Author: way0utwest

I tried out Bing’s new visual search after seeing a few people note it on Twitter. I was a little excited to try it, thinking that it might help me to find images for the editorials easier.

It didn’t, and I was disappointed. I thought that this short review in PC Week summed it up. It just doesn’t work well, and the best quote:

Yet after every search trial I always come back to Google, because it works.

I tried typing something in, but that brought me back to the regular search. I clicked “TV Shows”, looking for images from Leverage, but I couldn’t make out detail in the images. Too many to look through, and too slow. I found myself looking up at the search box for the words as I moused over

I’ve given Yahoo and Live chances, and each time they just don’t do a better job. So why should I switch? I haven’t used Bing a lot, but unless it improves on Google significantly, why should I switch?

What I want

I’d use a visual search if it made things easier. What I’d like in visual search is a combination of meta data and breadcrumbs to narrow things down. If I search for “flower”, then give me some options on the side like Amazon does. Let me pick from

• Media (books, movies, pictures)
• Red, pink, white, red, or even “more red” or “less red” (or other colors)
• natural, in stores
• people

Then let me click those to narrow down the images I want. I can scan images quickly if I’m trying to narrow things down or find some type of image.

If someone could make search for better, I’d try it, but so far Google does the job.

The more I think about this, the more I think it should be built into SQL Server as a default. Why not ask for the information to create an operator and email at install and then create a few nice default alerts, like one for which log is full.

It’s such a common problem, why not get people to enable DBMail and enter their email address during installation? For the people that really need to lock down their servers, they could skip it, but for the average person, it might save some headaches if they knew when their log was 80% full.

If you want the general steps for creating an alert, it’s on MSDN.

I started watching Leverage this season, after it was recommended by Wil Wheaton (blog/twitter). For those of you that don’t know Wil, he is an actor and writer, best known by me for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I had been working my way through Seasons 1, 2, and 3 while running this year and started following him on Twitter.

He talked a bunch about Leverage over the summer, where he was a guest in one of the episodes. I was hoping he’d be in more, but his excitement while shooting the show got me to tune in, and I’m hooked. I record it every week on my TiVo and bought the first season so I could watch it while running.

What does this have to do with Vegas?

Nothing really, but the characters on Leverage are thieves, and con artists, and it entertains me. So when looking for some new books to read, I plugged in "grifters" and "con artists" in Amazon and came up with a few by James Swain.

He has a series of novels starring Tony Valentine, who tries to catch those people that a ripping off casinos. There’s the Vegas tie-in 🙂

I’ve read a couple of them, Mr. Lucky and Grift Sense, and am working on the third. I’m not much of a gambler, but I enjoy reading about it and sleight of hand entertains me immensely.

That’s my preparation for Vegas, and SQL Connections. That, and picking out a few sessions to attend.

I noticed that the keys on my laptop were pretty dirty the other day. The heavily used ones have a nice brown stain in places, mostly from just skin oils, and normally I don’t notice them, but it bugged me one afternoon, so I wanted to clean them.

How do I do it? I haven’t ever really worried about it, not traveling as much with laptops as I have with this one, and not using them as much as I have in the last year with this one. It gets used almost every day, moves from the basement to the bedroom, and I wanted to be clean it up.

So I asked my Twitter community the question and got these suggestions:

• qtips and rubbing alcohol do a nice job of getting in between keys’ (@SQLDBA)
• Baby Wipes.  (@RossMistry)
• Turn it off. Turn upside down. Beat vigorously with broom. Turn back over. Wipe down with very wet cloth. Let dry. Turn on; use! (@ChristyLeonard)
• distilled water and a tooth brush. Then let it dry for a day or two before reusing.  Or chuck it and get a new one. (@MrDenny)

I decided to try a few things and document it so hopefully someone else has an easier time. Here’s a before picture, so you can see how things look.

(ignore the date, I didn’t set the date on my camera)

I then started with baby wipes. We keep a few around since they are handy to clean up, or wipe off kids’ skin even at 8 years old! I turned off the machine and lightly wiped a few of the keys. As you can see, it seemed to clean off the keys pretty well. It didn’t take much elbow grease, just a couple minutes of rubbing across them.

My next experiment was to try rubbing alcohol and Q-tips. A quick search of the bathroom netted me some supplies, and I started on the other keys. Here’s the before:

and the after

I think that this worked as well as baby wipes, but it was definitely more effort. After a few minutes the colors was back to white, and the keys felt fine. The alcohol evaporated, and even the smell was gone quickly.

I declined to try Christy Leonard’s solution of using the broom, and I cleaned up the keys enough to not worry about the distilled water and toothbrush. I’ll let someone else try those.

My suggestion if your keyboard is dirty? Use baby wipes. You can pick up a small travel pack cheap, and almost anywhere. You can throw them in your laptop bag, but unless they’re sealed well, they will dry out quickly.