Bing

Bing: The name of Microsoft's new search engine.

Now, while I love Google, Bing has some things to offer that Google doesn't. Bing has a more user-friendly feel to it. Everytime I visit www.bing.com, it has a very cool feeling to the page. They also change the background image, I believe once every day. They also have little pop-up boxes that you can click on that have little tid-bits of information about the image.

As for searching, when you search for something, you can roll your mouse over the right side of each result to get a small preview of what the site contains. On the left side of the results are related searches that you can click to also view.

I also like how they have their image search set up, it's pretty neat. The images are all displayed in the middle of the window until you click on one. The webpage that the image is on will open within Bing, but the image results from your search will still be displayed on the left side of the screen, so you can look through them if you would like to.

Something amazing that they have done, is their video search. They results display in the same way as images do. However, whenever you scroll your mouse over the video, it plays small portions of the video, so you can check it out without actually going to the page the video is on. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

Bing is also trying to be very useful for shopping, finding businesses, or travel information. It will display product reviews while shopping. When searching for restaurants, if you click on maps, it will show locations of each restaurant, along with an address, a phone number, and a link to click on to get directions. For travel, Microsoft is implementing a tool that will try to predict whether or not fares will go up or down in the near future.

Bing has a lot to offer and I have been quite impressed. I have been trying to use it more often, but when I need to search for something, I very often find myself still going to Google because it has been ingrained in my head for so long. While many people are very familiar with Google or hate change and won't want to check Bing out, I suggest that you take a few minutes to go there and explore. Go ahead, just check it out: Bing!

Vacation and update

The weekend of July 4th, Heaven, Noelani, and I had gone to Chicago for a small vacation. We were up there for three days and had quite a bit of fun. We visited the aquarium, Field Museum, planetarium, and Sears Tower. We also had to stop at American Girl for Heaven so she could look at all of the dolls and take about a million pictures of everything there. We also watched the fireworks display that the city had on July 3rd. We walked just about everywhere to save some money, which made it take forever to get places and tired us out a lot, especially when pushing a stroller or carrying a little baby girl around. Whew!

While we did have a lot of fun, I didn't really like Chicago as a city. All the places that we visited were fun, but quite a bit of people seemed really rude, especially the drivers and the traffic control people. For your amusement, here's a picture of Noelani in her baby sunglasses being really cool when we were in Chicago.

As for Noelani, she's been doing great. She's getting quite a bit stronger. She can hold her body weight up on her legs as long as we have a hold of her to keep her balanced and she has been able to lift up her head and upper body really well when she's laying on her stomach.

Noelani is also being more vocal and "talking" to us. She's also laughed several times instead of just smiling and giggling, which is really cute. I have to brag about that because she laughed the first time for Daddy. She's definately a Daddy's girl. :)

As for me, I've been looking for a job. I have four more weeks left of school before I graduate, so I've been a little stressed with not having a job lined up yet. Where I get a job will determine where we move. We're pretty open about location, so whatever we think is going to be the best for us, we'll most likely take it. However, if I don't get a job soon after I graduate, we won't be able to stay where we are now because of rent and living costs, so it looks like we'd have to move in with Heaven's grandparents, which I wasn't really wanting to do. Even if I do get a job in Lafayette/West Lafayette, we're going to move out of our mobile home. It's just too small for the three of us and all of our stuff, so we'll have to find something bigger.

I'm hoping and praying that things turn out well and that I get a job offer as soon as I can. I've been applying to quite a few places, so hopefully I'll hear back from some of them soon. But, if anyone knows anywhere that's looking for an IT guy to hire... give me a heads up!

I'll leave y'all with one last picture of Noelani.

Google Chrome OS

Hey all! Sorry for not making a post in a while. Not too much had been going on and I was being a little lazy.

So, if you haven't heard the news, Google announced today that they are going to release their own Operating System called Chrome OS, threatening the leader in the OS market, Microsoft. They said that it is going to be lightweight, quick to start, and open-source. For those of you who are not that tech savvy, open-source means that it is free and the source code is open to the public.

Google released a web browser in September 2008 called Google Chrome. Chrome ran faster then most browsers and focused on using cloud computing, which is where resources are used through the internet instead of on your computer. Chrome OS is going to use these features extensively. Instead of being focused on using your computer to do everything, it is going to run most applications from the cloud.

This is very eye-catching for me and I definately look forward to it coming out. Google is saying that they are going to release it in the second half of 2010, so we still have a wait. But when it comes out, I'm sure I'm going to try to get a computer to install it on.

However, even though this does look like it is going to be a big leap for Operating Systems, one of my co-workers asked this in his blog: Will it really make that huge of a difference? Especially against Microsoft. While it may be free, so is Linux and it doesn't have that much ground in the OS war. I think that Chrome OS will be a big deal, but mostly for people like me. The Geeks.

Summer Semester

So, most everyone should know that I have to take one summer class so that I can graduate this August. And the class that I am taking is French 101. Last week was the first week of classes. I have class every day of the week. Lecture is Monday - Friday, an extra lecture on Tuesday, and then a lab on Friday (why do you need to go to lab for French, I'm still not sure...)

My first class in French was pretty crazy. Our professor is from an African country and has a strong accent. Most of the time that he talked was in French, which didn't help me because I didn't know any French, and I'm not much of a "learn through immersion" person. He doesn't seem to explain things or give definitions much, which would be nice. The very first class he asked us to say our name and where we were from, but he didn't tell us how to say so in French, which I thought was ridiculous, but the first student he asked knew how to, so everyone seemed to just repeat what he said.

Since then it's gotten a little better, but I'm still not really keen on the class. Plus French is just a crazy language. They like to put letters in their words that they don't even say (mainly the letter 'T' that I've seen so far).

I just hope that the semester goes by fast and I get a good grade. Besides, all I need to graduate is get a 'C' in the class, so hopefully, I should be good to go!