Fri, 31 Jul 2009

Hail and Farewell: Part IV

In this age of Google, it's fairly hard to stay anonymous and private. Buy a house, get a mention in your local newspaper's caption under a photo of the local Little League team you coach, get a land line phone, get arrested, have your name mentioned in the meeting minutes of the local garden club's web site, make a posting to a Usenet newsgroup, have a child, sue someone (or be sued), or have your obituary published when you die -- it takes remarkably little for the tireless little search bots to cull your name from somewhere, then cross reference it, index it, and make it available to anyone with the time and patience to ferret it out.

Some people do manage to do remarkably well at keeping themselves "offline", as it were. They stay off the Internet radar, and out of view of the search engines. But sometimes, with a modicum of luck, and by having a more-than-typical level of familiarity with where to mine for data, even someone apparently lost and gone forever will suddenly and unexpectedly turn up.

More than twenty years since I last saw her, reenter Beth, stage left.

See more ...

Posted Jul 31, 2009 at 17:44 UTC, 3350 words,  [/rich]  Permalink

Telling The Other Guy What To Do

Telling other people what they should do is tricky business, even if what you are telling them is for their own good.

See more ...

Posted Jul 31, 2009 at 00:18 UTC, 3328 words,  [/dan]  Permalink