John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt

His name is my name too!

Whenever we go out

The people always shout

“There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!”

It’s been stated that, if you’re one in a million, that means there are at least 7,000 people out there just like you.

I know of at least 7 people with my name.

There’s a state senator in Iowa.

There’s a maker of fine pool cues.

There’s a Swedish IT security evangelist.

There’s a professor emeritus of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

There’s a sports podcaster. I used to get tweets meant for him all the time.

And there’s a restaurateur in Greater Los Angeles.

This I know because he was trying to connect with a ride-share/food-delivery service. Presumably, he meant the conversation to go to his restaurant address and his personal email address.

Except it was my personal address it was sent to.

At first, I was entirely unsure whether it was a strange phishing attempt or not, and as I don’t feed the trolls, I don’t pheed the phish. But today, I received a username, initial password and PIN for this service, and I decided that it looked real enough that I needed to get my deniability on.

This is one really good thing about web forms, that they ask you to put your email in there twice, usually, and send a confirmation email to that address, saying “if you didn’t intend to use this service, don’t click confirm.”

I don’t know to what extent I could have created mischief with this access, but I have to think that I could’ve caused some. Since, as I always say, I do web-but-not-web and don’t have many authentication problems in my domain, I don’t know the best practice for this, but somehow, the service did not use it.