Tag: names
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It took 13 years to notice my invalid vehicle registration certificate!
Thirteen years ago, it seems, a DVLA form processor decided that my name must have been a company name, and incorrectly registered my car's keeper as being a non-existent company imagined to share my name. And I only just found out.
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Wikipedia @ 25: Carl Person
As I continue my 25-consecutive-days-of-Wikipedia, today's random article of the day was Carl Person, a lawyer with an interesting history.
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Actually, Yes! (that IS what my birth certificate says)
There's a certain kind of person who, upon hearing my unusual name, immediately asks whether that's what's on my birth certificate (with an underlying implication that it's not my 'real' name, whatever that means, if it isn't). Well: as of this week, thanks to a quirk in Scottish law, the name I've used every day for almost two decades DOES appear my birth certificate. Fuck the haters.
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Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying "ethical non-monogamy"?
Nobody feels the need to say "ethical monogamy"; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.
I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word "ethical" and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)
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This form dynamically changes the labels for the Surname and Forename field based on the value of the Gender field. Wut?
Because a Male Surname is totally distinct and nothing like a Female Surname, I guess?!?
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A form asking for Surname, Forename and Gender (with options Male, Female, and Both) changes its labels to e.g. Male Surname/Male Forename or Female Surname/Female Forename when the Gender option is changed.
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Sometimes people connect my unusual name to popular culture. They say things like "Oh, Q like James Bond?" or "Oh, Q like Star Trek?".
I think their choice of franchise tells me more about them than they learn from my answer, which is usually "No, Q like the set of rational numbers."
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Council Disenfranchisement
West Oxfordshire District Council seem to want to disenfranchise me by requiring that I bring photo ID to a polling station with a different name on it than the photo ID that they themselves issued.
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[Bloganuary] What's in a name?
My name is Dan. But it wasn't always. For today's Bloganuary, let's look at the history, significance, and meaning of my name (and how I've changed it over the years!).
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It Is Only Q
The programmers at British Gas are among the many who don't believe that a surname can be only a single character, and their customer service agents have clearly worked around their validations (or just left a note for themselves in the problematic field!)... leading to hilarious postal mail.
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I'd Like to Change my Mother's Maiden Name
LastPass users are having to cycle their passwords in the light of a recent security incident. That might well include their "security question" answers, which necessarily leads to some amusing conversations.
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Confused.com Confuses Me
Confused.com's user interface makes Dan cry when he tries to comparison-shop car insurance. Here's why.
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Santander to Accept Homemade Deeds Poll
Santander are one of two banks who've been a thorn in Dan's side since he started helping people to change their name by deed poll. But no longer, perhaps.
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Just One Q
With the recent announcement that his friend Jimmy and his ex- Claire are engaged, Dan realises that he might somebody become the only person in the world with his surname.
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On This Day In 2011
As part of the On This Day series, Dan looks back over the last year that he's been running FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a service that makes it easy and painless for British citizens to change their name (and have that name legally-recognised)
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Hello, Facebook; Goodbye, Facebook
Inspired mostly by his experiences with Facebook over the last few weeks, Dan decides that it's time to hang up his Wall and quit. Goodbye, Facebook. There's also instructions in this post about how to keep in touch with him, if you've forgotten how to do that outside of repeatedly clicking "Poke" on his page.