Monday July 25, 2005

I Am Not The Drummer You Seek!

One of the small benefits of having a "plain" name is that it provides some amount of privacy through obscurity. Googling my name will bring you a long list of sites unrelated to me, mostly references to the basketball star from the San Antonio Spurs commonly called "The Admiral". After creating this blog I have risen through list and can now be found on the third page of Google results, previously you really needed to know something else about me to find me. So I have moved from total obscurity to partial obscurity.

The blogs.sun.com software has a fun feature that it allows you to see what sites are referring to your blog. Usually this contains just the few friends and colleagues that I interact with. Recently I noticed a large number of google referrals with my name and the word "cars". That was strange, so I went to google.com and entered the search. To my amazement my blog was the top hit! While I like cars and auto racing (NASCAR in particular), my depth of knowledge on the subject is far from unique or particularly valuable.

Then in looking at the other results, I remembered the rather obscure fun fact that the drummer from the band "The Cars" shares my name. Obscure because no one ever remembers the drummer in a band, even if they blow up on stage. So while I enjoyed the band's music, and in fact have their anthology (although what was with Panorama?), I can't do better than make noise with a drum set.