Thursday

What happened to the week?

2 and I had a good time at the Augie game last night. Although Augie won, it wasn't pretty. A couple of their starters had been sick this week and hadn't practiced, and it showed. In the end, my pal Pete's son did a great job leading the home team to victory.

3 had a little excitement this week when a comment she had made right here on 4000 Days last Spring turned up on a random Google search done by an acquaintance of one of her roommates in IC. The acquaintance passed it on to 3's roommate, and there was a resulting ripple in the force of the universe. 3's comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but a biased reader could take it the wrong way. And the roommate was a biased reader.

I guess the lesson is that you don't put on the internet anything that you might be uncomfortable defending at some later date. As 4000 Days has evolved, I have made it a rule to not use last names generally. And the numerical references to the girls is a small concession to a concern for mis-use or mis-interpretation by the wandering eyes of unknown readers.

There are lots of examples of old history coming back to haunt a public figure. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado is the classic example. Vetting has been a sport of choice for muckrakers for centuries. The difference today is that the Man On The Street ( or Woman) can be the target of the search for dirt. Consider the recent examples of the various Miss Somethings with the photo evidence of forgotten evenings from years ago. Or the case of the post-game partying habits of the Iowa State b-ball coach a few years back. The internet now allows the public relatively easy access to vast amounts of information. Blogging has added geometrically to the information base.

The element that has got my attention is the power of the internet search engines. If a simple Google search can recognize a person's name in a little-read blog text, imagine what a hacker who really wanted to find something could do. I know that I regularly use Google for technical/tax/IRS questions, and the results are surprisingly reliable. The information that I can get in that fashion today, for free, is multiple times more useful than data that I used to look up manually in the tax library (which had several subscription fees). (A fully-equipped electronic-media tax library is obviously superior to a system of free search on Google. But for a general practitioner CPA, you can get a long ways to the right answer with the non-subscription stuff on the internet.)

I took the Taurus in for an oil change at the Quick Lube over lunch hour. The up-sell offers included, 1) transmission fluid flush for $109.99, 2) air filter for $13.99, and 3) up-graded oil for better mileage at $20.00 over the "standard" grade. I took the air filter since the one he showed me was fully clogged. (I wonder how many times he's used that same dirty filter on a customer?) Some things never change. Up-selling at the Quick Lube is a Top Five item on that list. (Quick Lube is a generic term. Substitute your auto service center of preference.)

Ford Motor Company has announced that they are bringing back the recently retired Taurus name and sticking it on the under-performing Ford Five Hundred sedan beginning with the 2008 models. If only a name change could solve their problems.

Have a warm and toasty evening.

Be careful out there.