Dan Q

Month: February 2018

Digest for February 2018

Summary

This month I developed a workaround to WordPress/Jetpack’s (terrible) CAPTCHA, replaced “love” with “butt” in song lyrics (snortle), and argued with a pension provider that I shouldn’t need a doctor’s letter to justify changing my gender on their website from “not provided” to “not specified” because that isn’t actually a change of gender identity, just a change in how their systems store gender.

I also shared ideas on the Web’s position as a universal platform making it attractive as a universal solution, its approach to URLs as one of the (many) problems with AMP, and a link to one of the most-complex and interactive Abstruse Goose comics ever.

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Posts marked by an asterisk (*) are referenced by the summary above.

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Reposts marked with a dagger (†) include my comments or interpretation.

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Bureaucracy vs. Common Sense

In addition to the pension I get from my “day job” employer, I maintain a pension pot with a separate private provider which I top up with money from my freelance work. I logged in to that second pension provider’s (reliably shonky, web-standards-violating) website about a month ago and found that I couldn’t do anything because they’d added a new mandatory field to the “My Profile” page and I wasn’t allowed to do anything else until I’d filled it out. No problem, I thought: a few seconds won’t kill me.

Neon sign showing the words "Work Harder"
If I’m lucky, I might be able to afford to retire this century.

The newly-added field turned out to be “Gender”, and as it was apparently unacceptable to leave this unspecified (as would be my preference: after all, I’ll certainly be retiring after November 2018, when gender will cease to have any legal bearing on retirement age), I clicked the drop-down to see what options they’d provided. “Not provided”, “Male”, and “Female” were the options: fine, I thought, I’ll just pick “Not provided” and be done with it. And for a while, everything seemed fine.

Gender field with options "Not provided", "Male", "Female".
Leaving the field as the undefined “Select One” option wasn’t valid (I tried!) so I changed the value.

Over three weeks later I received a message from them saying that they hadn’t yet been able to action the changes to my profile because they hadn’t yet received hard-copy documentary evidence from me. By this point, I’d forgotten about the minor not-really-a-change change I’d made and assumed that whatever they were on about must probably be related to my unusual name. I sent a message back to them to ask exactly what kind of evidence they needed to see. And that’s when things got weird.

I received a message back – very-definitely from a human – to say that what they needed to see what evidence of my gender change. That is, my change of gender from “not specified” to “not provided”.

Fluttershy says "If I had fingers, I'd be showing you one."
Fluttershy gets it.

They went on to suggest that I could get my doctor to certify a letter verifying my gender change. Needless to say, I haven’t made an appointment to try to get my GP to sign a document that confirms that my gender is “not provided”. Instead, I’ve emailed back to ask them to read what they just asked me for again, and perhaps this time they’ll engage both brain cells and try to think about what they’re actually asking, rather than getting tied up in knots in their own bureaucratic process. Let’s see how that goes.

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Dan Q posted a note for GC13WZQ Swing Lower (Historic Site)

This checkin to GC13WZQ Swing Lower (Historic Site) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

That’s a shame, @brianbrianharvey. Who kicked you out, exactly? It should be possible to reach the cache without treading anywhere that you’re not “allowed” to (i.e. you’d expect to spend some time on a public road, above a public waterway, etc….)

Replacing “love” with “butt” in song lyrics

Seeing as it’s almost Valentine’s Day and by way of proof that I’m not always so serious as to write about important topics like WordPress’s CAPTCHA implementation or how I became a brony, here are some of the highlights of a conversation that Ruth and I just had (tapping in to our inner 12-year-olds, I guess: some alcohol might have been involved) about song lyrics that are immeasurably improved if you replace the word “love” with “butt”. Here are some of my favourites:

  • Greatest Butt Of All – Whitney Houston
  • Can You Feel The Butt Tonight? – Elton John
  • Shower Me With Your Butt – Surface
    Eww.
  • Big Butt – Fleetwood Mac
  • I Would Do Anything For Butt (But I Won’t Do That) – Meat Loaf
  • Too Much Butt Will Kill You
    “Torn between the butter and the butt you leave behind.” Yes, you can totally turn “lover” into “butter”, but it’s the addition of the word “behind” that made me snortle.
  • Thinking Out Loud – Ed Sheeran
    “Will your mouth still remember the taste of my butt? Will your eyes still smile from your cheeks?”
  • Butt Song For A Vampire – Annie Lennox
  • Bleeding Butt – Leona Lewis
    “Keep bleeding. Keep, keep bleeding, butt. You cut me open”
  • How Deep Is Your Butt? – Bee Gees
  • Addicted to Butt – Robert Palmer
    “It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough. You know you’re gonna have to face it: you’re addicted to butt.”
  • One – U2
    “Did I disappoint you, or leave a bad taste in your mouth? You act like you never had butt and you want me to go without.”
  • Lay All Your Butt On Me – ABBA
  • Butt Stinks – The J. Geils Band
  • Tainted Butt – Soft Cell
  • Can’t Help Falling In Butt – Elvis Prestley

Okay, now I’ve got that out of my system we can carry on as normal.

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After Section 702 Reauthorization

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

After Section 702 Reauthorization – Schneier on Security (schneier.com)

For over a decade, civil libertarians have been fighting government mass surveillance of innocent Americans over the Internet. We’ve just lost an important battle. On January 18, President Trump signed the renewal of Section 702, domestic mass surveillance became effectively a permanent part of US law. Section 702 was initially passed in 2008, as an…

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Web! What is it good for?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

https://adactio.com/journal/9016 (adactio.com)

You can listen to an audio version of Web! What is it good for?

I have a blind spot. It’s the web.

I just can’t get excited about the prospect of building something for any particular operating system, be it desktop or mobile. I think about the potential lifespan of what would be built and e…

You can listen to an audio version of Web! What is it good for?

I have a blind spot. It’s the web.

I just can’t get excited about the prospect of building something for any particular operating system, be it desktop or mobile. I think about the potential lifespan of what would be built and end up asking myself “why bother?” If something isn’t on the web—and of the web—I find it hard to get excited about it. I’m somewhat jealous of people who can get equally excited about the web, native, hardware, print …in my mind, if it hasn’t got a URL, it’s missing some vital spark.

I know that this is a problem, but I can’t help it. At the very least, I have enough presence of mind to recognise it as being my problem.

…

My problem, too. There are worse problems to have.

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TFW a Twitter bot solves a video game mystery

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

TFW a Twitter bot solves a video game mystery | The Video Game History Foundation on Patreon (Patreon)

Official Post from The Video Game History Foundation: Something pretty fun happened yesterday that I wanted to share with you all: a bot on Twitter accidentally provided the clue that finally solved a 28-year-old mystery about a DOS game that never shipped.Yesterday, the VGHF Twitter account was tagged in a thread by @awesomonster, who was frantically

Something pretty fun happened yesterday that I wanted to share with you all: a bot on Twitter accidentally provided the clue that finally solved a 28-year-old mystery about a DOS game that never shipped.

Yesterday, the VGHF Twitter account was tagged in a thread by @awesomonster, who was frantically trying to figure out the origins of a screenshot:

StarTribes: Myth of the Dragon Lord

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An Oxford book store is cashing in on the success of The Good Place by selling the moral philosophy and ethics books Chidi references in the series.

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

An Oxford book store is celebrating the success of The Good Place by selling the moral philosophy and ethics books referenced by Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper) in the series – and its efforts are going viral.

The popular NBC and Netflix series aired its season two finale last week, and to commemorate that, Oxford’s Broad Street branch of Blackwell’s has put up a book stand titled ‘Chidi’s Choice’.

If you’ve not been watching The Good Place then, well: you should have been.

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