Sociate

David Weinberger posted recently that he still likes X1 better.

For completely different reasons, after trying both X1 and Lookout (the Outlook plugin that Microsoft recently acquired), I'm pretty happy with Google's new Desktop Search.

X1 is overwhelming. It shows me all my files of every type, including files in my spam folder that I have no desire to see. I thought I excluded those from indexing, but they keep showing up. Because its UI premise is to narrow down the search, starting with all your files, X1 feels like a huge program, especially if you like to keep your application windows large. Then X1 insists on separating my files into different search buckets for e-mail, files and such. Why? Why do I have to search several times? And why do searches so seldom find the files I really want to find? Problematic.

Lookout is a little better, but it works on Outlook contents only, and it isn't all that quick. Its startup delay is a little annoying, but the re-indexing bothered me more. I could have set Lookout to re-index less often, but every couple hours, just when I needed my CPU most, my whole machine would slow to a crawl for long lazy minutes. When I had to rebuild my machine after a disk crash, I didn't reinstall Lookout.

Google Desktop Search is a pleasant surprise, understated and powerful. It doesn't promise that much, then quietly overdelivers. One of the unexpected features shows up the next time you run a normal Google search of the Web: your local results are summarized as the first search result, with the Desktop Search icon in the margin. It indexes limited file types, doesn't preview your files, etc., but having Google-speed search of your own desktop is sweet. It changes your world view a little to have useful search at hand, as with Gmail.

Microsoft, how come the $5 billion you spend every year on R&D couldn't do this?

Why does it take bin Laden to point out that Bush has no real instincts to be Commander in Chief?

Mr. bin Laden said Mr. Bush reacted slowly to the Sept. 11 attacks as they were occurring, giving the hijackers more time than they expected to carry out the plot. At the time of the attacks, the president was visiting a group of second graders at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla., holding a book called "My Pet Goat."

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," Mr. bin Laden said, referring to estimates of the number of people who might have been at the World Trade Center.

Referring to the president, Mr. bin Laden said: "It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God."

(From the New York Times article yesterday about the new bin Laden tape. Here it is in my furl archive.)

I can't picture Kerry sitting out the attack.