Well I know it’s been a little while since I last updated, but hopefully this one will make up for it. Come with me if you will on a bizarre little journey into the world of identity theft and virtual lives. If you’ve read my earlier post “Identity, Why Do I Care?” you’ll already know a little about it, but believe me, that wasn’t even half of the story.

In the latter half of 2003 I began frequenting a well known mac community site called spymac. It’s one of the largest sites of it’s kind, and has a very diverse and active user-base. Over time I began to get to know some of the members who post in the forums, and there were a few people that I exchanged messages with on a semi-regular basis. One of these people went by the nickname of dotcomboi.

On spymac everyone gets to use what’s known as an avatar, a small graphic that represents you visually, often people use a photograph of themselves, or a graphic that relates to Macintosh computers / Apple products, anything really that they want. Dotcomboi’s avatar was a photographic portrait of himself, or at least so he said. If you detected a note of suspicion in my tone just then it’s because dotcomboi’s photo was exceptional in two regards, firstly that the quality and composition of the photograph was highly professional, and secondly because the young gentleman featured in the image was by anyone’s definition particularly handsome, a fact commented on by many fellow members of the forums. Now although this was unusual, it was not beyond the realms of possibility and was quickly explained by dotcomboi as he claimed to have worked as a model for several years until quite recently. He also claimed to be currently working as a web/graphics designer, director, and general new media guru. He told me and many others of his job as owner of a new media company based in Aventura, Florida. Said company going by the name of Hyperactive. Now this seemed odd to me, that someone would undertake such an extreme career change, but again, without reason to really care I simply dismissed any doubts I had. That was until two new forums members appeared claiming that dotcomboi wasn’t all he claimed to be. The two members started to harass dotcomboi claiming the photo he was using was not him, that they had seen the photo somewhere before. This got me interested. So I thought I’d take a look through his member gallery, to see if I could find any evidence either way. Curiously enough there was a distinct lack of photos of himself, instead I was greeted by numerous pictures of iPods and various other gadgets. However one of the photos of his iPod also clearly showed his hand holding it, and what was strange about this hand was that the fingers were oddly fat, almost like sausages. This didn’t seem to make sense in relation to his face picture. So I added to the thread were his identity was being challenged, asking about the fat fingers. I rapidly received a series of messages claiming extreme offense on his part, but it didn’t alter the fact of his disproportionaly chubby digits.

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I’ve just imported the few entries that were on my abortive geeklog site, so although this site may not be looking as good as it was yet, it has much of the same content. There was an old HTML only blog I kept for a while, maybe I’ll manually add them too. You can actually visit that site still and look at some of the first photos i took with my IXUS 400 there too: http://homepage.mac.com/leeparry/

Apologies if you were looking for something that is now missing, I’m experimenting with a different blog engine, hopefully a more flexible one. The old site was Geeklog based, and a bit messy, hopefully this will be better!