what dreams may come

On Sunday I wound up taking an impromptu nap for about 3 hours. Call me Rip Van Winkle. Sleeping for 100 years would be fabulous, though I don't think I could pull of the beard. When I woke up, I had this oddly unsettled feeling that I couldn't shake. It took about an hour until I figured it out.

I had a dream that one of my friends found this blog and knew I was the author. And he was angry at me because of some of the content. Which is ridiculous, since I haven't written anything here that would bother anyone. Anyway...I knew that I had been very careful to preserve my anonymity. So I asked him why he thought it was me? He produced printouts of the blog, and on one of the pages I had filled out a meme. And entered my real zip code! Idiot!

Of course, it was all a dream. I'd never put my zip code on the blog, and while I want this to be a good read, I'm not going to risk my future career by writing department gossip. I don't even update the site at work.

So yesterday I'm checking out my statcounter while waiting for my PCR reagents to thaw, and I notice something. A hit from myself, at work. Which reveals way more than I expected. When I turned my computer over to the Computer Gurus, then placed it on the department domain, and then apparently gave it a new Computer Name. A name which is very very revealing of my identity. And there it is, for anyone with an IP tracker to see. Gah! Every website I visited in the past month.

I freaked out a bit and then set about trying to fix it. It took several reboots and a frantically trying to remember my admin password that I set up the day I got the computer back. I took it off the domain. I couldn't log back in! I remembered the admin password. I couldn't get it back in the domain! Finally I got the important bit changed and the rest back to normal.

So. While not exactly the same, my dream did forwarn me of certain privacy issues with my work computing. Strange. Perhaps a future in fortune-telling is my destiny? In any case, I'm feeling pretty good about my computer skills, though an expert probably could have saved me a few steps.