Notes from the field: The venerable Robert X. Cringely entices: And now for something completely silly. Only this one is not about Apache the Airedale in a motorcycle sidecar, his on-again-off-again shenanigans with Pammy, or slinging fiery potshots at tech execs. No, Cringe is riddled with insomnia and bored, to boot. Enough so, indeed, to dial up the Trends Engine on the Google subsite and start running searches on bedwetting, bestiality and incontinence, among others. Surprising, what he finds. Columnist’s corner: Sometimes a programmer’s best tactical career move is to run from scary code, particularly when it’s lacking documentation. That’s the lesson our Off the Record author learned after being hired to step in and take the blame for a failed project. “The HR rep tried to lecture me about how ‘unprofessional’ I was for leaving the company high and dry,” he writes. “I said nothing, asked for two days’ pay, and left.” Hardware: Acer surpasses Lenovo in PC sales, and turns its scope toward Dell. The PC maker also says it expects to acquire a small company in the coming months, but that bid won’t be for Gateway. Busy this week, Acer also fights back against Hewlett-Packard’s two patent lawsuits by hiring the same lawyer who represented EMC when HP smacked the storage titan with a suit. The news beat: ICANN issues a toolkit for handling new TLDs including .info and .mobi. A few weeks after introducing Google Desktop 5 in English, the search company localizes it in 29 languages. And, continuing with Google here, security and legal experts alike agree that Google AdWords need policing, especially in light of researchers uncovering that malware distributors harness the ads to infect unsuspecting PC users. Technology Industry