theimprobable.blog, which I look after on behalf of my partner’s brother after using it to GPS-track his adventures
I think that’s all of them, but it’s hard to be sure…
Footnotes
1 Maybe I’ve finally shaken off my habit of buying a domain name for everything.
Or maybe it’s just that I’ve embraced subdomains for more stuff. Probably the latter.
tl;dr: I’m tidying up and consolidating my personal hosting; I’ve made a little progress, but I’ve got a way to go – fortunately I’ve got a sabbatical coming up at
work!
At the weekend, I kicked-off what will doubtless be a multi-week process of gradually tidying and consolidating some of the disparate digital things I run, around the Internet.
I’ve a long-standing habit of having an idea (e.g. gamebook-making tool Twinebook, lockpicking puzzle game Break Into Us, my Cheating Hangman game, and even FreeDeedPoll.org.uk!),
deploying it to one of several servers I run, and then finding it a huge headache when I inevitably need to upgrade or move said server because there’s such an insane diversity of
different things that need testing!
DNDle, my Wordle-clone where you have to guess the Dungeons & Dragons 5e monster’s stat block, is now hosted by GitHub Pages. Also, I
fixed an issue reported a month ago that meant that I was reporting Giant Scorpions as having a WIS of 19 instead of 9.
Abnib, which mostly reminds people of upcoming birthdays and serves as a dumping ground for any Abnib-related shit I produce, is now hosted by
GitHub Pages.
RockMonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t really do much any more, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Sour Grapes, the single-page promo for a (remote) murder mystery party I hosted during a COVID lockdown, is now hosted by GitHub
Pages.
A convenience-page for giving lost people directions to my house is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Dan Q’s Things is now automatically built on a schedule and hosted by GitHub Pages.
Robin’s Improbable Blog, which spun out from 52 Reflect, wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify
“proper” hosting so now it sits in a Docker container on my NAS.
My μlogger server, which records my location based on pings from my phone, has also moved to my NAS. This has broken
Find Dan Q, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue with that in its current form anyway.
All of my various domain/subdomain redirects have been consolidated on, or are in the process of moving to, to a tinyLinode/Akamai
instance. It’s a super simple plain Nginx server that does virtually nothing except redirect people – this is where I’ll park the domains I register but haven’t found a use for yet, in
future.
I was pretty proud of EGXchange.org, but I’ll be first to admit that it’s among the stupider of my throwaway domains.
It turns out GitHub pages is a fine place to host simple, static websites that were open-source already. I’ve been working on improving my understanding of GitHub Actions
anyway as part of what I’ve been doing while wearing my work, volunteering, and personal hats, so switching some static build processes like DNDle’s to GitHub
Actions was a useful exercise.
Stuff I’m still to tidy…
There’s still a few things I need to tidy up to bring my personal hosting situation under control:
DanQ.me
You’re looking at it. But later this year, you might be looking at it… elsewhere?
This is the big one, because it’s not just a WordPress blog: it’s also a Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher server (thanks CapsulePress!), a Finger server, a general-purpose host to a stack of complex stuff only some of which is powered by Bloq (my WordPress/PHP integrations): e.g.
code to generate the maps that appear on my geopositioned posts, code to integrate with the Fediverse, a whole stack of configuration to make my caching work the way I want, etc.
FreeDeedPoll.org.uk
Right now this is a Ruby/Sinatra application, but I’ve got a (long-running) development branch that will make it run completely in the browser, which will further improve privacy, allow
it to run entirely-offline (with a service worker), and provide a basis for new features I’d like to provide down the line. I’m hoping to get to finishing this during my Automattic
sabbatical this winter.
The website’s basically unchanged for most of a decade and a half, and… umm… it looks it!
A secondary benefit of it becoming browser-based, of course, is that it can be hosted as a static site, which will allow me to move it to GitHub Pages too.
When I took over running the world’s geohashing hub from xkcd‘s Randall Munroe (and davean), I flung the site together on whatever hosting I had sitting
around at the time, but that’s given me some headaches. The outbound email transfer agent is a pain, for example, and it’s a hard host on which to apply upgrades. So I want to get that
moved somewhere better this winter too. It’s actually the last site left running on its current host, so it’ll save me a little money to get it moved, too!
Geohashing’s one of the strangest communities I’m honoured to be a part of. So it’d be nice to treat their primary website to a little more respect and attention.
Right now I run this on my NAS, but that turns out to be a pain sometimes because it means that if my home Internet goes down (e.g. thanks to a power cut, which we have from time to time), I lose access to the first and last place I
go on the Internet! So I’d quite like to move that to somewhere on the open Internet. Haven’t worked out where yet.
Next steps
It’s felt good so far to consolidate and tidy-up my personal web hosting (and to rediscover some old projects I’d forgotten about). There’s work still to do, but I’m expecting to spend
a few months not-doing-my-day-job very soon, so I’m hoping to find the opportunity to finish it then!
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
First eighteen years
When I was born, my parents named me Daniel, possibly as a result of Elton John’s
influence.1 I wasn’t given a middle name, and – ignoring nicknames, some of
which are too crude to republish – I went exclusively by Daniel for my entire childhood.
“Oh Lord! Please deliver me from this fate| For I am truly Not A Cat Person!”
The name comes from a Aramaic and Hebrew roots – din (judge) and el (god) – meaning “judged by god”, but I can’t imagine my parents knew or cared. They’ll
probably have been aware of its Biblical significance, where Daniel2
interprets dreams for the king, gets promoted a whole lot, but then because he prefers worshipping his god to worshipping his king they throw him to the lions3 before getting rescued by an angel and going on to have a successful career
predicting the end times (long before John of Patmos made it cool).
Next eight years
When I went to university in 1999 I started volunteering with Aberystwyth
Nightline.4 They already had a Daniel, so for convenience I
introduced myself as Dan. By the time I was going by Dan there I figured I might as well be Dan in my halls of residence and my course, too, so Dan I became.
People occasionally called me Dan prior to my going to university, but it was there that it became cemented as being my “actual name”. “Other” Daniel graduated and moved away from
Aberystwyth, but I’d settled pretty well on Dan. I updated my name in my email From: line to reflect the change in circa 2003, which felt plenty official enough, and I
didn’t do well at maintaining many of my pre-university friendships sufficiently that I’d hear “Daniel” from anybody at all.
“Shh, don’t tell anybody my legal name is ‘Dan’,” Dan of May 2003 might have said.
Last seventeen years
Eventually, my then-partner Claire and I got to that point where we were talking about what we wanted out of it in the long term. We agreed that
while marriage wasn’t a good representation of our relationship, but we quite liked the idea of having the same family name someday. And so we started, on-and-off, talking about what
that surname could be. Neither of us wanted to take the other’s and double-barrelling was definitely out: we decided we’d far rather come up with a completely original name that was
just ours.
It took us years, because we were pretty indecisive, but we eventually cut out choices down by committing to a single-character surname! When we chose ‘Q’ as
our new surname and wrote out some deeds poll I took the opportunity to change my legally-recognised first name to just Dan, at the same time. That was what
everybody5
called me by now, anyway.
1 My mother tells me that they also considered Luke, which I suppose
might have been George Lucas’ doing.
2 I mean the one from the Book of Daniel, of course, not one of the other three Daniels
mentioned in the Bible. It turns out that in ancient times, as now, Daniel was a common-as-muck kinda name.
3 It turns out than in ancient times, as now, being thrown to the lions was considered
fatal.
4 There’s a whole other story about why I did this, and the path it set me on,
but that’s for another day I think.
5 Not everybody consistently calls me Dan. My mother routinely still calls me Daniel, but
given that she gave birth to me she can get away with calling me anything the hell she wants.
Naturally, I was delighted, not least because it gives me an excuse to use the “deed poll” and “music” tags simultaneously on a post for the first time.
Don’t ask me what my “real” name is,
I’ve already told you what it was,
And I’m planning on burning my birth certificate.
The song’s about discovering and asserting self-identity through an assumed, rather than given, name. Which is fucking awesome.
The website’s basically unchanged for most of a decade and a half, and… umm… it looks it. I really ought to get around to improving and enhancing it someday.
Like virtually all of my sites, including this one, freedeedpoll.org.uk deliberately retains minimal logs and has no analytics tools. As a result, I have very little concept of how
popular it is, how widely it’s used etc., except when people reach out to me.
People do: I get a few emails every month from people who’ve got questions1,
or who are having trouble
getting their homemade deed poll accepted by troublesome banks. I’m happy to help them, but without additional context, I can’t be sure whether these folks represent the entirety of the
site’s users, a tiny fraction, or somewhere in-between.
So it’s obviously going to be a special surprise for me to have my website featured in a song.
I’ve been having a challenging couple of weeks2,
and it was hugely uplifting for me to bump into these appreciative references to my work in the wider Internet.
Footnotes
1 Common questions I receive are about legal gender recognition, about changing the names
of children, about changing one’s name while still a minor without parental consent, or about citizenship requirements. I’ve learned a lot about some fascinating bits of law.
For most of the last decade, one of my side projects has been FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a website that helps British adults to change their name
for free and without a solicitor. Here’s a little known fact: as a British citizen, you have the right to be known by virtually any name you like, and for most people the
simplest way to change it is to write out a deed poll: basically a one-person contract on which you promise that you’re serious about adopting your new name and you’re not committing
fraud or anything.
This web design looked dated when I made it and hasn’t gotten any younger, but the content remains valid as ever.
Over that time, I’ve helped thousands of people to change their names. I don’t know exactly how many because I don’t keep any logs, but I’ve always gotten plenty of email from people
about the project. Contact spiked in 2013 after the Guardian ran an article about it, but I still correspond with two or three people in a typical week.
These people have lots of questions that come up time and time again, and if I had more free time I’d maintain an FAQ
of them or something. In any case, a common one is people asking for advice when their high street bank, almost invariably either Nationwide or Santander, disputes the legitimacy of a
“home made” deed poll and refuses to accept it.
You’d think that Santander of all people would appreciate how important it is to have your legitimate change of name respected. Hang on… haven’t I joked about their rebranding before?
When such people contact me, I advise them of a number of solutions and workarounds. Going to a different branch can work (training at these high street banks is internally
inconsistent, I guess?). Getting your government-issued identity documents sorted and then threatening to move your account elsewhere can sometimes work. For applicants willing to spend
a little money, paying a solicitor a couple of quid to be one of your witnesses can work. I often don’t hear back from people who email me about these banks: maybe they find
success by one of these routes, or maybe they give up and go down one an unnecessarily-expensive avenue.
But one thing I always put on the table is the possibility of fighting. I provide a playbook of strategies to try to demonstrate to their troublemaking bank that the bank is in the
wrong, along with all of the appropriate legal citations. Recent years put a new tool in the box: the GDPR/DPA2018, which contains clauses prohibiting companies from knowingly
retaining incorrect personal data about an individual. I’ve been itching for a chance to use these new weapons… and over this last month, I finally had the opportunity.
Print this. Sign here. That’s pretty-much all there is to it.
I was recently contacted by a student (who, as you might expect, has more free time than they do spare money!) who was having trouble with Santander refusing to accept their deed poll.
They were willing to go all-out to prove their bank wrong. So I gave them the toolbox and they worked through it and… Santander caved!
Not only have Santander accepted that they were wrong in the case of this student, but they’ve also committed to retraining their staff. Oh, and they’ve paid compensation to
the student who emailed me.
Even from my position on the sidelines, I couldn’t help but cheer at this news, and not just because I’ll hopefully have fewer queries to deal with.
When Claire and I changed our surnames to the letter Q, six and a quarter years ago, I was pretty sure that we were the only “Q”s in the world. Ah Q‘s name is a transliteration into the Latin alphabet; Stacey Q is a stage name that she doesn’t use outside of her work (she uses Swain in
general); Suzi Q‘s “Q” is short for Quatro (perhaps popularised because of the
similarly-named song, which came out when she was aged 7; Maggie Q‘s “Q” is short for Quigley (she finds that her full name is almost impossible for her fans in East
Asia to pronounce); and both Q and Q are fictional. We were reasonably sure that we were the only two people in the world
with our surname, and that was fine by us.
Fictional, as much as we love them.
After Claire and I split up, in 2009, we both kept our new names. In my case, the
name felt like it was “mine”, and represented me better than my birth name anyway. Plus, I’d really gotten to enjoy having a full name that’s only four letters long: when my poly-tribe-mates Ruth and JTA (each of whom have almost 30 letters in their full names!) were filling out mortgage application forms recently, I was able to
get through the pages I had to fill significantly faster than either of them. There are perks to a short name.
Also fictional. But we’re less-upset about that.
I can’t say why Claire kept her new name, but I’m guessing that some of our reasons overlap. I’m also guessing that laziness played a part in her decision: it took her many months to
finally get around to telling everybody she’d changed her name the first time around! And while I’ve tried to make it possible to change your name easily when I launchedfreedeedpoll.org.uk, there’s still at least a little letter-writing involved.
Now, though, it looks like I may soon become the only Q in the world:
Personally, I thought that after she passed her PhD she’d
have even more reason to be called “Q”. I mean: “Dr. Q”: how cool is that? It sounds like a Bond villain or something. But on the other hand: if she wants to downgrade to
an everyday name like “Carter” then, well, I guess that’s up to her. I shan’t blame them for not opting to hyphenate, though: “Carter-Q” sounds like a brand of ear bud.
It’s not like there was ever anybody famous called “Carter”. Except for this guy, I suppose. But he was more of a “brave politician in the face of international crises” character than
a “Bond villain” character. Not fictional.
Seriously, though: good for them. If those crazy kids feel that marriage is for them, then I wish them the best of luck. And let’s face it, we’re approaching a bit of a lull in this run
of all-of-our-friends-getting-married, so it’ll be nice to have an excuse for yet another wedding and a fabulous party (I’m jumping to conclusions and assuming that they’re going to
invite me, especially after this blog post!).
Aww. It’s a sweet photo, but somebody should probably buy them a tripod as a wedding present: it’s hard to keep the horizon level in an arms-length selfie.
In other name-related news, look out for me in the Money section of tomorrow’s Guardian, where I’ll be talking about deeds
poll, as part of their series of articles on scammy websites. I always knew that it was only a matter of time before my photo appeared in a national newspaper: I guess I should just be
thankful that it’s for something I’ve done right, rather than for something I’ve done wrong!
On this day in 2011 I launched
FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a site that tries to make it as easy as possible for British citizens to change their names (and have those new names
accepted as being legally-recognised).
Generate free UK deeds of name change at freedeedpoll.org.uk.
The thing that people often don’t realise is that, as a British citizen, you have the right to be known by pretty-much any name you like. You don’t need a solicitor to change your name. You don’t even need any
money. You can just start using it. A deed poll, which you can make all by yourself for free, is just a piece of paper on which you write a promise that you
consider your “new” name to be your primary moniker, and not your “old” one.
Over the last year, almost 3,000 deed polls have been generated using the site, including ones for my partner Ruth (who opted to keep her maiden name as a middle name after she got married) and my friend Jen (who now has among the coolest – and most hippyish – collection of names I’ve ever seen). As to how many of the other thousands of deed polls
have actually been used, I simply don’t know: as a commitment to privacy, no logs are kept of the names people enter onto the form, so for all I know there are 2,000 all the same and
998 “blank” submissions.
Looking Forward
I’ve become a minor Internet guru on the topic of name changes, it turns out. The other week, a transgendered stranger contacted me via the “chat to Dan” link, to ask about the legal
aspects of their (slightly more-complex than most) case for changing their name. And because I’m a fan of helping people, I did a little research with them in order to find the answers.
I felt the need to keep stressing that IANAL, but I’m
pretty sure I managed to help, anyway.
And over the New Year, when there were a few days of downtime for the site (I was part of an exodus of domains from my SOPA-supporing previous registrar, and they made the process
difficult), I received messages from people asking when it would be back up again, so it’s obviously getting some use.
Most recently, a few days ago, a stranger emailed me asking for advice on the legal issues in changing the names of his children. After doing the necessary research, I’m now thinking of
expanding the site to make this easier, too.
A (sample) deed poll document generated by freedeedpoll.org.uk.
A strange feeling for me has been that this project is, and has been for the last year, “finished”. I’m not very good at finishing technical projects: one of the biggest and most
important things that I’ve worked on – Three Rings – is
now
in its tenth year and shows no sign of being “finished”. So it feels odd to have developed a website that’s complete, done and dusted, and probably won’t require more than a modicum
of maintenance over the coming decades to keep it running.
It’s good, though, that I’ve been able to help people with something about which far too many are underinformed. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and I like it.
To mark the ocassion, I’ve updated the open-source version of the
tool so that it works “out of the box”: it now includes all of the (free) fonts you need to get started, and can be used without setting up reCAPTCHA if you like. For more information about the history of the project, see my project page about it.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
tl;dr: [skip to the end] I’m closing my Facebook account. I’ve got some suggestions at the
bottom of this post about how you might like to keep in touch with me in future, if you previously liked to do so via Facebook.
The Backstory
A little over three weeks ago, I was banned from Facebook for having a fake name.
This surprised me, because I was using my real name – it’s an unusual name, but it’s mine.
I was interested to discover that Claire, who shares my name, hadn’t been similarly banned, so it seems that this
wasn’t part of some “sweep” for people with one-letter names, but instead was probably the result of somebody (some stranger, I’d like to hope) clicking the “Report this as a fake name”
link on my profile.
Perhaps somebody clicked their way through to this page, and claimed that I was not a "real person".
There are many, many things about this that are alarming, but the biggest is the “block first; ask questions later” attitude. I wasn’t once emailed to warn me that I would be
banned. Hell: I wasn’t even emailed to tell me that I had been banned. It took until I tried to log in before I found out at all.
The Problem
I don’t make much use of Facebook, really. I cross-post my blog posts there, and I keep Pidgin signed in to Facebook
Chat in case anybody’s looking for me. Oh, and I stalk people from my past, but that’s just about the only thing I do on it that everybody does on it. I don’t really
wallpost, I avoid internal messages (replying to them, where possible, by email), and I certainly don’t play fucking FarmVille.
Once, one of my Facebook friends invited me to FarmVille. They're not my Facebook friend any more.
So what’s the problem? It’s not like I’d be missing anything if I barely use it anyway? The problem is that my account was still there, it’s just that I didn’t have access to
it.
That meant that people still invited me to things and sent me messages. My friends are smart enough to know that I won’t see anything they write on their wall, but they assume
that if they update the information of a party they’ve Facebook-invited me to that I’ll get it. For example, I was recently at a fabulous party at Gareth and Penny‘s which they organised
mostly via Facebook. They’d be forgiven for assuming that when they sent a message to “the guests” – a list that included me – that I would get that message: but no – it fell silently
away into Facebook’s black hole.
The Farce(book?)
Following this discovery, here’s how I spent the next three weeks:
Facebook gave me a form to fill in when I tried to log in, explaining their “Real Names” policy and asking me to fill in my real name and explain “what I use Facebook for”
(“Ignoring friends and stalking exes, same as everybody else,” I explained, “Why; what do YOU use Facebook for?”).
It then asked me to scan and upload some government-issued photographic ID, which I did. It still wouldn’t let me log in, but it promised that somebody would look at my ID soon (and
then destroy their copy) and re-enable my account.
I periodically tried to log in over the next few days, without success: I was to wait, I was told.
After about a week, I received an email from “Rachel” at Facebook, who explained the “Real Names” policy and asked me to provide my REAL name, and a scan of some photographic ID. I
replied to explain that I’d already done this once, but complied with her request anyway.
Another few days passed, and I still hadn’t heard anything, so I filled in the Contact Forms in the Help section of Facebook, asking to have my request processed by an actual human
being. I provided by ID yet again.
Another few days later, I received an email from “Aoife” at Facebook. It was pretty-much exactly the same as the earlier email from Rachel. I replied to explain that we’d
been through this already. I supplied another pile of photo ID, and a few sarcastic comments.
A real person, with a real name, holding two examples of his real government-issued photographic ID. I wonder how long it would take a smart person to look at a scan of that ID and
say, "Yeah, this person's real enough to be allowed to post pictures of cats on his wall, again."
Another couple of days passed, so I dug up the postal addresses of Facebook’s HQ, and Mark Zuckerberg‘s new Palo Alto house (he’s tried to keep it secret, but the Internet is pretty good at this kind of
detective work), and sent each of them a letter explaining my predicament.
Yet more days passed, and we reached the third week of my ban. I replied to Rachel and Aoife, asking how long this was likely to take.
Finally, a little over three weeks after the ban was first put in place, it was lifted. I received an email from Aoife:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for verifying your identity. Note that we permanently deleted your attached ID from our servers.
After investigating this further, it looks like we suspended your account by mistake. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues
getting back into your account, please let me know.
Thanks,
Aoife
User Operations
Facebook
The Resolution
So now, I’m back on Facebook, and I’ve learned something: having a Facebook account that you can’t log in to is worse than not having a Facebook account at all. If
I didn’t have one at all, at least people would know that they couldn’t contact me that way. In my situation, Facebook were effectively lying to my friends: telling them “Yeah, sure:
we’ll pass on your message to Dan!” and then not doing so. It’s a little bit like digital identity theft, and it’s at least a little alarming.
I’ve learned something else, too: Facebook can’t be trusted to handle this kind of situation properly. Anybody could end up in my situation. Those of you with unusual
(real) names, or unusual-looking pseudonyms, or who use fake names on Facebook (and I know that there are at least a dozen of you on my friends list)… or just those of you whose name
looks a little bit off to a Facebook employee… you’re all at risk of this kind of lockout.
Me? I was a little pissed off, but it wasn’t the end of the world. But I know people who use Facebook’s “single sign-on” authentication systems to log in to other services. I know
people who do some or all of their business through Facebook. Increasingly, I’ve seen people store their telephone or email address books primarily on Facebook. What do you do when you
lose access to this and can’t get it back? When there’s nowhere to appeal?
And that’s how I came to my third lesson: I can’t rely on Facebook not to make this kind of fuck-up again. No explanation was given as to how their “mistake” was
made, so I can’t trust that whatever human or automated system was at fault won’t just do the same damn dumb thing tomorrow to me or to somebody I know. And personally, I don’t
like Facebook to seize control of my account and to pretend to be me. I come full circle to my first realisation – that it would be better not to have a Facebook account
at all than to have one that I can’t access – and realise that because that’s liable to happen again at any time, that I shouldn’t have a Facebook account.
The Conclusion
So, I’m ditching Facebook.
Goodbye, Facebook.
None of this pansy “deactivation” shit, either – do you know what that actually does, by the way? It just hides your wall and stops new people from friending you: it still keeps all of
your information, because it’s basically a scam to try to keep your data while making you think you’ve left. No, I’m talking about the real “permanent deletion” deal.
I’m going to hang around for a few days to make sure I’ve harvested everybody’s email addresses and pushing this post to my wall and whatnot, and then I’m gone.
If you’re among those folks who aren’t sure how to function outside of Facebook, but still want to keep in touch with me, here’s what you need to know:
I like email! Remember email? I’ve always preferred it to Facebook messages anyway – that’s why I always reply to you by email, where possible. My email address
is pretty obvious – it’s my first name @ this domain name – but if that’s too hard for you, just fill in this form to get in touch
with me. If you’re up for some security while you’re at it, why not encrypt your email to me.
I like instant messaging! I may not be on Facebook Messenger any more, but we can still chat! The best way to get me is on Google Talk, but there are plenty of
other options too. Here’s how you do it. Or if you’re really lazy, just check at
the top of my blog for the little green light and click “Chat to Dan”.
I like blogging! Want to know what’s going on in my life? I never updated my “wall” anyway except to link to blog posts – you might as well just come look at my
blog! Too much like work? Follow my RSS feed and get updated when I post to my blog, or keep an eye on my Twitter, which usually gets links to my new blog posts almost as soon as they go up.
I like sharing!I’m not on Google Reader any more, but when I find fun
things on the Internet that I enjoyed reading, I put them in this RSS feed.
Subscribe and see what I’ve been looking at online, or just look at “Dan is Reading…” in the right-hand column of my blog.
And I’m not opposed to social networking! I’ve just reached the end of my patience with Facebook, that’s all. Look me up on Google+ and I’ll see you over there (They also have a “Real Names” policy, which is still a bit of a problem, but
I’m sending them a pre-emptive “Don’t ban me, bro!” email now)!
Ironically, the only Facebook accounts I’ll have now are the once which do have fake names. Funny how they’re the ones that never seem to get banned.
My Name Is Me. I choose to participate on much of the Internet by my full name. I say “full name”, rather than “real name”, because the term “real name” is full of loaded
connotations. For example, I (still) periodically have people insist that Dan Q isn’t my real name, because it’s not the name I was born with. It doesn’t matter to them
that it’s the name I’m known by to pretty much everybody (except my mother, who still calls me Daniel). It doesn’t matter that it’s the name on my passport or driving license. To them,
it’s not “real” because to them, real names are either those acquired by birth or marriage, and somehow nothing else is valid. And that’s without even looking at the number of times
I’ve been discriminated against because my name is “too short” for ill-designed computer systems.
That doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that sites like Facebook and – in the
news recently on this very topic – Google+ demand that full “real” names are used on the profiles of their site users. If you
don’t use the name that appears on your government-issued documentation (if you have such a thing), then your accounts on these sites are liable to be closed. By the way: the same is
theoretically true of your Google Profile, too, so even if you’re not on the Google+ bandwagon and you, say, use a nickname in your Google Profile, your account is still at risk.
Now, I can see the point that these policies are trying to make. In fact, there was a time that I’d have naively agreed with them. They’re trying to make the Internet a safer,
more-accountable place. But in actual fact, there’s a real risk that they’ll make the Internet a lot more-treacherous for some people. I shan’t bother listing folks who are affected,
because others have done it far
more-thoroughly than I ever could.
But I shall point you in the direction of my.nameis.me, where you can read a little more about these issues.
Thanks.
I talk a lot. If you don’t want to listen to me ramble, and you’re just looking for the free deed poll generator, click here.
After Claire and I changed our names back in 2007, I actually took the time to do a little research into deeds poll (or, more-specifically in this case, deeds of change of name). It turns out that we did it the wrong way. We paid a company to do all of the paperwork for
us, and – while it wasn’t terribly expensive – but it wasn’t free, and “free” is exactly how much it ought to cost.
In the intervening years I’ve helped several friends to change their names via deeds poll (yes, “deeds poll” is the correct plural), and I’ve learned more and more about why the whole
process should be simpler and cheaper than many people would have you believe.
A deed poll, by definition, is nothing more than a promise signed by one person (it’s not even a contract – it’s got little more weight than a New Year’s resolution), on paper which
has straight edges. That’s what the word “poll” actually means: that the paper has straight edges. Why? Because back then, a contract would typically be cut into two on an irregular line, so that when the
two halves came together it would be clear that they were originally part of the same document – an anti-forgery measure. A deed poll, because it’s signed only by one person, doesn’t
need to be separated like this, and so it has straight edges.
The Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, a contract from 1252 - note the cut top edge where it originally joined to the "other half" of the contract.
That means that’s it’s perfectly legitimate for you to write, on the back of a napkin, “I have given up my name [former name] and have adopted for all purposes the name [new name].
Signed as a deed on [date] as [former name] and [new name]. Witnessed by [witnesses signature(s)].”
The problem comes when you send that napkin off to the Inland Revenue, or the DVLA, or the Passport Office, and they send it back and laugh. You see, it helps a hell of a lot if your
deed poll looks sort-of official. You ought to put some work into making it look nice, because that makes a world of difference when you ask people to believe it. That’s
not to say that they won’t laugh at you anyway – the Passport Office certainly laughed at me – but at least they’ll accept your name change if it has an air of authority
and is covered with all of the most-relevant legalese.
Behind the dozens of scam artists who’ll charge you £10, £20, £30, or even more to produce you an “official” deed poll (tip: there’s no such thing), there are one or two “free”
services, too. But even the best of these has problems: the site is riddled with advertisements, the document isn’t produced instantly, you’re limited in how many deed polls you can
generate, and – perhaps worst of all – you have to give them your email address in order to get the password to open the documents they give you. What gives?
Generate free UK deeds of name change at freedeedpoll.org.uk.
So I’ve made my own. It’s completely free to use and it’s available at freedeedpoll.org.uk: so what are you waiting for – go and change your name! Oh, and it’s also open-source, so if you want to see how it works (or even make your own version), you
can.
Why? Well: I don’t like feeling like I’ve been scammed out of money, so if I can help just one person change their name for free who might otherwise have been conned into paying for
something that they didn’t need: well, then I’ve won. So change your name or help your friends and family to, on me, or just download my code and learn a little bit about Ruby, Sinatra,
and Prawn (the technologies that power the site). What’re you waiting for?
