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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....

• Why doesn't Linux support the embedded NIC on my motherboard?
• Why does the PC reboot spontaneously occasionally, mostly after running a perl script that opened a lot of socket connections (say 300 or so) to the internet for downloading stuff?
• Why does my (GBP£2.00) mouse malfunction to the point of non-usability if it's in direct sunlight?
• Exactly how does SUSE Linux Pro need 7 CDs anyway?
• Why won't CmdrTaco let me see the exact number of my Karma anymore?
• Why do people moderate my posts down as over-rated just for someone else to moderate them back up again?

... And now we have actually running hardware of our very own! Cool eh?

The results from Mensa came and went. Qualified, joined, went to (2 so far) meetings. I cannot possibly reccommend it enough. If you think you can, shoot for it. Don't even bother thinking about it.

Interestingly enough there were two celebrity premiers in town last night - Star Wars (all the big stars except Euan and Natalie) and We will Rock You - the Ben Elton musical using Queen music. Naturally I was skulking around the edges of the Queen thing - although this was because I was going to play games with Mensa.