Blackmoor Vituperative

I just had a panic moment when I thought that a Google document I’d spent the better part of a week writing had vanished. This is what I plan to do from now on, once a week, until I forget about it and stop doing it.

1. In Google Docs, go down to the far left bottom menu item, and select “More V” and then “All Items”.
2. Click the select box at the top of the screen next to “TITLE” to select all items.
3. Click the “More V” button at the top middle of the screen, next to the eyeball (“Preview”) icon, and select “Download”.
4. Select “Change all formats to… OpenOffice”, and click the “Download” button.
5. Wait a couple of minutes and then download the file somewhere.

I just spent too much time pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to get Google Docs to paste spaces and keep them spaces, rather than turning the spaces into tabs. I couldn’t find a way to prevent it, so here is what I did.

1. Paste my text into a text editor, such as Notepad++.
2. In the text editor, find & replace every instance of a space ” ” with a character that does not already exist in the text, nor in the document you intend to paste that text into. In my case, I used a tilde “~”.
3. Copy this modified text, and paste it into Google Docs.
4. In Google Docs, find & replace every instance of the placeholder character with a space ” “.

Is it ridiculous that you need to do this to keep Google Docs from corrupting what you are pasting? Yes. Yes, it is.

We saw The Dark Knight Rises last night. I’m not bothering with a spoiler warning, because it’s unnecessary: the movie is just that predictable. I started looking at my watch after about 70 minutes. That’s not a good sign.

The first half of the movie is a strung-together series of Long. Serious. Monologues. After a while it picks up, and turns into a dull, predictable remake of Batman Begins (a fantastic movie).

I liked Anne Hathaway, but she wasn’t onscreen enough to salvage the movie around her. Dull and predictable sums it up.

Oh, and if you think the ending needs further explanation (why anyone would need the ending explained is a mystery to me, but apparently some people go looking for ambiguity), this toy can explain the ending to you.

I am completely sincere when I say Batman & Robin was better in damned near every way. If you’d told me a week ago that I would say that, I would have laughed at you.

Edit: Someone saved me the trouble of listing most of the problems I had with the Dark Knight Rises script. They leave out one noteworthy problem: the “these guys are the League of Shadows, no wait, now they’re revolutionaries, no, wait, now they are suicidal goons … who the hell are these guys, anyway?” problem.
(Note: Google erroneously marks this site as malicious.)

I recently got the hatch of my car fixed at Pouncey Tract Collision. They did a great job. I just wanted to start off with that, because I keep forgetting to blog about it.

This has been a great weekend. We went to a friend’s Christmas party on Saturday, and then went out to dinner at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. Great food, but ludicrously overpriced. About double what we would normally pay. But it was a celebration, so what the heck. The food and service really were great.

Today we made lasagna and gingerbread cookies, and invited some good friends over to watch Christmas specials and movies. We watched Santa Claus (the crazy Mexican movie where Santa fights Satan), Elf, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas. That was great. I firmly believe that Christmas is for everyone, regardless of religion or lack thereof, and I love sharing it. As usual, we made too much food. We’ll be eating lasagna for the next week. Lucky for us, we really like lasagna.

Tomorrow we go to fill out the loan paperwork for our house. Yay!

A brave soul by the name of Todd Vierling has posted a compelling opinion piece explaining why, in his words,

… those of you who think that using real names will make people more open and social are horrifyingly deluded. Your idealistic vision of “real” interaction through real names isn’t just nonsense; it’s making online socialization more dangerous for everyone by putting them at risk of real-world prejudicial action.

(from Why the Google Profiles (or any) “Real Name” Policy is Important to Me , duh.org)

It’s worth reading. I suggest that you do.

More fun and educational links are at Google strikes out again on social networking.

If you have been paying attention, you know that I planned to delete my Google+ account today unless they reconsidered their so-called “real name” policy, which endangers and disenfranchises users. The day has come. They had plenty of time to eliminate this policy. Time is up. I use my so-called “real name”, but I will not use a service with such contempt for the safety and privacy of its users. I urge you to avoid Google+.

Google doesn’t care whether linking your real name — what some people call your “wallet name” because it’s on all the plastic in your wallet — to your online comments might get you sacked from your job, outed as the only gay in the socially conservative village or your door kicked in by the police.

It really, really doesn’t care. [...]

Google chair Eric Schmidt said it himself during an interview in Edinburgh with Andy Carvin from US National Public Radio.

(from Google+ is a goddam Trojan horse, Crikey)

It’s a real shame, because aside from that policy, I think Google+ is awesome. Ah, well.

This and other fun Google+ related links at Google strikes out again on social networking.

P.S. I am also removing the “+1″ links from my blog. Screw you, Google.

“Mr. Schmidt, how do you justify putting people’s lives in danger and discriminating against people who need to, or simply wish to, preserve some privacy online?”

“The Perfect Order is coming, and you will either be among the elite, or you will be among the common people whose lives are numbered and traded like so many Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Google will not be a Yu-Gi-Oh card! As for the rabble you mention… eh. Their cards have no value, anyway. We can make more money without them than with them.”

I’m at the Edinburgh Intl TV Festival and just got to ask a question to Google CEO Eric Schmidt regarding real names on G+. I asked him how Google justifies the policy given that real identities could put people at risk?

He replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information.

Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, he said G+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it. It’s obvious for people at risk if they use their real names, they shouldn’t use G+. Regarding countries like Iran and Syria, people there have no expectation of privacy anyway due to their government’s own policies, which implies there’s no point of even trying to have a service that allows pseudonyms.

He also said the internet would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward.

(from Andy Carvin, on Google+)

It looks like I am on track to delete my Google+ account at the end of the month. Bonnie Nadri sums up my feelings about this whole thing:

Nice going, Google; in a scant month you’ve turned me from one of your biggest and most vociferously ardent fans into someone who would rather be app-less and out the money I spent in your Android Market than ever as much as think about doing business with you again[...]

(from Google: Thanks… for nothing.)

I am not quite to that point yet, but it’s coming.

“Identity” is not a scalar quantity. Google is attempting to force it to be so. The attempt is doomed, because it’s impossible, but in the meantime, Google is impairing the quality of its service and eroding the good will the company has accrued in the past decade.

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

In the late 1980s, I moved to southern California. City of Orange in Orange County, to be exact. If you start at Los Angeles and drive south until you can see the horizon, you’ll be in Orange County.

Shortly after I moved out there, Susan flew out and visited me there for a week. That’s the first time we went to Disneyland together. We weren’t even really friends yet, at that time, although I’d had a crush on her in high school. By the time she went back to Virginia, all of my friends had a crush on her, too.

A year or so after I’d moved to California, my mother followed. I don’t think it’s because I lived there. She’s always been something of a rolling stone: an artist and an explorer, never satisfied with one place for too long. Very Jack Kerouac, my mother. There was a span of about six months in the late 1980s when neither of us knew the other’s address. We weren’t estranged: we just fell out of touch for a little while.

Anyway, before that, she lived down the road from me in Orange County, just behind an Arby’s on Tustin Ave. That’s where this mug came from. I admired it at the time, and years later, in the mid-1990s, she gave it to me. I don’t recall if it was for my birthday, or Christmas, or if she was just moving and didn’t want to pack it. The important thing to me is that she remembered that I’d liked it.

According to Google, that Arby’s is still there.

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In case you weren’t already tired of hearing about this (heh… heheh), here is an opinion from a scientist blogger (or perhaps a blogging scientist) on the value of pseudonyms.

Our new Scienceblogs overlords sure have great timing with their new pseudonymous blogging rules. For those who haven’t run across that yet, National Geographic has decided to eliminate pseudonyms and force everyone with a blog remaining here (which is already dwindling) to blog under their real names. Meanwhile, out here in the real world, there’s a new unfortunate case study (short version: “EpiGate”) showing how blogging under one’s real name can lead to serious threats and potential loss of employment, among other things.

(from On the value of pseudonyms, Scienceblogs)

Mothers (who may or may not also be scientists) also have an opinion on the subject.

Those who have the knee-jerk response of “Well, anyone who doesn’t want to use their real name has got something to hide or is just out to cause trouble” are, at best, cosmically misinformed. The notion that if “real names” (a term which, by the way, is nearly impossible to define – go ahead, give it a try) are good enough for the wealthy geeks at Google it should be good enough for anyone just reeks of massive privilege. (Frankly, the way Google’s been implementing their ‘policy’ also reeks of colonialism – if you’ve got a nice, comfortable looking ‘wasponym‘ as your name at G+, you’re probably fine, it seems, at least based on what people have been documenting about their clownish banning and reinstatement behavior so far.) I’ve been reading, thinking, and writing about identity and privacy stuff for more than a decade, and the more I learn, the more I come to agree with jwz, who said:

the other night I had dinner with a friend which turned into an hour long argument over it, because he thought that forcing everyone to use their real names was just fine. This is someone I’ve known for decades, so to say that I was shocked and horrified by his attitude is an understatement. It was as if my friend had suddenly started beginning sentences with, “I’m not a racist, but…”

(from Quick Thoughts on Parents and Pseudonymity, CurrentMom)

Meanwhile, Information Week gives us 5 reasons Google+’s name policy fails, TechEye offers concrete suggestions on How to stop Facebook and Google trampling on your privacy rights, and over on ZDNet, Violet Blue (who has been banned and reinstated by Google+ for using her “real” name at least twice now) declares, “Google Plus: too much unnecessary drama“. These and more new links at Google strikes out again on social networking.

Google has been, in many ways, an admirable organization that has done a lot of good but to call its real names policy shortsighted would be kind. By demanding “real” names they can’t reliably determine what are real, they’ve inconvenienced a lot of people and excluded all of those who, for example, live under politically repressive regimes or who might for social reasons wish to stay anonymous.

Nyms matter enormously and an online world without nyms, where everyone can be easily tracked, completely measured, tidily pigeonholed, and endlessly manipulated, will become much less free and much less valuable.

(from No nyms equals evil, Computerworld)