Monty Worm's Journal: Eeek!

Many people, especially those with more common names, are used to the idea that there's someone out there with the same name as them.

I'm not. For a long time[1] I was the only person called Dominic I'd ever met. Don't get me wrong, I'd heard of others in books, seen them on TV - I wasn't in ignorance of their (hypothetical) existence. My surname (Thoreau) is even worse. In my home town, *everyone* with my surname is a relative [2] - pick a name, phone it, and ask for who you want. You'll get through to the person you require - 2 or 3 calls total.

Then today I followed a link on Dave Winer's Scripting News [3] site - something about google [4] as an internet mapping tool. I followed the link to the site. After some playing around, I jumped off to google to search on my own name [5]. For once a new link arrived - a review of a book from Amazon, by a Dominic Thoreau in Zagreb, Croatia.

Still not sure about this - I feel it's all very dubious.....

[1] In practice this only ended this year
[2] To the best of my knowledge, there are't any Thoreau's elsewhere in NZ.
[3] www.scripting.com - lots of stuff that is far too interesting and I don't have time to deal with properly - see my abortive blogs scattered around the internet
[4] You *know* this : Google, www.google.com , the best and most relevant search engine on the web
[5] Egotistical I know - but google ranks by some nice criteria, and what you end up with is interesting - more of what other's think is important, than any random order... [6]
[6] And if you actually ran this, yes, those systematic entomology papers are me....