Today is a significant marker in my life, the first anniversary of the passing of my mother-in-law. Her death was sudden and I was unprepared for it. While shocked and sad, after the week of mourning was over, I expected life to return to normal quickly. In many ways it did, but in retrospect I'm amazed at how much flux there was throughout the following year. In hindsight, I now see how depressed I was for several months after her death. It feels silly to say that, since I'm generally a happy person. The idea of me being depressed for a day let alone a month feels very out of character. But I was and it affected the decisions I made and blurred my focus, both personally and professionally. I've been searching during most of the past twelve months and it took a while to find myself again, as my wife has so patiently endured. My productivity at work took a nose dive for a while, partially because I became extremely disinterested in what I was working on. My disinterest ...

I recently was forwarded an email about Google's "scary" (for some) feature of reverse phone searching. You can read more about the email at Snopes.com . Anyway, I was bothered enough by the false sense of security a FUD email like this provides for those who aren't as wise to today's Internet issues that I was forced to write the following response for my family to read as a counterpoint. I receive many forwarded emails, but I award few with more than a passing glance. This one is so misguided though, I felt it deserved a response at least to those I know and care about. Phone numbers and addresses aren't private information and shouldn't be or they betray the very nature of what they are, location devices. Reverse searching for a person or address based on a phone number has been available for a very long time on many websites, the most well known, for me at least, being http://anywho.com. The advice the original email provided will lead many who rea...