Bounded in a Nutshell

On my way into the office today, I overheard one of our graduate students using the phrase internal biological clock. This naturally got me thinking about what an external biological clock would be; I concluded that it would be something like a squirrel that was also a wristwatch.

In other news, it's the end of term and I'm in Grading Hell.

From Triple-H. Pretty clever, especially by the standards of online quizzes.

My gmail account name, as you might notice from the side of the page, consists of a pretty common English word; even if it doesn't come up in your everyday conversations, it's not one that you'd pay much attention to if someone mentioned it in passing. As such, I imagine that variations on it are not uncommon.

My primary evidence for this is that I keep getting e-mails for people who aren't actually me. A sampling:

• Once I received information about when my job interview was scheduled with a consulting firm. In Israel. I think I actually got two of these, one after the other, but it's hard to tell because the first was in Hebrew.
• I'm apparently registered at a couple of different forum sites; most notable (in terms of the number of messages I get about it) is a French guitarist site, which seems to think I call myself Green Disease.
• I receive e-mails in Portuguese with some frequency. No idea what any of them are about.
• The most recent mystery, and the one prompting this post: I just got a whole bunch of correspondence forwarded from a guy in Finch, Ontario. How do I know this? Because a few of the e-mails are between the gentleman in question and various poker sites, with the latter requiring the former to supply personal information for a credit cheque. This was accomplished by dude scanning in the front of his driver's licence… which I now have an image of.

So if there's a lesson here, I guess it's something like: be careful when you type your e-mail address. If you get it wrong, there's no telling what kind of freak gets to read your mail.