iGoogle

(Yes, I did recently purchase an iPhone and as such all posts from now on will have a good old Apple iIdiom as its title. It works particularly well when the suffix is a verb.)

I haven't googled myself for a while, and after reading someone's Facebook status warning that Facebook allows your public profile to be indexed by search engines (many social networking sites do by default), it prompted me to wonder what the latest search engine results for "Lindsey Buckle" are.

I was strangely satisfied (and a tad concerned but not really that surprised) to find that the majority of results on the first page were actually me. After all I am the centre of the universe. But then there probably aren't many (if any) other Lindsey Buckles in Australia and Google probably knows where I am and assumes I'd be more interested in local results.

Obviously you can perform the search yourself but just for the purposes of fleshing out this post a bit and helping those of you too lazy to be arsed but nice enough to spend the time reading this, here is a summary.

Firstly, I'd like to complain that Google asked me if I meant "Lindsay Buckle". Jeez Google, not you as well. I do know how to spell my own name you know, even if the rest of the world doesn't.

In the top spot is this blog... but not for the reason you might first think, i.e. that this is Lindsey Buckle's blog (that's the second item), but because once upon a time, quite a while ago, I blogged about there being another Lindsey Buckle in the world. I discovered this the last time I decided to Google myself for fun. You might be relieved to know this isn't a frequent pastime of mine; the previous post was written 2 ½ years ago.

This time I discovered a third and fourth Lindsey Buckle in the world (and I seem to remember a fifth one contacting me on Facebook at some point but I'm sure she was a Lindsay so not the same really). I don't think there are any other Lindsey Buckle Clewetts though.

The third listing is my Facebook public profile, which displays my photograph, lists some friends and rather embarrassingly announces that I'm a "fan of Gi Fernando", a friend who had some silly competition with his colleagues to see who could get the most fans. I'm not sure I really want that piece of information presented to the world. I find my friend list rather random too. It isn't in alphabetical order; it isn't a list of the friends I interact with most often; it doesn't even seem to be in any sort of chronological order. It's just purely and simply random and probably isn't a good representation of my real friendship group. Oh well.

Next is some random from Arizona's Facebook page. She's blonde and is a fan of Michael Phelps. I wonder if her friend list is as random as mine.

Next we have the fourth Lindsey Buckle's Linked In profile, followed by the article in the Sunshine Coast Daily about our wedding webcast, then my Linked In public profile, which doesn't say much about me at all really. Then some PDF about the fourth Lindsey Buckle. You're hogging my Google page, dude! S/he sounds really boring; s/he's a "Senior Actuarial Analyst", whatever one of those is. People looking for me will be extremely disappointed if they find those pages instead.

Next up is a foreign Facebook page and finally a post on Mark Lynas' website discussing whether I should fly home to my family in the UK. It was interesting reading this again as I initially thought not much has changed but ended up noting some stark differences between my life then and now. The sentiment and dilemma persists though but this is a point for discussion in another post at another time.

The Surfer Sutra movie starring Toby is the first item on the second page. I hadn't watched that for years but it brought back some memories, such as the fact that I wasn't allowed a speaking part due to my out of place accent, and the party scene, where the "beach babes" and "disciples" were kicked out of our actual New Year's Eve party during filming so we consoled ourselves on the driveway with a bottle of gin, bad singing and a camera. Thus were born the Angry Pirates and Blue Steel photos, which have plagued every gathering since. I also regained the memory of what my husband looks like without facial hair and how his bald head looks a bit like an egg.

I lost interest after that.