Showing posts with label Bing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bing. Show all posts

Tuesday 20 August 2013

Blue for You

This morning one of my favourite albums came into my mind , and I fancied posting a music video on Facebook. I thought a quick youtube search would return one of the songs I wanted , but no , no sign. Maybe it was because it was ten to seven and my bus was at seven. Then I got to thinking how much in life gets taken for granted. We expect the sunto rise and set , that's a given. We expect the light to come on when we press a light switch , we expect water to flow when we turn on the tap, we expect our buses and trains to turn up and deliver us safely to our destinations , when we get in our cars we expect it to fire up and go in whatever direction we point it. Anyway that the sort of deep stuff.

In relation to the internet we are used to searches returning us what we want , or at least something relevant (unless it's Bing or Ask,com). Then I remembered certain bands such as "A" and "!!!" (pronounced chk chk chk apparently) who are unsearchable on most search engines so you need to know exactly where you are going. The song I was thinking of was "Another Night Time Flight" from the eponymous album by Blue . You can sample it here. I was listening to the album on the way to work and posted a couple of comments asking iof people could get what I was listening to. Despite a few clues and one fairly close guess no one got it so I will be making a donation to St Catherine's Hospice unless someone has worked it out while I am writing this post. Their Wikipedia entry is here fronted by ex Marmalade guitarist Hugh Nicholson , so the answer is out . One of mine and the late John Peel's favourites. Well worth a listen.

No one guessed so , St Catherine's Hospice will get the donation.

Friday 7 June 2013

Windows 8 Maps and Scottish Pirate Metal

I'm still getting to grips with Windows 8 so this may be an unfair rant. One of the problems in building intuitive interfaces is that the user has to guess what the designer wants the user to do and the designer has to pre empt what the average user will do.

So I was presented with a map roughly centered on Newcastle , with a Bing logo in the bottom left hand corner (and we all know how rubbish Bing searches are) , so that doesnt bode well for the package. Eventually I discovered that a right click on the bottom of the screen brings up a menu with a directions button whicjh I selected , put it my start and destination post codes and it drew a blue line on the map....

...and that was it , no printed directions , no opportunity to put in detours. So went back to Google Maps and got what  I needed.

Anyway it's sunny, and I will we driving down despite having a cough , cold , maybe hayfever and feeling quite rubbish. This day in 1692 an earthquake destroyed Port Royal in Jamaica , a notorious pirate haven . Article here. This gives me the inspiration for todays June's Tunes , the Scottish Pirate Metal (how niche can you get)  band Alestorm