off the Hook - 911s Chief Lotu...

With all the publicity (OK, TV ads ) I've seen about Microsoft's new search (err... "decision" ) engine, bing.com the past couple of weeks, I finally gave it a try today.

The query on my mind happened to be the $99 iPhone 3G. So first, I typed "$99 iPhone" into bing.com. The top result was a link to a "Boy Genius Report" article from December, 2008 (that'd be six months ago ) SPECULATING about a $99 iPhone. The rest of the results weren't any better.

Then, I went over to Google and searched for "$99 iPhone." The result? A link to an apple.com page actually describing the $99 iPhone and how to get it (otherwise known as "What I was looking for" ).

The only "decision" bing.com helped me make is not to use it. Don't get me wrong, bing.com does have pretty backgrounds that change every day for those that don't have a screen saver already doing that for them.

P.S. This humorous video pretty much sums it up too.

P.P.S. Want even better results? try my new favorite search engine at http://twoquick.com.

I love Chris Toohey. I really do. In fact, he saved my butt this very morning by helping me correct some broken links in my blog entry. But he also posted this blog entry, which caused me a bit of hearburn, not because of him, but because of the technology he wrote about. Since I trust Chris implicitly, I got excited when I saw his entry about using Google Sync to publish his Notes Calendar to the web for internet users to see using my Blackberry as middleware. So I immediately signed up for a google account (no, I did not have one before because gmail is way inferior to Notes). I then started synchronizing my Notes cal to that Google cal. That was a week ago. First, I noticed that it wasn't synching everything. OK, no biggie. I can deal with that. It even told me that it couldn't sync everything because "another program" was (that'd be Notes). Fine, at least some were going through, so I left it going for a week. Interestingly, it was synching most (not all) of my new calendar entries. But I noticed it was draining my Blackberry battery, and I can't afford that at Lotusphere, so I decided to "sign out" of Google Sync on my Blackberry. It warned me that it would delete anything it had synched, so I looked for an option to NOT do that - no such option. So I figured, Google is smart, surely they wouldn't delete the entries that I created in Notes, right? WRONG. It wiped out 8 weeks of my appointments, and the Blackberry diligently sent cancellation notices on all of the meetings to the participants I had invited. Nice. Thanks Google (not so much).

But there is a (relatively) happy ending to this tale.  Since I am running the Notes 8.5 client and 8.5 mail template (on a Notes 8.0 server BTW), I simply went to my Notes calendar and clicked Add Calendar / Google Calendar, provided my credentials, and BAM, there are all of the Google calendar entries on my Notes calendar again. Thanks Lotus (sincerely).