Looks like MSN has the upperhand so far in desktop search.  I have little interest in finding out first hand though so I think I'll wait for a non-beta release.  I don't know about others, but I rarely need to search system wide for documents on the desktop.  For searching text files, I use built-in search capabilities of Eclipse and Visual Studio or Agent Ransack, a free GUI grep of sort.

Google recently added satellite images to it's map service which I found useful for finding bike commute paths from my house to a client whose office is just across the marsh.

I thought there was a path along the edge of the marsh but examining the satellite images revealed otherwise (vector-based road maps don't show bike trails but high resolution satellite images do).  Since I don't like bicycling along side cars, biking to work is not an option.  I can, however, canoe to work although getting out of the lagoon in my neighborhood requires me to carry the canoe on my back like Vikings did.  But would Vikings have done that if they had only work at the other end instead of kill, rape, and pillage?

Anyway, a neat feature of Google Maps is that you click on a travel direction and see the location like this:

Very cool.

Apparently, Groove was sold to Microsoft for $120 million in cash (via Dave) which falls short of $155 million invested into Groove.  Since Microsoft was the largest investor, it's share out of the $120 million is about $80 million.  That means Microsoft bought rest of Groove for just $40 million.

Groove investors got some of their money back for which founders gained some respect.  Microsoft got a bargain (?!?) and a new CTO.  And employees got nothing for their shares.  Phew!

Looks like Matt now understands the real problem and is making good efforts to recover from the incident.  Exchange of comments to Shelly's post, in particular, has some excellent tips for public relations which set Matt on the right course.

In retrospect, I must admit I was (and am still!) in a highly irritable state of mind.  It's been a little over 10 days since I quit smoking and I am starting to crater already.  I think I can…Choo-Choo! (sound of me chewing niccotine lozenges)…I think I can…

Last night, I've been thinking about Russell's post on PSP in which he wrote:

So I snagged Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow this weekend via BitTorrent and then converted it to run on my PSP.

Actually, it wasn't that he snagged a major movie off BitTorrent that had me thinking.  He wouldn't have been able to unless it wasn't a common albeit illegal and shadowy activity.

What had me thinking was his response to the obvious questions:

I simply described an activity that many, many people are already doing with or without me. Do you really think that not talking about this sort of illegal use of BitTorrent is going to somehow protect it?

While my answer to his question is no, I do think talking in public about illegal activities does somehow cause changes, changes which the affected or interested parties (i.e. MPAA, FBI) may consider extremely harmful and thus proceed to counter by setting examples.

Based on my mutated theory of ying and yang, what belongs in the shadow should stay in the shadow.  Failing to do so leads to chaos.

Matt finally responded with a post titled A Response to the Noise.  Noise?  I think this incident is a great example of how easily we can be blinded by the people we surround ourselves with.

Frankly, I now regret having wasted words.

To me, what Matt did with WordPress is, without a doubt, a shameful act.  He had, in effect, pressed WordPress users into becoming unwitting accomplices in google bombing for financial gain using hidden content.  This is what Matt had to say about it:

The content in /articles is essentially advertising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I'm not sure if we're going to continue it much longer, but we're committed to this month at least, it was basically an experiment. However around the beginning of Feburary donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like donations but more specifically it's been going to the business/trademark expenses so it's not entirely out of my pocket anymore.

Matt, stop babbling poor excuses like a teenager who just crashed his dad's car into a ditch.  No excuses can be made for that kind of shenanigan except a sincere admission of complete lapse in judgement.

Nothing much going on because I am floored with a flu of sort.  Symtoms are severe muscle and stomach aches.  Constant intake of niccotine lozenges didn't help with my stomach either.  Is it just me or are flus and allergies seem more prevalent these days?  Maybe I should invest in kleenex manufacturers…

Oh yeah, I did notice 360 but don't have any comment other than that it seems just like Orkut with blogging thrown in.  Note that Orkut was not useful at all, not even from the revenue model point of view.  As to the blogging side, it the same old same.  What's going on in Korea now is more advanced than this.

OOPS.  Dave quoted a part of this post which got edited out.  Well, I'll just restore some of it.

Everyone seems to be copycats these days, like all the cats who wrote three-pane news aggregators.  It's the same with social networking services like Orkut, 360, Spaces…  What's wrong with you all?  Are you all assimilated or something?

A small team (2-3) of Microsoft engineers lead by Steve Rider is building Start.com, what looks to be a personal news portal (aka server-side news aggregator).  I see that they too found TiddlyWiki interesting too and are AJAXed like rest of the web development tippy heads.  I say they too because Start.com is in the same space I am attacking.  And they are running into same problems I have.  Hehe.  Luckily, they have Dare to help them with.

In my opinion, forcing Microsoft to ship media player-less Windows won't have any effect on Microsoft's media format dominance.  Instead, Microsoft should have been forced to place media player IP and code in the public domain as well as bundle several competitive media players.  Of course, the monopolist side of me still think anti-monopoly whiners are just wimps but I'll change my tune when I have a lucrative reason to.