Michelin Diamaris and directional tread?

I replaced my winter tires with my summer tires on my BMW X5 last weekend. I’ve got Michelin Diamaris as my summer tires, which were the OEM tire when I purchased the X5, and I’ve replaced a couple of times since I bought the vehicle in 2002. While I was installing the wheels, I noticed that the tread didn’t look symmetric to me, which seems strange from a water traction point of view. 

I went to the web site for the tires, http://www.michelinman.com/tire-selector/category/suv-crossover/latitude-diamaris/tire-details#pr-header-4536 and they don’t seem to have different tires for left and right in the part numbers. I downloaded the picture of the tire, and rotated it 180 degrees. Here’s what the left and right tires should look like side by side:

 

The tires have a specific pattern for the outside of the tire and the inside of the tire, but the inside portion has essentially half a V pattern to the center groove. Notice how the “V” in the inside portion of the tread would push water to the center of the tire on one side, while pushing it away from the center on the other. 

In the past I’ve had tires that had a symmetric V pattern, and the direction of rotation was very important for wet traction. Staring at these looks counterintuitive to me.

Has anyone else noticed this? 

Is my installation correct, or are these tires supposed to be delivered in a left-right pair?

End of Windows Live Messenger

Today I was forced to stop using Windows Live Messenger. It upgraded me to Skype. I don’t like the interface to skype for messaging mostly because of the way it looks. It’s not very informationaly dense.

Here is an example of the live messenger contact list next to the skype contact list that I took several weeks ago. The four large icons at the top of the skype window have an unclear meaning to me, and their size makes them look like they are designed to be hit with a finger instead of a mouse. i suppose that it fits in with the flat style that I was ranting about recently, but that doesn’t make me like it any more.

 I rebooted my machine this morning, and when Windows Live Messenger attempted to login I could not get past this screen without clicking “Yes”.

When I tried to find out what’s new, it took me to a pretty bland skype page, with no real useful information:

I let it upgrade me and got this series of screens:

Now I have no more messenger, and to top it off, all of the sounds are different so I don’t even notice if someone is attempting to send me messages.