Going through my feeds in Google Reader, I came across this wonderful irony ...

[vimeo [www.vimeo.com/11991409](http://www.vimeo.com/11991409) w=595&h=336]

For common tasks like looking up movies and weather, Bing is totally better than Google. One of the reasons I have made it my default search engines on all my browsers. The start page is also fantastic, so Bing.com is also my homepage on some (non-work) browsers.

And I did not put the “verticals” here like Bing Shopping, Bing Entertainment, Bing Social, Bing Finance!

Update: I completely forgot to mention Bing Maps! I used them recently on a trip to Santa Barbara both on the iPad and on my iPhone. The directions have a neat feature that said “if you have passed so-and-so street you have gone too far” or something to that effect. Nice touch!

 Update 2: Cannot believe how much else there is! I forgot Visual Search! I added a new image below showing what else is there in Bing which makes “searching” so much cooler for non-geeks (although, geeks are not left behind, clearly!)

Andersen’s Danish Bakery on State Street - the coffee was actually very good!

I have said this many times, but Google does need to clean up (literally) its interface. Not only are there inconsistencies among apps for doing the same things, but look at how the "Google apps" logo sticks out in my gmail theme. Sucks. 

BTW, the logo? It also stinks. 

Sliders are SO much better for such things than radio buttons/drop downs and anything else facebook has implemented so far! 

Un-freaking-believable .... (HT, Gizmodo)

[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uleQ6ZGyifQ?wmode=transparent])

The West is all set with Denver/Dallas and Lakers/Houston. I think Denver/Dallas will be closer and Lakers/Houston will have no viewer appeal.

Cleveland will have such a long layoff from match play that they may be rusty coming into the next round.

I think both the Game 7’s in he East are going to take a tool on whoever makes it out of the round and will get chomped away by their next opponent.

Lakers/Denver for the West.

I am so glad the Lakers did not have to go back to Utah for a possible game 6. This gives them a few more days of rest and I hope Luke Walton can come back quickly. Houston will be a tough opponent, never mind the past record and Portland has somewhat owned Lakers in Portland so it will be tough no matter what. Looking forward to the next matchup.

On the home front, the Sharks were a bust once more. I don’t know what it is about them in the regular season and what happens in the post season. They just do not work at the same intensity level as the regular season. Complacency? You betcha! Now my care level in the NHL is close to ZERO!

What a season F1 is having this year … who would have thought that at this point of the season Ferrari would have 0 points and Brawn, Red Bull and Toyota would be hogging the points!

My Fantasy F1 is taking a beating after finishing in the 97th percentile last year. Currently I am in 75th percentile. I know it is difficult to make that big a gap because the point differential between 1 and 8 is not too much, so I know the glory days are over.

I am now bummed that I took off Speed Channel from my cable package because this season would be fantastic to watch with pretty much ANYONE able to win on any given day.

Maybe having the IPL2 in South Africa was a blessing in disguise for us in the US? The games are at 3.30am and 7.30am Pacific time and I am able to watch a bit of it every day just before leaving for work and then just after reaching the office.

The games have been mostly good, and Rajasthan Royals have struggled a bit as defending champs. I was not happy to see Mumbai Indians' game getting rained out.

Still don’t know who the favorite is because T20 is so unpredictable. Delhi seems ok, but I do hope this is Mumbai’s year.

That would be great for him and a little boring for us :-)

I was actually looking forward to seeing some trades up at the top and stuff, but looks like the Lions have chosen their first pick as a QB. Hopefully now they will win a game next season …

All this is perhaps good news for Sanchez because that means he is the hot QB on the board now. Wonder if Seattle will take him. It would be good for him to sit out behind Hasselback like Carson Palmer did behind Jon Kitna.

I will be looking forward to seeing how the USC LB’s land up … there seems to be a lot of buzz around them but usually the buzz does not translate proportionately to pick numbers, so we’ll see!

As I read about the Conficker worm getting active again, I was virtually forced to put down the thoughts I had at the time around 4/1 when it was supposed to create havoc.

I started thinking, this is a fabulous marketing ploy from the security companies to boost their sales. Think about it, it had the perfect story - a security threat, there was time to react (buy security software), there was widespread media attention (awareness = more purchases) and of course the most brilliant part about it was that if on 4/1 nothing happens, the security companies could declare victory!

And that’s exactly what happened. Press releases went out from the security companies about how good their software was to stop Conficker. Of course, the other outcome was that if on 4/1 the worm hit, the security companies could easily spin it as not enough computers being protected. Quite convenient, right?

Did anyone else notice that 4/1 was just before quarter-end? It could not have been a better-timed situation!

And now today, we are back at it again. It may not be quarter-end, but the dormant worm story is perfect for security companies and the news is that the worm has gotten some new updates via P2P and that it is going to start downloading some keyloggers and such. Grreeeat.

What exactly has Texas Tech done to deserve #2 ranking besides beating then #1 Texas?

Let’s see the out of conference schedule - Eastern Washington (3-5 and not even Div 1), Nevada (5-4), Southern Methodist (1-8) and hold your breath, UMass (6-3 but in Div 1)!!

Granted that they were highly ranked and they beat then #1 but what was the justification before the Texas game to have them ranked so high?? Were there not enough teams with better resumes? Should teams start scheduling cupcakes so that they get to unbeaten records by October to justify a high ranking??

This is B.S. and I hope the people who rank teams week in and week out stop hyping up the Texas Tech train. They are absolutely overrated and they do not deserve to be so high up in the rankings.

Bring in what your arguments are … would love to discuss.

I just read the GMail Blog post about the temporary outage to some Gmail accounts this afternoon.

Among other things, they suggested that we go through the user group on Google groups.

Unfortunately, I have had very bad luck getting updates on my posts on various Google-run Google Groups. Has anyone posted to the Gmail group or for example the Blogger group? Hardly any responses to the many posts/questions I have asked there.

I reasoned to myself that I cannot expect much support because after all these are free services, but these services are taking over my work and personal life slowly. For example I have converted from my Outlook-based email setup to a completely web-based GMail setup. I went through the pain of migrating all my emails over to GMail and am happy that I don’t have to worry about multiple Outlook versions on multiple computers anymore and am always just one click (a few clicks, actually ;-) ) away from all my email.

But that means such outages and lack of responses to queries about the usage of certain features annoys me.

Anyone else in the same boat?