Bing

Having worked hard on something makes it difficult to give up.

I am  afraid that this is what poor Windows 8 is up against. The all-knowing

power user - and after x yearsof struggle on the computer, I count myself among these -

comes to cherish his own hard-won little service world. Anything new seems to be trying to

sell one one's own product. A case in point, weather information.

I happen to live in a climatically diverse area, where the winters can be brutal and the

summers treacherous. I have developed routines for following snow storms and cold snaps

from California and the Artic, and hurricanes from Florida and Africa. I use the weather

services of Canada, the US and various European countries, not to mention historical

statistics, hourly changes and satellite maps. I am a weather taxi driver.

If I look at that limp tile on the Windows 8.1 desktop of my non-touch screen computer,

telling the temp in Montreal while I live 20 miles south in an entirely different hydraulic

system, well la-di-da. I had a small widget on my Windows 7 desktop that also showed me

Montreal - which is useful because that is where my child lives and I worry, and I might want

to go there on occasion - but hey, I also had the Weather Channel widget to St-Jean, with

hourly, 5 day, 14 day and a link to the site. Which I was hesitating to set up again because it

blocks Adobe updates and needs to be uninstalled, reinstalled...A power user, as I said. But

at least, that was morning coffee weather.

So putting pride aside, I decided this morning to see what Bing Weather could do for me

which I was pretty sure - once I had clawed my way up the learning curve - would be

awesomely complete. I wasn't disappointed. Now can Bing weather keep my feet dry? C'est à

voir!