Stuck inside these four walls

Yeesh, what a boring day.  Couple more hours of it, then I get to go home.  EXCEPT... We're My wife is babysitting 4 toddlers until tomorrow evening.  This is so some married couples can go to a church retreat this weekend, without their crumb crunchers tearing the hotel down.  Instead the crumb crunchers are tearing my house down and terrorizing my doggies.  If you don't hear from me after this, check the Benton County Jail inmate roster and look through the booking pics for the guy on a psych hold that pulled all his hair out.  That'll be me.

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Andy has a very interesting post regarding internet anonymity.  It looks like a really long, tedious post, but that's only because Andy uses a big font.  So go read it.  As for me, I use a pseudonym mainly because my real-life first name is the very generic "John."  Not that there is anything wrong with that name, but...  Yell "Hey, John!" at my church and half the guys turn around and say "Yeah, what?"  And my last name, while seemingly simple, just confounds the heck out of people.  I tell people "it rhymes with Bonham" and they are like "Whoa!  John Bonham!  You're the drummer for Led Zeppelin!  I though you were dead!" Then I'm so annoyed that I have to punch them in the gut and take their skateboard.  It gets old after a while.  Hence the nom-de-blog.

It's also interesting to do the self-google...

In other words, I'm so screwed.  There are usenet (anybody remember usenet?) articles I posted back in the '80s in the rec.pyrotechnics newsgroup about blowing things up with homemade bombs.  Like melons.  And tree stumps.  And... Well... I'm sure that Big Sis ("ve haff detailed files") Napolitano already knows all those things about me.  But I s'pose it'd still be prudent to shut up right about, umm, now.

All that junk is still archived and shows up when I google myself.  Of course, Rick Santorum thinks it is a sin to google yourself, so maybe I should just knock it off.   What I'm getting at, is that there is already such a wealth of stuff about me on the 'net that could be cherry-picked to make me look really bad.  Or really good.  Or really ordinary.  No way to put that genie back in the bottle, so I don't worry too much about what people try to find.  Perhaps you, though, actually have a decent reputation and would like to keep it that way.  Start by reading Andy's post.

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Scary-good overhead image courtesy of Google Earth.
(Image of me standing in the parking lot flipping off Google's satellite photoshopped out)

Here's a view of where I do my early morning grunt job.  It is never so bright and cheerful when I am there before sunrise, but that isn't the point.  The point is stupid people doing stupid things stupidly.  The "corral" is what we call the walled-off area where we store non-valuable things like the garden hoses, snow shovels, etc.  It also has our dumpsters, which we also share with the Chevron station that is partially visible at the top of the pic.  I know, none of that is the least bit interesting but I felt a strange compulsion to include all those details.

So... A customer came through the drive-thru.  The customer pondered the offerings on the menu, placed an order, paid for the order, received the order, and proceeded to leave.  This may seem like a routine event.  But it you stop and think of it, it is quite amazing.  Someone from 500 years ago would think it miraculous that we could travel about in big shiny machines and get a greasy breakfast burrito and coffee for $3, with all this happening under the goal-time of about 140 seconds.  They would conclude that man had reached a level of Higher Intelligence.  Then the time traveler would marvel at the Low Intelligence of said customer driving RIGHT INTO THE CORRAL.  Tearing up the wall, goobering up the door so it no longer swings freely, and then DRIVING AWAY leaving behind a mess of broken headlight glass and bits of bumper cover and fender trim.  Since none of the stuff in there is valuable, there is no surveillance camera pointed at it.  We don't know who did it. 

So I say to the hit-n-run moron:  This moment of stupidity will haunt you all your days, like exaggerated boasting of blowing up melons on the rec.pyrotechnics newsgroup.  Because I talked about you on the internet.  And the internet is forever.