Katelyn M. Thompson’s Blog

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.“

Henry David Thoreau

“Never iron a four-leaf clover, because you don’t want to press your luck.”

– Unknown

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”

-Dwight Eisenhower

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.”

– Jim Rohn

I decided to do a 12 of 12 yesterday and I enjoyed it! Here’s my 12.

Yesterday I signed up to participate in the beta testing of the new geocaching.com Droid app. Oh, I recently purchased a Droid! I love having a smart phone, but I think that’s a post for another day. I’ve never participated in beta testing (officially). While at H&R Block I did a lot of bug finding/discovering, but I’ve never done anything in any “official role”. I’m excited to see what it entails and hopefully add something to the end product. I’m hoping to track the progress of my testing here.

Where do you go to learn the definition of a word? Where do you go if you don’t know how to spell a word? Mashable.com conducted a poll to find out what people do and it looks like an online dictionary is the way to go.

If I am looking for a definition, I usually go to Dictionary.com but if I need to spell something it’s usually either Microsoft Word or a Google search. I didn’t know that you could search “define:word” into Google. I have a feeling I’ll be using that more.

I’m sure you have seen the recent commercials for Bing, which is Microsoft’s new search engine. Basically they are a conversation between two people one of whom replies with random things, supposedly representing other search engines. Incase you haven’t seen them, here’s one:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0f8X_SOVjA]

Anywho, I was on my work computer listening to my Alanis Morissette station on Pandora. When up pops an acoustic version of “Ironic”. And I’m singing along belting my heart out and I hear “and then meeting his beautiful husband”. Now, I’m not completely sure, since I was saying “wife” at the time. Since you can’t skip via Pandora, I decided to investigate via search. I reluctantly open a new tab in the IE browser and use the search widget in the top right, where Microsoft has conveniently placed their Bing search engine. I typed [including quotes]: “its like meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful husband”. I am returned with nothing, nada, except suggestions including: “OH La La Pains” and “Pregnant Man“.

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Long story short… I woke up this morning to plan my caching run, and came to find the site down. Come to find out, there was a fire at the data center which resulted in water from the sprinklers disabling the power generators and knocking out power to the facilities. In addition to geocaching.com, bing travel [a Microsoft product] was down. Also, the local television channel is housed in the building. They had to begin broadcasting from a sister channel, and their 6 o’clock news did happen, however it was a little different.