Studies in Internet Futility: In Search of Duffman [The Beerquarium]

Studies in Internet Futility
In Search of Duffman

Introduction: I've been converting pages from my old web site to my new one, and this has to be by far the stupidest choice I've made to actually go through with putting a page up. This is a personal page, so it never mattered who knew who I was before. I used to have my real name and contact info all over the page, and of course had many Internet stalkers but they were all girls so I didn't care. But when I started moving everything over here, the other guys were very concerned about liability and whatnot, and didn't want people tracing them back through me so I took out all the refererences to my real name. Well, the entire point of this feature revolved around my real name. So removing all the links that lead to pages with their names on them and taking out all the critical info for tracking these guys down has basically robbed this feature of its essence, but hey, I like a challenge.

So this is our fourth study in Internet Futility, and it might surprise you to see that there isn't any numerical data in the entire project. However, this shouldn't be a big deal, because these features are "studies" in Internet futility, not experiments in it. In fact, if you go back and look at the other three, you'll notice that none of these are experiments, since none has a control. Two of the studies compared sets of numbers, and the third just produced one set of numbers and compared it to a theoretical standard. So, please do not be confused to see that this study is purely observational. Still, we can use some of the same principles such as hypotheses, but they will have to be compared by more subjective means.

The Rationale: At the time when I originally wrote this, I'd been getting E-mails from people in another part of the country asking me to help pick computer science classes for them or find internships for them. I just thought these people were on crack, until one day my sister was trying to find my web page, but forgot the address. She tried searching for my name on Google, and I came in the room to tell her that this isn't a terribly effective approach since I rarely used my last name on the page. Also, my first and last names are both common Indian names, and since way too many Indian people have web pages, there are a million or so pages from people who aren't me. We decided to look at a few of the pages, and the first one was a professor of computer science from the school where people were E-mailing me. My interest now raised, it was time for more searching. I got distracted by something most likely, but a little over 3 months later, I continued the search and this is what I found.

The Hypothesis: All the other people with my real first and last name with web pages are even bigger losers than I am.

The Procedure: This is pretty simple. I just type my real name into Google and examine all the pages in rank order, then put the info up here. Since I don't feel like being here forever, I'll just put up the first ten I run into.

Complications: The sixth guy with my name is way too ugly to be on the Internet.

The Results: Some info on the guys with my name is below..

	The Professor Country: USA A professor of computer science, he used to even chair the department. He also enjoys distributed databases, embedded systems, and various other things that get the ladies all wet. He's been published 56 times, and unlike me, it wasn't in Big Jugs Magazine, so good for him.
	The Poet Country: Unknown This guy's an amateur poet and writer from the looks of it, and not terribly skilled at either. Remember that I used to be editor-in-chief for a literary magazine whose main content was poetry when I tell you that I've definitely seen a lot worse wannabe poetry, but this is definitely crap... lacking substance, style, originality, and everything else someone using my name needs...
	The Student Country: USA He's in (surprise, surprise) computer science. Some of his interests are tennis, chess, and bridge... wow, could he get any more Indian? He gets points for being in the place where a painter I like did his work, but then loses said points for his mustache, which tickles women only slightly... only slightly.
	The Writer Country: Unknown This guy writes articles and books about... you guessed it, information technology. That's right, just when you thought we might be getting out of the techy arena, we actually jumped even further into it. He's also a public speaker (I believe it's some motivational stuff about when he lived in a van down by the river), and he started his own IT consulting firm.
	The Student Country: USA This guy works with both alternative energy in developing economies and biotechnology investments in ours. Sounds like he just made up some crap to me and is really a philosophy major, or as the philosophy majors at my school liked to call it, "philosophy engineering." He's also into photography and soccer, but has yet to produce photographs of naked female soccer players, so what's the point?
	The CEO Country: USA He seems to be one of two CEOs for what looks like an international e-consulting firm. This is quite possibly the most worthless company I've ever seen. It's like all the clichés put together. I'm sure this company makes like $0.02 in revenue but he just wanted some business cards with "CEO" on them to try to impress women. I wouldn't be surprised if lately they've been calling themselves model scouts or vagina inspectors or something.
	The Lecturer Country: Unknown Basically, all I know about him is from one lecture he gave at some scientific university in France, about magnetic anisotropy and a bunch of other boring science (from the looks of it, physical chemistry) stuff.
	The VP Country: Unknown What's he a VP for? A software system company... I don't know anything about him from his work, though, since I've just got some of his work on the Web instead of a home page, but he writes about telecommunications, so I think you can take your guesses.
	The Student Country: Unknown I know basically nothing about him, but wanna guess what he's studying? That's right, computer science... Simply amazing...
	The Engineer Country: Scotland This Duffman works on drug delivery, so basically he's in the same vicinity academically where I was when I originally wrote this, although his department is technically cell engineering... eh, close enough.

The Discussion: As mentioned briefly in Complications, #6 is at least 55% too ugly to be on the Internet. Also, I should have mentioned earlier that the whole point of this study went completely out the window about 7 months after I wrote it, when I switched from premed to systems engineering, and then a half year later when I switched again to computer engineering. Thankfully for my image, I got out of that, too, but it's really hypocritical to have this page ripping on these guys for fulfilling the Indian stereotype by doing computer stuff when you are yourself. I specialize in hypocrisy, though, so it shouldn't be a challenge for me. Perhaps I can even get a job at Fox News after this because of it.

Alrighty then, so let's try to make some sense of this. I'm reexamining it now since a lot of stuff's happened in my life in the approximately 3 years between when I originally wrote this and when I'm now updating it to be put on The Beerquarium for the first time. For some reason, the vast majority of the information about these guys that's put up on the net is professional so it's really hard to make any judgment calls, as it's not like one's favorite things are beer bongs and the other's are Star Trek conventions. Still, one can make some calls on guys who should get a real job, like if you see some 30 year old who's still a cashier at Blockbuster. So #2 (The Poet) and #6 (The CEO) are clearly giant losers, as the first guy should know not to post work that's just so embarrassingly bad and the CEO has a nice title but you'd have to see the company website. It's so obviously not a real company, in that it certainly exists but is set up so these guys can put the title CEO on their resumes.

Apart from that, interests are listed sometimes. So #3 (The Student) is clearly a big dork, but what about the rest? The bulk of what they have put out about themselves is professional, and while there is some association for the people who enjoy programming enough to do it as their full-time job, for others you can't really make that call as it's just how you pay the bills. But at the same time, the fact that all their public faces are completely work-related says something about themselves as well. Some of the links originally in here were journals but a lot are personal sites, and the fact that they say this is all there is to my life and then just talk about their accomplishments in IT says a lot about them. These guys are techies, so they know how to make pages about stuff that's fun, but don't. Perhaps they need to look back at their priorities, or maybe (hopefully not) that's just what happens at their age.

The Conclusions: Other people with my name are probably even bigger losers than me, but the data we have is far from conclusive.