The force is with us

This is the line for the midnight showing of Star Wars III - at the least popular theater in town!

OK, I'm officially a geek

I just bought my tickets for the midnight showing of Revenge of the Sith.

But most of the reviews show that this one is much better than the last two prequels. The New York Times reviewer says it's even better than the original Star Wars. So that justifies the midnight showing on a workday, right?

MSN desktop search final

Microsoft has released the final version this excellent desktop search tool, which in my experience is the best of the three big file search tools (the other two are Google's and Yahoo's. All three are very useful, but MSN is the only one of them that indexes OneNote files, which I use extensively. It has tangibly improved the way I work, eliminating the file- and email-hunting that used to take up so much of my day.

Why are these tools any different from the regular Windows search function? For one, they're faster than the standard Windows search, even othose aided by Windows' annoying indexing service, which many power users turn off. Second, the new tools search the contents of files, not just the names. So it's easier to find that Coxinha recipe, even if you don't remember whether you found it on a Web site, saved it as a Word file or got it in an e-mail. And all three tools set themselves in your Windows taskbar, so they're always ready to use.

If you haven't tried out the services, you should. They're free.