Like Someone's Walking Over Your Grave

As I have mentioned before, I use (abuse?) Google News Alerts extensively. One of the first was "Gartner says". This particular alert has been very rewarding at work, since upper management has a serious hard-on for whatever comes out of Gartner's corporate pie-hole.

There's the occasional basketball coach or county sheriff coincidentally named "Gartner", but they sponsor so many corporate powwows and dog-and-pony shows that barely a day goes by without a Gartner hit or two.

The latest... and strangest... of the "Gartner says" alerts advise businesses how to leverage a presence in Second Life.

Excuse me? Sounds like there's a Gartner analyst with too much free time on his hands.

Early this year I added an alert for "hinkydink". Shortly thereafter I was deluged with news-ish stories about Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, an old time Chicago political boss. So I changed the alert to "mrhinkydink". Now I mostly get alerts for that fellow on Daily Kos ( hey, Hink, wanna buy mrhinkydink.com? Make me an offer! ).

But every now and then I get a hit. Today I found this one in my mailbox:



Creepy. Somebody fingered me at Unreal Admin.

In fact at this moment (8:19AM EST 09/10/07) that same link is the Number 2 hit for "mrhinkydink" on Google (first being, of course, our buddy at Daily Kos).

Oddly, my horoscope for today advised me that someone had "more information than I suspected" and that I should "listen to the omens".

This shit gives me the booboo jeebies.