Caught at one hundred and twenty metres per second

Forgetting that the product named Internet Explorer is from a certain Redmond company, and thus has to promote other products and services of the same company, I typed in a search term straight into the address bar in an IE6 window.
I ended up on the search results page for what I typed on Bing, and noticed a link at the top right which read “Gebruik Bing om beslissingen te nemen” (“Make Bing your decision engine”).


Curious about what a “decision engine” could do for me, I followed that link. The decisions weren't all that exciting — I could add Bing as a search engine, but actually it already was the default one; and I could set Bing as my homepage — not something that Microsoft already aimed for before, with live.com, and something which other search engines do as well if they have a chance.

What struck me however, was the example bing.com screenshot used on the page — using a graphic of a puffin. Which, while not being some species of, could remotely pass for some sort of penguin.
Would it really be coincidence that they'd use this image of all possibilities, or is this a wicked taste of humor from someone within Microsoft?

Past wednesday, a new Saturn electronics store opened it's doors right next to the railway station of Brugge (Bruges). To celebrate this, they had several real bargain deals, among which an Asus Eee PC 900 to be had for 129 EUR.

Thing is, the advert wasn't really clear which Eee 900 type it was, and it was contradictory even: the netbook was said to be equipped with the Atom N270, and at the same time the CPU clock speed supposedly was 900 MHz. The latter being the speed of the earlier models that had a Celeron Mobile CPU.
So I called the store and asked for some explanation. The person on the other end of the line, a guy named Kevin, confirmed that it had indeed the Atom N270, yet at the same time ran at 900 MHz and not the usual 1600 MHz. Errrr…?

“Well, this is a bargain deal, so that's why it's running at a slower speed. Sure, I know the N270 normally runs at 1600 MHz, only this netbook doesn't.”
Yeah right.

I was offered to have one netbook be put aside for me, because they were supposedly running nearly out of stock.
Since you simply cannot find any netbook over here for under nearly twice it's price, I still considered it a good deal. Even if would be the old Celeron model.

I was slightly tempted to ask if it would be possible to have one with Linux rather than the Windows XP version they offered, but as the answer was clear from the outset I refrained to do so.

So after work I drove to the shop, picked it up, and returned home. As thursday evening is swimming evening, I only had time to briefly power it into the bios when I returned home. There I saw confirmed what I suspected, it was a Celeron Eee 900 and not a revision with the Atom.
Saturn really should learn to educate their support staff better.

Still, I'm not unhappy that I bought the netbook — it should provide sufficient speed for most things I have in mind to use it for.
Now all I have to do is put a modern OS on it.