currently, they have a lovely background of Normandy. This is filled with hyperlinks to D-Day topics, but done in a rather unobtrusive way.

Anyway, the main thing to check is search. For my first effort, I decided to try and find a BusinessWeek article that I’d just read and wanted to seed to Newsvine. My search terms were the title of the article (“Microsoft’s Search Savior”) with “BusinessWeek”. In Bing, sadly, the article didn’t appear in the first page of results. Google had the article as it’s first link. Trying a vanity search, I find my LinkedIn profile first, followed by my main website, Setzers.org second. Not too bad. I do like the list on the left side with related searches.

In the end, I’m not really wowed. I will continue to use this for a little while and see how it “sticks”. Anyway, the best thing about this is the media attention, which should drive Google to accelerate their innovation.

A Day At The Beach, originally uploaded by carl.setzer.

My family spent the early part of the day at the beach along the Edmonds waterfront. Quite a bit of marine life readily viewable. The three of us delight in tide-pools. Quite the variety, from three different crab species (red-rock, dungeness & kelp), a couple gunnels, shrimp (possibily dock shrimp, but I’m not too sure), a regular convention of nudibrachs, sunflower stars, ochre and blood-stars. These were the stand outs. There also were all the standard players: sea cucumbers, anenomes, barnacles and the like.

Via BlackBerry

Edmonds Beach, originally uploaded by carl.setzer.

The extreme low tide today. -3.6, I do believe. Lots of marine life to see.

Via BlackBerry

There are a good many things I like about Twitter. Most exciting is the range and speed of communications. With that is a serious problem: filters. The receptive element of communications gets overwhelmed by the volume of data. Breaking down the stream into manageable chunks is cumbersome. There are some good tools, though. I have become somewhat fond of Tweetdeck. It helps separate out some of the streams (replies and direct messages, in particular). It does a good job letting you set up groups and favorites. Thus the stream is far easier to manage. This, for me at least, makes this the best Twitter client I’ve worked with so far.

There are a good many things I like about Twitter. Most exciting is the range and speed of communications. With that is a serious problem: filters. The receptive element of communications gets overwhelmed by the volume of data. Breaking down the stream into manageable chunks is cumbersome. There are some good tools, though. I have become somewhat fond of Tweetdeck. It helps separate out some of the streams (replies and direct messages, in particular). It does a good job letting you set up groups and favorites. Thus the stream is far easier to manage. This, for me at least, makes this the best Twitter client I’ve worked with so far.

My friend Bill forwarded me a great piece from siliconvalley.com discussing the ways that layoffs have been impacting people’s family lives. My layoff has affected me far more deeply than I would’ve expected. Fortunately, on the whole, I’d say the experience has been positive. This interim gives me much more time with my son, which I take with relish. The tension that I have felt with my wife has been externally focused. The feeling is as the two of us facing out, backs together. For such, I’m quite grateful. The opposite would be an aggravation beyond pale.

I have focused on growth and understanding during this time. Watching the news, it’s easy to see the greater state of the economy. It’s easy for me to not take the quiet after the hundreds of resumes personally. I quite expect that this economic mess will take years to fully recover from.

Many years ago I decided my life would not be about wealth or power, but about service and impact. And about living my family life with quality. One of the people quoted said to his wife, “I don’t care if we lose everything, as long as I have you”. I couldn’t agree more. As I’ve often hear said, “no one has wished, on their death-bed, that they’d worked more.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, about one half the way down the page, that there’s a graphic for IP2Location.com. It’s really a delight to see all the different locales represented in my readership. Though it is a humble wee blog, I have readers all over.