Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

A man who is on trial for killing his wife apparently Googled for “neck snap break” and “hold” before he committed the crime. However, this news acts an organic Google bomb for those phrases, which are now entirely dominated by news stories about the crime:

To view the results yourself, click here.

I’ve decided that Sun Micrososystems has screwed up with Java. See, they have a great API, but every now and then you find some kind of inconsistency that really makes you wonder “WHY.” For example, things in real life which can be compared to each other generally ought to implement the Comparable interface in Java so that you can compare them as objects. However, java . net . URL doesn’t implement Comparable, and therefore I am forced to conclude that a Uniform Resource Locator is fundamentally un-comparable. Except that it’s not. Every search engine has figured out how to handle URLs, but for some reason Java hasn’t.

Let me give you a hint–it’s not too hard. Just compare the protocol, the domain, and the paths. Then compare the query string. Of course there can be aliasing of all kinds on the server side, but couldn’t you lazy programmers at least have tried something?

I received the following email today:

From: Aaron Hevenstone
To: “ecb29@cornell.edu”
Subject: Who?

Someone told me that this is the email of Christopher Paolini. If it is e-mail me and tell me. If it isn’t, im sorry for bothering you!

Update:

I got another email:

Hello. I don’t mean to disturb you, but I heard that this is Christopher
Paolini’s email address? I’m sorry, I imagine that if it is, you get all
kinds of obnoxious fan mail, and if it is not, you are quite tired of
getting emails such as this one. All that I can say as an excuse is that I
truly would love to get in touch with you, Mr. Paulini, assuming this is in
fact your email address. Would you mind emailing me back? My name is Casey
Casias, and I would like to speak to a professional writer (I am an ameteur
writer myself and love your books). Once again, I apologize if this is a
bother.

Thank you,
Casey Casias

This prompted me to acquire the professional contact details for Mr. Paolini:

Christopher Paolini
c/o Michelle Frey
Random House Children’s Books
1745 Broadway, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10019

You can write him a letter at that business address if you feel like it.

Update: It seems that this won’t die, people keep sending me email not noting the sarcasm of this post. Don’t send me email, I’m not Chris Paolini:

Hello, My name is Angela Paolini. I’m Chris’ (Paolini) sister. i saw a blog (title of this email) do you claim to be Chris? I honestly do not believe you are. If you were you wouldn’t have referred to yourself in second person(“I am Christopher Paolini, and this is his e-mail”) Chris has never said anything to me about this blog. Please explain yourself.