Google has a truckload of new features on its main page today. It also introduced Personalized search. Since I’m at least partially interested in personalized searching (seeing as how my thesis was based on it and all), I tried it out. I created a profile with 3 or 4 favorite subjects and then started searching. I started playing around with the slider on the top of the page and lo behold! My personalized results started magically sliding upward. It’s always nice to your research project being closely imitated on Google.

A few quick questions, though…

• Shouldn’t your personalized results be part of the answer page right from the beginning of the search? As of now, completely new personalized results appear out of nowhere when you move the personalization slider. This seems to suggest that the personalized results are somehow not part of the initial text search. That doesn’t seem right to me. Personalized icons should appear beside your plain-text search when you begin moving the slider.

  (This is a Personalized icon: )

• You can also search for number ranges in Google now. Type in ‘Playstations $150-$170’ and you should be getting pages that sell Playstations from $150 – $170. Experiment Results??? Not so good. Too much noise in the results page.
• Froogle is now officially on the front page. Maybe the price range input would work well with Froogle? I tried that, and to my surprise… it doesn’t work AT ALL with Froogle!

My newest addiction… DingDongs — The satan-influenced evil sibling of ‘Pure Magic’ biscuits!

There are two movies in the theaters that I’m dying to watch:

1) “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. If anyone’e seen Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, they can expect a surprise from Charlie Kaufman every time. His scripts are entirely mind-bending and funny to boot. The story of the new movie also seems promising – “Would you erase your past memories?”. The movie is directed by Michael Gondry, who directs music videos, especially a lot for Bjork. (This video by him is really cool and very creative). A collaboration by Kaufman and Gondry is sure to be quite different from Scooby Doo 2.

2) “Dawn of the Dead”. I’ll let Maddox do the talking… here’s a snippet: “This movie stomps so much ass that they have to import colons from other countries to meet the demand”.

I hope my self-imposed exile from the theaters ends soon — I’m getting impatient!

What?:
* Nifty new sidebar on the left where I’ll be putting up links that caught my eye.
* Book selection and movie selection changed on the right sidebar.
* Added CognitiveOverload to the blogger list.

Why?: Because I don’t have anything else to do.

via Fark today, Kansas admits it’s as flat and boring as your high school girlfriend, will give you free land if you move there.

Since I haven’t had a high school GF, I can’t confirm or deny the lack of assets(physical and mental) of the forementioned creatures, but I can vouch for the fact that Iowa is way flatter than north east Kansas. My road-trip to Chicago proved that Kansas doesn’t really deserve its reputation for flatness. The flint hills in south eastern Kansas are quite beautiful during spring/summer. The rolling hills and the meadows are a soothing sight for any traveller on I-35.

But what do I know, some guys have actually scientifically proven that KS is flatter than a pancake. As for your High School GF, only you can be the judge 🙂

Call Center – The Film is being made by a British guy(Art director for ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Life of Brian’ – impressive!). It’s going to be Office Space meets Dil Kaho Na Kuch Mil Gaya Hai. Or so I would hope…

The good news: 47% of firms in Ventura County indicate they are about to hire this spring.
The bad News: Most of the jobs are in durable and nondurable goods manufacturing, transportation-public utilities, wholesale-retail trade, finance-insurance-real estate, and education and services.
Maybe it’s time to move to Californ-eye-yay.

How does the spam industry stay afloat? Does anyone actually click on junk mail??? I’ll admit it – I do. I now know where to go if I want to date Christian singles. I can eliminate my credit-card debts by sending debbi453 an email. I can ‘increase’ my ‘performance’ without ‘vI@gr4’. Even though I do not have the necessary appendages, I can choose to increase my lactation stations by two sizes. It’s a win-win situation!

But I stop at merely perusing these mails. Apparently, people like Soto actually buy stuff from the spammers.(Note: Soto has been depicted in charcoal to protect his identity.) I read somewhere that spammers made $115 billion in profits last year. With dutiful American consumerobots such as Soto, it’s no wonder spammers keep finding innovative ways to increase my boob size.

[from:Dashes]: Here’s a link for amateur bloggers on how to write. Strunk and White has been on my reading list for a while – formal grammar just seems so… dry.

Via Metafilter:C4 swears by four-letter advert. Here’s the ad. NSFW, if you have your speakers on.

What makes a swear word, well, a swear word? Why did derogatory references to genitalia and bodily functions attain their swear-status? When did female dogs begin to refer to women who refuse to have sex with you? I’ve winced when teenage girls in India said “Oh shit”, imitating their favorite Hindi actress. I’ve been winced at when I said ‘damn’ in regular conversation here in Kansas. ‘Hell’ and ‘damn’ are considered cuss words in my god-fearing state. Considering their non-aligned status with respect to the G-man, can atheists curse? Does the pope shit in the woods?

So, what is your favorite swear-word ?

Via MetaFilter: Journalist gets his own article outsourced. Do people still buy “… and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirts ???

Dave Blood of The Dead Milkmen, found dead. I hadn’t heard about them until a friend loaned me a CD, and I was hooked. The funniest music group, ever.
Life is s***, indeed. RIP.

Anti has blogged about the music for Ayutha Ezhuthu today. The uncorroborated rumor is that the story is going to based on the City of God. I haven’t seen the movie, but it’s been on my to-watch list for a long, long time. (92% on RT, that’s pretty darn good.)

Speaking about Tamil movies, I saw Virumandi finally this weekend. So here’s yet a belated Virumandi review, sorta.

—->Lovin’ it: The differing Points-Of-View technique — the first narration by the bad guy seemed disjointed and kept me wondering if there was an editing mishap. The subsequent narration by the protagonist nicely fills in the blanks. When compared to movies that told multiple points of view, I’d say Kamal has done a good job of it. Apart from that, I wouldn’t say that the direction was better than Hey Ram. My reason for being less-than-impressed with cinematography might be due to the fact that I saw it on a 17″ monitor from a burnt CD of a copy taken at a 320X240 resolution from a website. (On a sidenote: I haven’t seen Aazhavandhan, but if there was anime in there a la Kill Bill, I’m all for it.)

—->I hate you, I hate you, I hate you: The usual commercial elements, the bad CGI… all of which have already been pointed out by TeaKada.

And that’s how I feel right now. (by LesKellert from Worth 1000. Original idea: Gary Larson). What’s the deal with IE here? I can see the image on Firefox, but not on IE.