So, there have been commercials lately for the latest search enging - bing.com.  Given that I spent 18 years doing research and have gone through the evolution of many search engines, I thought I would check it out today.

Now, mind you, these days I only keep TWO search engines on my "Favorites" list: Alta Vista and Google.  Google is more sensitive to general pop culture flow when searching, but Alta Vista remains more fine tuned when looking for specific things.  Google tends to feed me pages of index pages when I'm searching something specific (scientific or historical, for instance), whereas Alta Vista tends to list specific sites devoted to or mentioning my search object.

So, between the two of those, I haven't really needed another search engine.  Dogpile never did it for me, and Ask.com - well, their own pages are so loaded with advertising and pop-ups it annoys me into avoiding it.

Anyway, I decided to give Bing.com a try, testing searches for "ScribblerWorks" and for "Sarah Beach".

VERY interesting results.

For "ScribblerWorks" it did indeed turn up my main pages and blogs with that name on them.  Good.  It also turned up listings for those who have a link to my site on their one sites/blogs. Hmm, good.  It turned up post responses that have that either as my screenname or my email address included. Interesting.  And because of that last aspect (that it tracks the @scribblerworks.us as well), I also found a copy of the Press Release for The Scribbler's Guide to the Land of Myth on a press release site. Very good - as I had not actually seen a copy of it out in circulation (paid for it, and approved the copy, but not actually seen it posted anywhere).

When I searched "Sarah Beach", right on the first page were two listings on Facebook for other Sarah Beaches -- I expected that, which is why I put my middle name in when I registered on Facebook.  That upped my "Sarah Beach" awareness by another two people.  Then I also found a Sarah Beach who does professional graphic design (and apparently has the SAME middle initial as I do!), and a Sarah Beach in San Diego who does copy writing apparently.  (What is it with "Sarah Beach" - we seem to have a high percentage of artists or writers or both!)

I have only skimmed through the other features of Bing (and not registered yet).  But it has a LIVE map reflecting freeway traffic as part of it's offerings, and that is one thing that's really useful, especially in Los Angeles.  So, I went ahead and added it to my "Favorites" list.  I'll continue exploring it, but so far, it looks very promising. 

Just thought I'd throw this preliminary recommendation out there.

No, I'm not actually going to talk about a hokey mythology movie.  Perhaps I should have titled this "Clash of the Corporate Overlords".

Spring and Cogent are clashing over peer connectivity -- since late yesterday.

This had a profound effect on my usual daily internet routines.  You see... my domains, and my email accounts that are tied to the main domain, are hosted on PowWeb, which uses Cogent.  However, the broadband card for my laptop is from Sprint, so I access the internet most often through Sprint.

Up till now, I have not given any thought to the fact that what I view as the monolithic SINGULAR "Internet" is in fact lots and lots of smaller systems who just talk to each other A LOT.

What happened last night is that Sprint disconnected from Cogent.  So, if you use Sprint to access the Internet, ANY site carried by Cogent was lost.  It might be out there, but you'd have no way of getting to it.  I didn't know that last night, so it was puzzling when I was chatting by IM with a friend, and he said "No, your site is still there, as are these others from PowWeb."  It was only this morning that I learned that the problem wasn't with PowWeb itself but these two other companies.

I don't really care what the issues are between Sprint and Cogent, who is in the right, who is being greedy, who is just throwing their weight around.  What I do care about is that their little spat has the power to disrupt my ability to communicate conduct my own business.  Right now, because of the clash, if I wanted to update my website (which I'd prefer to do on my secured Sprint network access) I would not be able to do it.  Oh, I could do it over an unsecured WiFi... but that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in me.

Now, I use Sprint for my cell phone and my broadband card.  But if this spat continues, I may have to rethink that contract.  Not only my website, but a couple of others (at least that I know of) are hosted on PowWeb, and I've been very satisfied by their services.  They say they are trying to figure a way around this problem (to which they are NOT a party), but who knows if they'll find a solution.  So it starts turning back to Sprint.  After all, Sprint is the one that CUT the connection.  And I've had slight problems with Sprint on other things. For instance, did you know that emailing your pictures from your cellphone counts as Internet bandwidth usage, and is NOT covered by your "picture email" charges? I discovered this when I was charged an additional $70 for bandwidth usage -- because I'd emailed a number of picture emails from my cell phone (an unusual occurance).  I was stunned, because the wording for the services said that picture email was "unlimited".  Ha!

So, anyway, you can see that I might be disinclined to view Sprint's side of the dispute favorably.

On the upside -- for me -- I still have AT&T DSL on my tower PC, and my laptop can use WiFi access without the Sprint card, and can get to my PowWeb email boxes that way.  But it does mean, I'm probably floating on someone else's stream using the WiFi.

This whole problem strikes me as very, very wrong.  And I hope it gets changed fast.  I feel that Internet access should be like telephone access.  Parts of it should NOT be cut off from other parts, just because providers are having business clashes.  I think of some folks stuck out in the countryside who have only ONE way of accessing the Internet, and they use it for their livelihoods and their very connection to the rest of humanity.  What if they were in the situation I was - most of their email on one provider, but access from a different provider?  But if they had no other options for getting around the cut-off.  Like I said, I have two options - a DSL line from a third provider not involved with either, or riding on "free" wireless networks.  Not every one else is going to have those options.

Well, since I've been informed by BookSurge that my book, The Scribbler's Guide to the Land of Myth, is FINALLY at the "print ready" stage, I figured it was time for tme to get the books own website up and running, instead of having the domain point to my ScribberWorks site.

Oi vey.

Really. I DON'T know what I'm doing.  I just know the results I want, and intuit how it ought to be possible to do.
( A truly horrific cyber-adventure follows! Gruesome, awful, frightening! )

I've been running two computers, sort of.  My old tower that wasn't up to handling a lot of the Java script on the internet, but was fine for printing out PDF files that got emailed, and handling sundry other things.  In fact, I liked to turn it on to log onto AIM while doing regular surfing on the laptop.

And then something got screwed up today.  

It really sucks sometimes, this internet thing.

Last night, I wasn't able to log into my webmail provider.  So I checked my webhosting service -- turns out they were having a major server problem.  But at least at that time, my website itself was accessible.  And they said they were working on it.

I had such hopes this morning!  I got to try and log into my webmail ... and not even the log-in screen is available (it was last night).  Worse than that, the website for the hosting provider itself was unavailable, so it's not there to even check for updates on the progress of solving the problem.  

This is going to be a long day, if they can't get it fixed quickly.  All my basic email addresses are run through my domain (I do have a couple of back-ups elsewhere, but I try not to use them much). *sigh*

On the other hand.... I've had my domain and webmail with them for about three years, and this is the first time there's been a problem of this size.

But it really is a bother.

UPDATE:

Whew! Back up and running.  But it's almost surprising how tied I've become to having that access.  It's not so much that I check every hour on the hour every day. I don't. On weekends, I might go a whole day without checking email.  But somehow, knowing I DON'T AND CAN'T have access is a real pain.  I'm addicted to the possibility of being that connected and accessible.  Aren't humans weird creatures?

So I got my new laptop -- a Vaio. It's a nice machine. But getting the Microsoft Office authorized, when you haven't set up a wireless connection for the computer yet... that's tricky. In fact, it's a downright bother. Which means, I can't use the programs I want yet.

However, I am getting hooked on "InkBall". ("Ooooo! New game!")

Learning how to live with a touch pad too... that's weird. And the flat keyboard. And the fact that laptops run hot (no built in fan, of course!). And now I have to figure out whether or not I can continue using the PC for updating my website, since the over-full C Drive won't let me do much. I'm suspecting that I'll have to switch that task to the new machine. Decisions, decisions. Well... I'm not deciding today. But I'm sorting out my options.

In the meantime, I have jury duty on Monday. Except that I have to find the jury summons, with that crucial juror number on it. It arrived before I went to Houston for my mother's funeral. And I know I took it out of my shoulder bag before the trip and put it in that proverbial "safe place". So safe, I can't remember where. It's certainly not the "usual places". I've gone through the papers in those locations, discovered a handful of this month's bills (oops), and some older things (like a staff photo from our location shoot in New York for the Masters Tournament at Radio City in 2002). But not the jury summons. Maybe it's in the coffee table piles.

Hey ho. So, of course, instead of seriously looking for it, I'm whiling away time online.

Next up... that fragment I found the other night.

So, my custom built PC is getting a bit cranky in its old age (I got it in January 2000). And I knew I was going to be investing in a laptop before the end of the year as a "second car", as it were. It looks like the time has come.

Part of my problem with the PC is that the hard drive when it was originally partitioned gave the smallest space to the C Drive. And now (because I wasn't paying attention to what was being loaded to it in recent years), there's no space on the C Drive. Not even enough for me to run PartitionMagic to repartition and give the C Drive some of the unused gigs from the other partitions! How's that for a laugh? (Surely there's some way to run PartitionMagic from my D Drive, but I haven't had the time yet to figure that out.)

The trusty beast is, aside from this lack of space in the C Drive thing, actually still quite functional. I don't load it with lots of MP3 files or games or huge graphics files. But, (1) it's not mobile, and (2) there are online things it doesn't want to deal with anymore. I suspect some of the online drag with it is due, again, to that C Drive problem, but at a certain point, me, a mere computer user and not a geek, I don't want to futz with it anymore. 

It's almost a little insidious the way technology worms its way into our lives and makes itself important. At Mythcon this last summer, it really hit me. In the past ("Ah, the good old days!") attendees would arrive at Mythcon and happily shut out the world, enjoying the time almost as if we'd escaped to the land of Faerie. But this year, the site had an internet access room with terminals for attendees to use. And dang, if in the mornings there weren't four of us in there (only four terminals) checking email and minor things online! Addicted! Likewise cell phones. Once you give into these things, it becomes hard to deal without them.

So, anyway.... I'm about to bleed out some moola for a laptop. A good one. I will, alas, have to learn how to contend with Vista. And I have to talk to my cell provider, to get a wireless card for the laptop. And figure out what new programs I'll be adding to my tools (Photoshop looks like it's taking the lead - I'd like to do better graphics work than what currently shows up with my poetry on my website). And then there's learning to make the two machines to talk to each other. Jolly times.

I'll gripe and complain in the process of making these transitions, and learning new programs. But really, no, I do NOT want to go back to the days of scraped vellum and boiled ink and goosefeather quill pens. Absolutely not. Why? NO SPELLCHECK! That's why! ;)