Never thought I'd have a legitimate reason to call 112 (the European equivalent of 911), but I just did. About an hour ago (4 am or so), I went for an early morning walk... or rather a late night one as I couldn't sleep. Roughly halfway, I noticed what looked like a large bonfire in another street. This turned out to be a conifer hedge on fire. Read more
The first week of my search experiment is over. For the past week, I've used Teoma as my primary search engine. Teoma (pronounced "chawmuh", although I really can't bring myself to say it that way) took a page from Google's book and adopted a minimalist interface while using sophisticated context-aware algorithms to rank pages. About a year after founding, Teoma was acquired by Ask Jeeves and it is now the technology behind Ask and related sites, all owned by IAC Search & Media. Read more
Having been online since the mid '90s, I've used a variety of search engines. Even back then, the web was too large to find the stuff you needed quickly, so search engines played an important role in day to day internet use. I used AltaVista when it was still hosted at digital.com, Yahoo and Webcrawler, which integrated results from multiple search engines. With the exponential growth of the web, these search engines have become even more essential today. I think it was in 2000 when a colleague of mine told me about this little-known engine that was no-frills, fast and yielded great search results. It was called Google. For nearly 10 years, Google has been my primary search engine and I've never really been dissatisfied with it. Simply put, they do a terrific job at search. Read more
I've been working a lot on the site structure lately and it is now time to make a few changes in the presentation department as well. The orange design this site had until just now dated back at least 6 years and was beginning to look rather dated. Read more
Earlier this month, I expressed my frustration at Activision pulling the plug on fan-made The Silver Lining, a previously officially sanctioned sequel to Sierra's famous King's Quest games. I'm not the only one outraged by this, and several efforts are underway by the fan community to get Activision to change their mind. There is an online petition that can use your help and a letter- and e-mail writing campaign is also in progress. I've taken part and hope you will join in too. Read more
