The Decision Engine

Microsoft started a war that they had no business sticking their noses in, but which just might have an unexpected, positive outcome. I'm not talking about Microsoft versus Macintosh (now known as Mac or Apple), because in that case I'm not too sure who really started the war, and I prefer Microsoft anyways. No, I'm talking about the search engine war between Microsoft's Bing and Google.

Google wasn't the first major search engine - I'm sure everyone remembers Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. Google, I believe, was the first major engine after Yahoo, however, and it achieved greater success than all the previous search engines for one simple reason: even the slowest browser will load the Google page in just one second. Yahoo became littered with facts and news and email applications, but the page you get after typing google.com into the URL box consists of a simple logo on a white backdrop, a text box, and a few links to advanced options. When looking something up, Google users don't get distracted by flashy text or gifs or roll-over images.

Microsoft launched Bing in June, 2009, riding a bit on the popularity of Google (Much like how Microsoft jumped on the video game bandwagon with their Xbox after Sony and Nintendo and Sega). They advertised themselves as a 'decision engine', helping users make decisions fast and easy without the distractions other search engines had. Microsoft's previous search engine, Live Search, had been released two years earlier, so Bing is more of a glorified update than anything. Google had existed by this time for ten years, but had only recently become popular enough to get their name (A misspelling of the word googol) in the dictionary, and the timing to me seems to suggest that Microsoft, at this point, realized the monetary possibilities of a well-working search engine.

What's in a Nom de Plume?

That by which we call you, by any other name, would write just as well.

I kinda doubt many of you noticed, but as a blogger and avid writer, it is my job to blog about this anyways. I changed by pen name; it used to be Ginny Moon, but after some thought and soul-searching, I decided to shift it to Kenna Moon.

If you don't know me personally, you may not know that [Whatever] Moon is not my real name. Some people dislike the idea of writers using pen names, and I can understand why. It seems a bit insincere and places distance between the writer and the reader. I choose to use a pen name instead of my real name for a couple of reasons:

The Scarlet Bookmark

When I sit down to read a book - and I don't mean the physical act of sitting down to read a book, but the general mindset of choosing a book off the shelf and planning to read it - I feel tied to that particular book, like it's a movie playing in my head, and for the next few days I'll pause it often and get on with my life, but I don't want to have this paused scene from a movie stuck on my TV set all month. I have to finish the book. It's like any other task I might undertake, except that, like writing a blog post, I pick it up and continue with it every now and then, instead of getting it all done it one sitting.

It sounds like a chore when I put it in these terms, but I love reading, I really do. I really regret that I don't have enough time to read nowadays (Maybe I should cut back on Dragon Age), and I've already got a pile of books stacking up for when I finally finish what I'm working on now.

However, the worst part about loving to read, and not having enough time to read, is the inevitable feeling of infidelity. You know, those few times when you're halfway through one book and already have another one lined up, but whenever you have a chance to read you can't help thinking about how great the next book on your pile might be. It's not that the book you're reading now isn't great too, though occasionally that happens as well (Especially with school assignments - invariably, whatever you're assigned to read for class is a better read if you're reading it of your own free will). In my cases, the next book on my stack is something new I've just gotten, something I've been looking forward to or just bought because it sounded to great in the store.

I generally love whatever I'm reading at the moment, and I know that if I put it down to pick something else up, I'll lose the thread of plot and my interest as well, over time. So even if I'm excited for whatever's next on my list, I refuse to stop reading what I have at the moment, even if that means taking another few days to get through it. I feel unclean for thinking about putting the bookmark in prematurely and moving on to another story. I couldn't do that to the writer, or the publisher, or the characters.

Right now, I'm re-reading The Hobbit, because I was in an epic-fantasy mood and wanted to be ready before the movie comes out next year. I have a couple books planned after this, but nothing I'm explicitly excited for, so I can't say this is how I'm feeling right at this moment. I doubt I'm the only one who's ever felt this way, however, and I'll be looking forward to never having to go through all this again. Too many people just quit when things get a bit difficult and I don't want to be one of those people.

The Large-Tiny Phenomenon

I can't be the only one experiencing the phenomenon that is little tiny jump-drives. External drives in general are one matter, interesting and worth discussing here, but right now I'm specifically thinking about those small jump drives that stick out of your USB slot for an extended period of time.

Size, of course, is what really boggles our mind. Twenty years ago, it would have been pure herecy to think that a thumb-sized stack of techno-plates glued to the inside of a plastic shell would hold 4 billion bytes of data. If you had told a scientist that you could carry 4 million kilobytes of data around your neck while you danced uphill in the snow, they'd have tied you to the stake (But scientist understand how ironic it would be to burn you, and would have instead left you there in your underwear for all the other scientists to snigger at).

In fact, the first USB drive (as we think about them now) only came out in 2000. It held about five-times more data than the popular Floppy Disks, and in the next decade soon forced the floppy disk into a category of technology nobody aspires for: the obsolete.

And the original Trek ThumbDrive was only about a third of the size of the floppy disk!

Since then, USB drives have gotten smaller and smaller and able to hold more and more. My brother owns a medium-sized external drive, about half the size of his laptop, with a terabyte of data space. A whole terabyte! That's like, a thousand gigabytes (which is, of course, a thousand megabytes, and so on)!! Of course, that counts as an external drive, not a jump drive, but about a year or so ago, I picked up a tiny jump drive at Staples that's about the size of my thumb-nail, and not even as thick as my pinky (this includes the protective metalic case, which is only a touch larger then the storage plates). The whole thing holds four gigabytes of data space, or 1000 songs.

I have to admit that, as a child born in a last years of the 20th century, I'm a bit used to the idea of technology increasing in leaps and bounds. However, even I can look back and see the progress of just the last decade, and compare it to any other decade in history, and recognize the exponential increase.

I do have a little problem with my amazingly large-tiny jump drives. I like to keep the bulk of my data stored there, in case our computer blows up or is magnetized or stomped on by Roman Centurians. Which means I somehow end up leaving my thumbnail-sized jump drive where I don't expect it, and can't see it, and spend all night worrying about the project due the next day that I'll have to completely redo. I guess with every technological advancment, there are pros and cons.

Late Night Talk Shows

I watched Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday night/Thursday morning, because a certain web-show producer/actress I follow was going to be on with him, talking about her new project. I set our new TV DVR to record the show just in case I went to bed and forgot, but by 12:00 when I was still awake playing a video game on my computer, I decided I could catch it as it aired (especially since I got to sleep in an hour the next morning).

I've never actually seen one of those late night comedy/talk shows before. Sure, I might have seen clips or s few seconds as I flipped channels, but I've never actually purposely stayed up to watch them. If I'm going to be staying up late, it's because I'm doing something, like watching a movie or studying or playing video games. I never get bored enough and decided not to go to bed but to instead turn the TV on. Except for the five serials I follow, the TV tends to be turned off if I have a choice (Sometimes my mom will turn on Home and Garden or the Discovery channel, and my dad likes to watch a TON of old movies).

So I'm a bit confused as to who actually does watch these late night shows. Sure, people who sleep all day and are only awake at night, or people who get to sleep in really late and don't mind staying up until 2:00, or people who don't mind getting five hours of sleep daily or - wait, doesn't that really limit your audience, and the type of people in your audience?

Maybe I'm being biased here. Maybe a lot of stay-at-home moms watch these late night shows, or honest hardworking citizens who go to sleep really early and wake themselves up specifically for the show. But I kind of doubt it. I don't want to sound judgmental, but it seems to me that the majority of people who watch these shows regularly are either dark, depressing people who never sleep, or they just have no life.

I found my experience with Jimmy Fallon kind of... interesting. I had the sound down most of the time (because there were people trying to sleep in this house), so I didn't catch everything he said, but he didn't seem too crass or vulgar, and his interview with Felicia Day was pretty funny. I'll probably still steer away from those shows, however, because I like sleeping, and I prefer shows that appeal to a non-sleep-deprived audience. Keep truckin', though, late night comedy/talk show hosts, because if anything you say is good enough, it'll end up on the internet anyways.

Cellular Interference

My mom bought me a cell phone at the beginning of last semester, because, with me taking her's to class, there was no way for us to get a hold of each other. I've never been particularly interested in owning a cell phone, but it does come in handy occasionally, so I keep it on me. She doesn't text, so she decided not to include unlimited texting on our joined plan. We've been careful not to text each other or anyone else unless it was necessary.

About a week or so after I got the phone, I got a mysterious text from someone whose number I did not recognize, but who acted like they knew me. I figured it was a wrong number, but over the course of the semester I received more texts and phone calls from the same number, along with a few other numbers, from people apparently typing in the wrong number. One message left for me was from some guy who obviously meant to get a hold of his girlfriend.

I don't know about you, and maybe guys are different, but if I was going out with someone, their number would be in my phone's contact book. If I have a reason to call someone more than once, their number's going to be saved in my phone, so I can just type in their name when I'm sending a text or even calling them for a conversation. Since this guy was obviously trying to call his girlfriend, why didn't he just pull her name up from his contacts list, instead of typing it in from memory and risking accidentally calling someone else?

This happened a couple of times in the first few months after getting my phone, but luckily not often enough for it to really bother me. I brushed it off as some poor fool who will probably stop mis-typing my number in a few months because he wont be going out with that girl for much longer. However, my interest was tickled, and I imagined myself texting this wrong number back, pretending I was in fact his girlfriend and breaking up with him, or doing something else to upset their relationship earlier than it normally would have been.

I didn't, though, because I'm a nice person. When he texted me on Christmas, and I forced myself not to reply that we were through.

It's probably a good thing I didn't, though. It would make an interesting story idea, and I haven't gotten a text from this number since then. Either he finally put her number in his contacts, or they didn't need my help to break things off.

(I hope this doesn't make me a bad person - everyone dreams of punishing people for silly mistakes, right? Right?)

Twenty Something

This may seem a bit inconsequential to some of you, but I assure you this is a problem that desperately needs to be fixed. As you might be able to guess, I'm referring to blatant use of the term "two-thousand..." when stating the date - as in, 'two-thousand ten, two-thousand eleven, two-thousand twelve.' While it's true that, in this new century, the full number that represents the year isn't ten syllables long (Unlike one-thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine), we should still be mindful of the number of unnecessary syllables.

I was born in the early 90s, and like everyone born before the year 2000, I got used to shortening the year-date into two numbers - Nineteen and Ninety-five, or ninety-six or whatever (Of course, we never actually said the 'and' part). I remember thinking it was a bit strange, until I tried saying the year as one number - One thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-seven is WAY too much to say in one go. (However, in my French classes we were always taught to say the whole number, as if the French actually take the time to pronounce all that whenever they're giving the date. Still not sure if this is true.)

That's why the next decade was a bit strange, because there is no way to shorten two-thousand or two-thousand one (Unless you want to say 'twenty-zero' and 'twenty-oh-one', but that just sounds ridiculous). It didn't take extremely long to get used to however, and I think everyone will agree that we got pretty used to saying 'two-thousand nine' by the time it rolled around.

However, there's a serious problem with saying 'two-thousand ten'. If we get used to saying 'two-thousand ten', then we'll be saying 'two-thousand thirteen', and eventually 'two-thousand twenty' and 'two-thousand fifty-six' and so on. IT'LL NEVER END. Whatever we start with, we'll have to keep up, to keep face. Our kids, hearing us say 'two-thousand thirty', will say 'two-thousand sixty-four' to their kids, who'll say 'two-thousand ninety-three' to their kids, and a hundred years from now everyone will be saying 'two-thousand one-hundred eleven' like the FRENCH.

You may think this is ridiculous, that having experienced the twentieth century we'd never start saying the whole date out like that, but that's just the point - we wouldn't be! Who among us is going to be living for another hundred years? It'll be our kids, and our kids' kids, who, having heard our pronunciation their whole lives, wont think to revert back to the lesser-syllable version.

And I assure you, the lesser-syllable version is far superior. I love the English language, in part because it's open, always changing and shifting to make it easier for the speakers to communicate. That's why our non-living nouns don't have genders, it's why most people don't pronounce the 'h' in 'wh' words (even though the 'hw' pronunciation is technically more correct) and why we pronounce 'Colonel' as 'Kernul (Try saying 'Col-oh-nel' in a sentence a lot, and you'll see why the pronunciation changed over time. I'm personally against this one, however - I'll pronounce it the way it's spelled, thank you very much).

That's why we invented 'ten twenty' when 'a thousand and twenty' got to be too hard to say. We haven't had a reason to challenge the shorter pronunciation, which cuts down anywhere from 1-5 syllables from our speech, until now. 'Two-thousand ten' isn't far off from 'Twenty-ten', but it's enough to cut a syllable, and if you can cut anything out, and still keep the same meaning, then you're a winner.

Please, if you're one of those grammar nazies who insists on pronouncing everyone they was they did in during the Renaissance, do not procreate. Our language is evolving, changing, because people are still speaking it. That's how languages work. The responsibility of a fluent English speaker is to communicate as effectively as possible, and if that means cutting out sounds or syllables, creating portmanteaus, or adopting words from other languages, by all means (Just try not to slur your words - the point is to increase communication, not baby-babble).

This year is 'Twenty Eleven', and in a year it'll be 'Twenty Twelve', and the sooner we figure that out, the sooner we can focus on some more important problems facing us today.

The Great Water Voyage

On Tuesday, after my classes were over, I headed over to the Westfield Shopping Center to get lunch in the food court (I spent Lunch clocking an hour at the Language Lab as homework. We have to do an hour a week T_T). I always go to the same mom-and-pop Chinese Food place, and I try not to spend very much money, so I normally only get a Chicken/Vegetable/Rice bowl and nothing to drink. Usually I don't mind, but today I had about an hour to kill, so I decided to explore the mall to find cheap or free water.

My explorations started and mostly took place on the upper level of the mall - on the ground level, the walkways are cluttered with kiosks and kiosk managers trying to con you into buying something from them. It's a scary, scary place, fraught with gunfire and dying soldiers and their crying, terror-stricken families. You do not go down the the ground level of the mall unless you need to.

So, I took two laps around the upper level of the mall, searching for a public water fountain. Every twenty yards or so there are water coolers with water bottles, sodas and power drinks, but they cost $1.50, which is 50 cents more than I'm willing to pay, and I'm always afraid those vending machines will eat my money and leave me empty-handed. After one lap, I still didn't see a single public water fountain - you know, the kind that are free.

When I went around again, I was more meticulous, checking all the nooks and crannies and probably weirding some people out. Finally, in front of Sears, hidden from view off to the side by some maintenance doors, I found the elusive free public drinking water. There were two fountains, one higher than the other (as they usually come). I stress again that they're hidden from view - unless you're in Sears, looking out, or heading into the maintenance hallway, you cannot see them, but they're not marked 'employees only', so they're obviously meant to be for shoppers use.

Those were the only fountains I saw on the upper level, and begrudgingly I headed down into the battlefield. I wont expound on that terrifying experience, but I found one more set of public fountains, directly below the others up-stairs. Throughout the entire interior of the mall, there are only two public drinking fountain stations, both easily accessible but hidden from sight.

On a suggestion from my mom, I headed into JCPenny and Macy's after Thursday's classes. She had said that those stores, the two major chains and 'cap' stores (located at each end of the mall), probably had water fountains inside somewhere near the bathrooms (I didn't go into any of the stores Tuesday, because most are too small to have room for a public fountain, except for Barnes and Noble, which a few months ago replaced their drinking fountains with a pretty table).

Turns out she was right - if you know where you're looking, both JCPenny and Macy's have drinking fountain stations hidden in their bathroom alcoves, only visible to people who have to use the bathroom (or, like me, were pretending to).

Assuming there aren't another set of bathrooms/fountains in one of the chain stores, there are only four sets of free public drinking water fountains in the entire mall, all of which are hidden from view. Now, as far as I can tell, there's no law requiring public buildings to provide free and relatively clean water to people, but given that water in a basic necessity to survive, I think there should be.

Let this be a warning to everyone out there - if you have access to clean, free water, take advantage of it. Here in the desert, water out of the tap is not only naturally cleaner than most of the country, but also tastes delicious (so I've heard - I haven't actually tasted much tap water outside the Coachella Valley, but it's definitely better than that chlorinated stuff you get in pre-sealed water bottles. Blegh). If we let our schools, parks, and public buildings get rid of all our free water, we'll be paying $5 a day just to drink second-rate well water that companies pretend to scoop from 'natural springs'.

Daughter After Dentist

I had three cavities filled this week, and three last week. While it's true I do eat a lot of chocolate, that wasn't the reason; apparently, I have naturally deep teeth. Or at least, I did.

I went in to the dentist's a couple weeks ago for a check-up. I hadn't gone to the dentist's in a long while, and this was also my first time as an adult (I got to sign my own papers!). According to Mom, most adult go to the dentist's twice a year for a teeth cleaning, which seems a bit pointless to me, but as long as I'm still on her insurance I'll let her pay for whatever she wants to. This would be the first of my biannual visits, to get me familiarized with the system.

As they were taking X-rays and checking my teeth, the dentist noticed that they were very deep. I'm not really sure what that means, but it can't be too rare because he said his children had that too, along with one of my older brothers (Side note: I have four). He said it was a problem, and that they'd have to fill them in.

I guess I can see why it might be a problem, logically, but I also kind of felt proud of myself for being naturally different. Can't a girl feel proud about something? We made dates to get them filled right away, but part of me thought 'hey, do I get a say in this? Can we just skip this?' However, not being the paid professional, I deferred to his judgment.

So, last Wednesday they filled three teeth on one side. They're in the far back, so it's not extremely noticeable, but for about half a week my bite felt just the slightest bit lop-sided. On Monday, they finally filled in the other side, along with replacing an old silver crown that my pediatric dentist gave me years back with a temporary porcelain one (I go back in a couple weeks to get my final crown set on).

Several years back (I must've been around 12-15), I had a root canal, and these two experience were pretty much the same. They numbed the whole half of my jaw with a large scary needle (that I could luckily only half see), and poked and prodded at for quite a while. With the fillings, it only took about a half hour - for the root canal, it took two [exhausting] hours.

For anyone who's never had major dental work done, let me set your mind straight - except for the initial injection of painkiller, I felt pretty much nothing. For all I knew, they just kept pushing on my teeth. That's what made the root canal so exhausting - I lay there for two hours, trying desperately to stay awake while strange people in surgical masks messed with my mouth. Maybe I just have good luck with my dentists, but if you're feeling a lot of pain during your dentist visits, you should probably switch dentists.

Anyway, now my teeth are no longer deep. I guess that's great. Unfortunately, I have to go back this summer to get my wisdom teeth out. Wish me luck!

Superbowl Weekend

You probably knew that Superbowl was on Sunday. I found out because of Facebook.

In all honesty, I don't really care for Superbowl. Sports in general interest me very little, and American Football almost least of all (I wont rank every sport in my mind). There are few professional non-American teams - not that I hate American-only sports, but that fact just makes the sport seem so small-time to me - and the game itself just doesn't seem that appealing; at least with most other sports, there's a lot of action, but American Football feels to me a lot like hitting every red light on your way to work.

So when Superbowl starts popping up on TV and Facebook, I think to myself, 'Oh, is it that time of year again?' Then one Saturday evening, there are a ton of people at Stater Bros buying potato chips, and the next day on Facebook everyone's talking about funny commercials and how Christina Aguilera messed up the National Anthem. Oh, was that today?

I don't mean to sound demeaning to everyone who lives for Superbowl; I love how people can rally together positively. I'm just not interested in that sort of thing. So I'll get the score from four or five fans on Facebook, who'll probably inform me indirectly of any highlights from the game as well, and be satisfied.

Happy Superbowl Weekend, everybody! As of me writing this, I don't know who won (I'm writing this Sunday night - I'll log back on Facebook in a few minutes and find out), so I hope it was your team! If your team wasn't even playing, then I hope they have a good season next year!

WORLD OF WARCRAFT

I'll just jump right in here, since the title of this blog is a bit self-explanatory.

In 2004, Blizzard Entertainment released their Warcraft-universe MMORPG (Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). This wasn't their first Warcraft game - the series had started a decade earlier - but it was their first MMO, and somehow they hit it off big. World of Warcraft (Abbreviated as WoW) is the number one most subscribed MMO in the world, with major expansions and minor updates coming out frequently to keep the experience fresh for users.

It's a pay-to-play type of game (Quite a few other MMOs on the internet are free, with users paying for additional content so the company can support themselves), so when I first started to understand what World of Warcraft was, I wasn't very interested in joining. Not that it didn't sound pretty cool, but my parents have always held a policy of letting us play whatever video games we wanted, as long as we paid for them ourselves, and it wasn't worth it to me to work up the monthly subscription fee when I could get the same experience playing Diablo II, which my brothers had bought (One of my favorite games as a kid, also by Blizzard, and ESRB-rated M, though I don't remember anything in it being creepy or gory at all).