Yeah, that one was definitely my bad.

[azurelunatic]

So I come home from anime night to a rather righteously (and rightfully!) annoyed e-mail from Christopher Little, the author of an essay that I'd viciously deconstructed back in 2001 as the result of a freshman assignment to take one of several essays and write an in-depth critique of it. He explained that the textbook that I'd found the essay in had a mis-print: notably, the ending quotation mark in a paragraph of text that his essay had quoted from another essay was misplaced. Not having done all the research I should have, I had come to the erroneous conclusion that the bad placement of the quotation mark smelled of plagiarism. This was not the case; it was an editing error in the re-print of the essay in the textbook I was working from. When reminded of the essay, I vaguely remember that the textbook was updated and that I'd gone to the essay and looked, but hadn't seen the problem. Mr. Little asked that I do something about my incorrect entry.

I have apologized to him via e-mail, and edited the original entry to clarify. (He'd originally thought that perhaps I should take the entry down, but I pointed out the Google/archive.org thing, and he agreed that my idea was all right too.)

LJ posts get around, it seems.

Comments

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

Sounds like he just got around to googling himself and his published works.

[azurelunatic]

Looks like it. He mentioned he did that on occasion.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

Man, that reminds me of the Learning Perl thing.

The Internet is weird.

[azurelunatic]

The Perl thing was mostly caused by the author not knowing LJ ettiquite at all, though. This was just a mass convergence of bad.

[azurelunatic]

(That is to say, after I e-mailed back, this guy and I had a cordial e-mail exchange, whereas the Perl guy did not impress me much.)

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

He apologized as much as I expect a curmudgeonly old-programmer-type to apologize (and more apology than I have gotten from most of his ilk whom I have come into conflict with). But I mean the people googling their stuff and having to run interference with other people on the internet who wouldn't normally be in their circle of people-they-talk-to thing. Conflicts coming up that have that strange scope. I am not coherent today.

[azurelunatic]

Aha. Yeah, it does have that scope to it. I hope I did my part speaking well for the silly/left/liberals.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

The Perl guy is local to me, and I've run into him a time or two. I got the same impressions from him in person as I did from watching your exchange with him.

[azurelunatic]

I got the impression that the perl guy learns social skills by rote, and is confused when he runs into places that have different social expectations.

uhhmmm

[xanateria.livejournal.com]

just wanted to mention that you can actually set your preferences to exclude journal entries from google results...if you wanna...

Re: uhhmmm

[azurelunatic]

I don't mind Google indexing my journal. I figured that the guy would probably not want to have a deleted or made-private entry still hanging about in Google's cache. I actually use Google on my journal to find stuff I've lost, because I keep writing things here and then not remembering when or what I tagged them, but remembering enough keywords that I can find it via Google, generally.