Microsoft and Yahoo have been doing the partnership dance for a while now. It was almost 18 months ago that it looked to all the world like Microsoft was going to just buy Yahoo. Of course, Yahoo didn’t go for the deal and their stock tanked and we’ve been in a three-way race ever since. Yahoo has sputtered along without doing much new. They released Yahoo Buzz, but it doesn’t seem to have generated nearly the “buzz” that they had likely hoped. Microsoft on the other hand has release Bing, which has generated lots of noise and put Microsoft back on the search map.

Now a new deal is supposed to be announced that will make Bing the default search engine on Yahoo. This is not the first time Yahoo has changed engines. At first, they had their own search, which just searched their directory (remember their directory? no?). A little later, they partnered with and eventually bought Alta Vista. Then they partnered with Google for a while. After it became clear that Google was kicking their butt, they partnered with and eventually bought Inktomi. And now they are looking to partner with Microsoft. You can’t say Yahoo isn’t trying to do well at search. The problem is they always seem to look outside the company for answers.

Okay, enough history. What does this mean for you and your web site? Well, I have good news and bad news.

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Being the geek that I am, I buy a lot of stuff online. This weekend I snagged an hard drive caddy for my HP laptop on eBay, made necessary because HP sells them for the extraordinary and extortionary price of $145. The whole laptop only cost me $613!

In any case, I ordered the part for $20 on eBay and was pleased when I got my UPS Quantum View email telling me at had been shipped. When I when to check on where it was, I became less pleased as it said the package had been delivered already to Houston. I live in Pittsburgh. So, I started swearing and panicking and trying to figure out where on earth they put a Houston address to my name. [read more]

I went to CNN today and clicked on a link about something or other. Since CNN loves to repurpose its content, this turned out to be a video, but not one I was allowed to watch. I got this bizarre message (click it to see the whole page):

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You reap what you sow, I suppose. Yesterday, I criticized Cuil partly for their lack of stability under stress.

Last night, one side of my UPS died. Just died. No beeps, nothing. One side works, the other doesn’t. I guess one of the batteries has finished its lead-filled little life. That took out my primary name server and my in-house hub. At first, I thought it was just the hub, so I borrowed one from my brother-in-law and swapped that out. Still no light on the name server. Figured that out and managed to keep the downtime to an hour or so. Given that the two secondary name servers were alive and well, all was okay. it didn’t last. [read more]