Mistaken Identity

A couple of days ago I setup my web server so that it would run statistics on everybody that visits my site. It's something that I used to have running all the time but when my old webserver got hacked in february I didn't bother setting it up on my new server.

One of the things that the program tracks is the list of people that have linked to my site from their web page. Most of the time I will see a list of websites that I recognize, usually the blogs or personal websites of friends and family, but every once in a while I will discover that some random person on the internet has discovered and decided to link to my blog.

Whenever this happens I'm always curious to figure out who linked me and why. So, when I came across a link to my site from skazatraskazzz.blogspot.com, I was a little curious; all the more so because this was actually a person's blog and not just some random website.

When I first loaded the web page I quickly scanned it over and could not see any obvious references to me or my website. Even searching for the word "svoid" on the page produced no results. In a moment of brilliance it occurred to me that if the site had linked to mine then there would minimally need to be an href somewhere in the document that pointed to my site. So, I opened up the HTML source of the web page and searched one more time.

It turns out I was linked from the current article right at the top of the page. Hmm, I must of scanned past it in my cursory examination. The article was a bit lengthy so I decided to start reading from where my site was referenced rather than read the whole article from the beginning.

As I start reading I pick out that he's talking about two people called Dan and Holly. Wait, is he talking about me? I read a little further and he mentions a wedding in Mankato. Hmm, maybe he just picked up that detail from reading my blog. This must be a case of mistaken identity. Surely this person has got me and my blog confused with some other Dan that he knows.

I decide to start at the beginning. The poster mentions that he ran into an old friend of his on the previous weekend and that as he was talking to her (OK, maybe this is one of Holly's friends) some strange guy came up and put his arm around her. Wait, that could have been me at any point during the last weekend. Except that I don't remember running into any of Holly's friends. I'm racking my brain but I just can't remember.

He goes on to mention that the name of the fellow is John Abu-Saba. Who the hell is John Abu-Saba? That doesn't even sound like a real name. Is he speaking in code? Am I John Abu-Saba? I'm confused.

As I scan over the rest of the article I pick up a few more clues: the poster went to school at UW Eau Claire (the same place as Holly) and even makes mention to a party at Holly's apartment that I might have been at years and years ago. The only problem is that certain details don't add up. For instance, I didn't show up to the party with a bunch of friends and we didn't drink up all of the alcohol and leave.

I'm freaking out. What's going on here? Who the hell is this person and why are they telling lies about me?

As I reach the peak of my paranoid delusion (just before the black helicopters start to show up), I glance up in the upper right corner of the blog and notice the author's name. Andrew Fefer. Andrew Fefer? Sounds familiar... can't quite place it... Oh yeah, Andy! All of the sudden, everything becomes clear. Andy was (and still is) a good friend of Holly's from college.

I read over the article a couple more times and realize that Andy isn't even referring to running into Holly in his opening paragraph. It was someone else entirely different. John Abu-Saba is probably a real person and definitely is not me. As I read the article with a little more clarity, I feel silly that I ever thought that I might be. Oops, I guess that's what I get for starting in the middle of the article.