“It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.”
—Dave Barry

Given the problems newspapers are having these days as the result of the mass adoption of digital media, you gotta love the irony of this Valleywag story.

No, not Stanley Bing. It’s a brand-new search engine from MSN and it’s pretty good. Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but over time Bing could erode some of its leadership in search. Stay tuned.

The Twitter account I’ve been kvetching about for more than a month got hacked yet again last night, and is still hacked as of this morning. I’m beyond infuriated about the situation, but experts say exercise is good for stress … so here’s video of a dog getting more exercise than I typically get in a day.

While taking a break yesterday from shoveling mulch and trimming shrubs and such, I checked in on TWITRCON 09 — a one-day conference about Twitter held at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.

Evidently about 270 or so people gave up their Sunday to hear speakers like Guy Kawasaki, MC Hammer, Steve Rubel and others. You could follow the conference by following @TWTRCON or by searching for #twtrcon on Twitter. You can also see photos from TWTRCON 09 over here.

The interesting thing about the convention was that Twitter users were asked to pose questions to the speakers and panels. I tried repeatedly to ask questions relevant to my post from yesterday, but evidently there was no interest in criticizing Twitter at all. This was apparently a day for preaching to the converted.

The biggest piece of information I was able to glean from following the TWTRCON on and off yesterday was that Twitter has a total of 45 employees.

In January, Michael Arrington reported that Twitter has a valuation of $250 million. To date, they’ve raised $57 million in venture capital funding.

So why can’t they take a million of that and hire some more engineers and develop a customer service department? That way, maybe representatives of a global brand might get some sort of a help desk response from Twitter in less than a month.