On The Pleasures Of Ego Surfing

For those of you who are unaware, ego-surfing is using the search feature on yahoo or google (also known as googling) to look up references to your own name. This can also refer to looking up the names of close friends and family members, and is a task I occasionally (okay, fairly often) enjoy. It is sometimes quite enlightening to realize what sort of information about you is online. Taking the yahoo search results, let us look at the ways in which yours truly is immortalized online. Some of these were quite entertaining for me, as I do not remember all of them. Why they should rank so highly on a search engine is quite puzzling to me as well, but regardless, they are informative and worthwhile to look at.

For one, not all of the references online to "Nathan Albright" are about me (I am not, after all, a divorce attorney from Las Vegas, although that one is rather ironic in the light of my previous rant on divorce. Another Nathan Albright (maybe the same one) apparently is or was a field lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board. Too many lawyers for my tastes, one of them having a pen pal from Belgrade (I had a couple of Slovenian pen pals myself). I am also not from New Zealand, a land I have never visited (but one I would like to), though apparently there is a bike enthusiast from there who shares my name. In addition there is a relatively famous tennis player named "Nathan Albright" who even appeared on ESPN's site. Alas, I am not he. There is also an 0-1 wrestler with that name, who apparently retired winless after his lone defeat (as no other results are available to see). Perhaps my doppleganger the tennis player was slumming for the wrestling team that day. Who knows? Finally, for the athletic "Nathan Albright" links, there is apparently a basketball player named Nathan Albright who scored 14 points in a game. Obviously, that was not me, as in my entire competitive basketball career (mostly in YOU in the ol' WCG) I scored a grand total of 2 points. You can rest assured that any reference to a Nathan Albright with athletic talent does not refer to yours truly. There are also a lot of references to long dead Nathan Albright's appearing in genealogies (though, not to my knowledge, my own). Apparently, one Nathan Albright was even a descendent of Alfred The Great. Sweet. Lucky guy.

What is somewhat humorous is that a high percentage (at least a third) of the online references to "Nathan Albright" do refer to me. And they aren't only the references one would expect. Of course, this blog here (my info page as well as my blog entry "Remember The Days") receives mucho love from the search engines. That is to be expected. Even my nonupdated Xanga site gets some search engine props, though not my livejournal blog for some odd reason. My fan club site (www.nba.homestead.com), alas now disabled (that's what happens when the person running your fan club site is your ex), also receives a lot of searches apparently. Some of the genealogy references are my own, based on posts to online forums about genealogy. Then again, posts of my own appear on the Ambassador Watch site, on some anti-Leonardo DiCaprio site (I didn't even remember making those rather saucy comments, even calling the bisexual former hearthrob an "@$$hole," but then again, it was seven years ago, and I can hardly remember what I said or wrote yesterday). Intriguingly enough, a private e-mail I sent giving directions to my old college dorm appears online. No one who lives there now knows who I am, so that's pretty useless. Than again, I guess even my personal and private e-mails find their way online (though I'm far from the only person who has that issue). But hey, a letter of mine appeared on Fred Bronson's "Chart Beat Chat," which is really sweet. I also wrote a short comment to the NTEvangelism forum about a survey which showed UCG to be a bit too heavily populated by elderly Silent Generation types and self-righteous Boomer types who are a bit concerned about the lack of respect for their "accomplishments." Yup. On a lighter note, my career states for Spirit Wars (I haven't played in a while--but it's a really fun game I must say) appear online as well.

A lot of references to my writing appear online, which is, of course, unsurprising. For example, there are plenty of popular links to my play "Even After All These Years" (e-published on www.aviarpress.com for only $5.95. Go there, buy it now, and hopefully the fine people at Aviar Press will finally send me a royalty check!). Some of my fiction press works are popular, but not the ones one would think. My most popular is the "Biblical Reenactment Society" skit I wrote at the Ambassador Bible Center (ABC for those in the know) with my classmate Tyler Smith. If you use our skit, just remember to give us the credit for writing it. Thou shalt not steal, remember. My sermonette knows for "Let The Righteous Strike Me" are somewhat popular as well. Who knew the smiting of the righteous was such a popular subject? My poetry on Secfenia, as well as my very dark (you've been warned) Secfenia Dark stories are somewhat popular as well. Very oddly enough (though thanks, whoever is the webmaster for www.ucgstp.org), my article "The Hesed Factor" appears online, from an old issue of Vertical Thought (edited, perhaps unsurprisingly, by my local pastor) based on an ABC "Reflection Paper" that Dr. Levy suggested I turn in to be published. It was a good idea. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, another article of mine that appears online, "Judging Righteous Judgment," was based on some writing at ABC as well). There are other articles of mine that appear online, such as "The Truth About The Cross" (a short piece in which I helped out my friend Randy Vild) and "Lest You Also Be Tempted" (a short article that originally appeared in Anchor, where I applied Galatians 6:1-5 to the rather contentious issue of homosexuality). Both of those articles appear on Blow The Trumpet (www.blowthetrumpet.org), a site run by a couple of friends of mine in the Church of God. Unfortunately, my college thesis on "Modulus of Elasticity and Poisson's Ratio For Concrete Columns" appears to be a dead link. Pity. However, an article I wrote quite a few years ago called "What Makes An Empire" is still online. That's impressive, I must say.

A lot of links online about me deal with such issues as reviews, travels, and political thoughts. For example, some of my amazon.com reviews appear online (mostly about books such as engineering text books, cds like "Tragic Kingdom," and books on political philosophy (including at least one book on Shakespeare's politics)). A couple of links deal with my trip to Ghana in 2000 to teach computers to elders and members in the Kumasi area. I think a few pictures, and even an intereview, can still be found dealing with that particular trip. Ah, good times. Of course, my being a "Communitarian" also appears online in a couple of places.

So there you have it, a brief tour through the sites one encounters when I egosurf. I would recommend you do the same, but sometimes the results can be rather unpleasant (the egosurfing of other people has gotten me in more than a little trouble, alluded to in previous blog entries). At any rate, looking up how you appear online at least gives you an idea of what other people can readly discover about you without all that much effort. Sometimes, that's just a little too much information for my liking, but then again, it hardly seems right to quibble too much about it if you put it online yourself.