rss club – Dan Q

I called out a scam… but now I’m not so sure…

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👋 Looking to change your name by deed poll without paying nor giving over your personal information?

I suggest you use my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. Want an alternative? DeedPoll.lgbt is good too!

FreeDeedPoll.org is okay, but be aware that it’s run by a company who also sell deed poll services, so they’re not entirely impartial.

I’m stuck on an ethical question and I’m not entirely sure what to do.

I called out a scam…

At the start of this month I called out “ChangeNames.co.uk” as a scam after I received an email asking me to promote a “free deed poll” service:

When I looked into it, my “scam alarm” went off time and again. I couldn’t believe that this wasn’t an inelegant attempt to harvest personal information:

The domain name wasn’t even registered (which I exploited by registering it!), which felt like someone claiming a level of authority they didn’t have or the work of an AI bot.
Some of the links were broken: again like some kind of AI scatter-shot.
It funnels to an email subscription signup form. It felt off that the “service” required that you sign up to an email list to get a deed poll?

The form requested weird data. Both “full name” and “first name” are the kinds of things you want for email marketing but if you’re making a deed poll you probably want to be clear about whether you want the old or new one. A mandatory free text field asks for your reason for changing your name (which, in my opinion, is none of anybody else’s business!).
The double opt-in uses tricky language. The confirmation email encourages you to click the “confirm your subscription” button by saying that “Confirmations help us know you have recieved [sic] the deed poll and everything works.” Why so keen on getting the double opt-in?
What you eventually get is just a template. You get a link to a public Google Drive folder containing Word documents that you have to finish for yourself, same as you can get from more-reputable sources: e.g. gov.uk! The templates have mistakes that could, under some circumstances, render the document legally-questionable or even be considered fraudulent.

Here’s the entire experience of signing up to the mailing list just to get a template. Just for fun, I used an email address on my latest domain name purchase. 🤭

Sounds dubious, right? So I blogged about it.

But now I’m not so sure…

A few weeks later, I received an email, followed by a surge of comments, from Tav at ChangeNames.

The comments are a work of art, by the way:

The first comment tries to expose the email address I used when testing the service, but instead doxxes some other random service user… (could you dream up a more-perfect example of why you shouldn’t give up your personal information in exchange for a deed poll!)
The second comment sets up a straw man, claiming that I think everybody who asks for your personal details must be a scammer.
The third comment is my favourite: it’s the one that says that I ought to be using my software engineering skills to make things better. As if that wasn’t what I’d been doing, via FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, for frickin’ ages:

Over the course of exchanging a couple of emails, I’m no longer certain that what we’re looking at is a scam.

Don’t get me wrong: I can’t possibly recommend this “service”, which requires that you surrender your personal information (with little assurance about how it’ll be used) to get the link to an uncustomised template (like the ones you can find online easily, but worse).

But I’m increasingly coming-around the arguments that Tav doesn’t intend harm. It could be that he’s trying to provide information about deeds poll to people, for free. His videos on YouTube and TikTok certainly provide good advice in a form that’s accessible to an audience that I, let’s face it, wouldn’t have a clue how to reach.

It’s possible that he’s genuine: that his motivations are a mixture of wanting to help people (and to bulk out his CV). I’ve played that game myself. Perhaps he’s just using the limited tools that he’s comfortable with to try to achieve that?

If I come to that conclusion, then obviously I’ll write a blog post correcting my statement!

And now I’ve got an ethical conundrum…

Tav’s asked if he can buy the changenames.co.uk domain name from me.

If I refuse to sell it to him just because his service is inferior and less privacy-respective than the many alternatives (including mine), he’ll just rebrand and buy a different domain name. All I’ll have achieved is alienating somebody who might well have the same end goal as me: making free deeds poll more widely available and better-understood.

But if I turn it over to him, am I morally complicit in his service… whether that turns out to be as bad as a scammy marketing list or as benign as running something that already exists (but better)?

What do you think?

That’s what I said in the first place!

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Day 1: Senior management ask me about a proposed change. I tell them it’s not worth doing. They tell me to plan and scope it anyway; it’s important that it happens.

Day 4: After a ton of research and meetings, I present a full plan about how we can make the proposed change happen. It’s hard and it’s expensive, but it’s achievable.

They tell me it’s not worth doing. 🤦😜🤬

Sleepy Legs

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This weekend, I (a) carried a 1970s Yamaha organ around the place, (b) took a beginner lesson in Argentine tango, and (c) spent an hour swimming in an outdoor pool that was, despite the mini-heatwave, still amazingly cold.

My poor old-man-legs are not happy with me.

The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act [contains spoilers]

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The elder child took me to the cinema to see The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act tonight. I was pleased and impressed that it didn’t take the (ample) opportunities for a trite nor easy way out, instead finishing its arc in a satisfying way that did justice to everything that had come before it. Like its original source material, this wasn’t a story about people escaping or overcoming their antagonist… it was a story about found family and coming to terms with the reality that we’re given, for both its joys and tragedies.

(Unlike the story the inspired it, though, it is of course not completely bleak, and is even hopeful right up to the very end.)

So yeah. Not bad. Was a good crowd to see it with, too. The audible gasp from the entire auditorium at the moment that it becomes apparent that Caine still exists was enjoyable to be part of.

Oh, and in case you haven’t seen any of the bajillion places that have doubtless already leaked the “store exclusive” merch QR qode that appears at the end of the movie, here you go: https://glitchproductions.store/pages/u2fsdgvkx19pzajepvyzbljzzv48kjlz331hmw9mith7fo5l1tzw3vji92nudusk

Sitting in the rain

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You know it’s been too hot and dry when, as soon as the rain starts to fall, your first thought is to go sit outside in it!

Liquid Crystal Cafe – Names Hack

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Last night I wrote a stupid userscript to exploit a stupid XSS vulnerability to add a stupid feature to a Web-based chat room I’m in.

Everybody else’s name is coloured in accordance with the theme they’re using. But mine… can be a rainbow, or an image, or something else entirely:

The Frosted Pane Again

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The Frosted Pane

Driving across Witney today my music player randomly selected Pagan Wanderer Lu‘s The Frosted Pane. Just like the first time, I was absolutely wrecked by the heartwrenching lines that show the bout of depression he’s singing about is interminable, as the seasons pass with him still unable to see the world in the clarity and colour he’d enjoyed before:

Trick or treaters
I see them through the frosted pane
Carol singers
I see them through the frosted pane
My wife and daughter
I see them through the frosted pane

Probably it wouldn’t have hit me so hard, but things have been tough lately. There’ve been plenty of times (not always the obvious ones) over the last few weeks where my “healthier” coping strategies haven’t really pulled their weight and I’ve definitely found myself resorting to flumping, overeating, or “just one more glass of wine”¹.

A philosophy of depression

The experience reminded me of a blog post published about four-and-a-half years before the death of David Bowie². A philosophy of depression, published pseudonymously by “malbo21”, describes the strategies the author finds successful in managing their depression.

If you believe it’s the tree in your neighbour’s garden that’s giving you depression then you can’t cut it down. You can’t ask the neighbour to cut it down. So maybe you start to resent the neighbour? You resent the way he puts out his bins. You resent the way he parks his car. The way he laughs all the time and looks happy. You resent the fact that your friends don’t agree what a dick your neighbour is. Stupid friends, they’re just like him – with their laughter, and car parking and bin putting out. Wankers.

So maybe it’s your friends who are making you depressed as well? After all you do seem to be depressed whenever you’re around them… You remember that one occasion that you were out when everyone else was having a good time and you just wanted them all to fuck right off. You sat there thinking what unbearable idiots they all were. And yeah sure, you were tired, you were a bit drunk, you’d had a stressful day… but those things have happened before and you were fine. So it mustn’t have been those factore, it must mean either that your friends are awful irritating people, or that some external force called ‘depression’ is manifesting itself via your friends, your neighbour, and that fucking tree!

Looking back on it with the experience of, y’know, studying for a foundation degree in counselling and psychotherapy in the interim, the fundamental strategy suggested here might be described as self-reflection, internalising your locus of evaluation, and developing your authentic self. A Rogerian hat trick, and exactly the kind of uplifting humanistic approach I might expect from somebody with malbo21’s history³.

Chopping down the tree is as easy as getting your ass in the garden. Feeling better about the tree is harder, but it might lead to greater insight and to genuinely solving the problem.

That’s a simplification. I don’t intend to minimise it! The post’s still great, and it’s reinforced by some excellent examples and metaphors. Putting fancy words on it doesn’t undermine it. Humanistic psychotherapy is of that special category of magic that still works even when you know the secret!

But fucking hell, having a human brain’s hard sometimes, right?

Normal life

Mostly, I just want my normal life back. For a while there, I felt like I’d got shit mostly figured-out. Ruth jokes that I’m the kind of person who likes to carve out a comfortable rut that they can sit in, and while she’s mostly used it as a metaphor for my tendency to find a job I love and then stop considering the possibility that there might be a better one… I think there’s an analogy there for the rest of my life, too.

I like to know what I’m doing and where I’m living a week from now. I like to know where my stuff is. I like to have my own space and make my own mark on it. And while I also like to explore and adventure and to be surprised, I like to do so on my own terms: I like to be able to “turn off” the crazy-times. If that’s being-in-a-rut, then yeah: I like being in a rut.

But all the disruption in my life right now doesn’t give me that feeling. It makes me feel unsafe and unsettled to not know where I’ll be living in the near future, or how it’ll be paid-for. It leaves me uneasy to have my routine broken, re-cast, and broken again: even if it’s just little things like… normally, I try to get myself 5-10 minutes of piano practice on weekdays, while my lunch heats. But the piano lives on the ground floor and it’s not in its best state and even if it were… that’s not where I am.

When supporting a person in emotional crisis, I like to consider their window of future vision. A person in the most-critical of distress might not be able to tell you what they’ll do tomorrow, because they struggle to imagine a tomorrow in which they still exist. As their distress eases, they expand their window to be able to see past hours, then past days, eventually past weeks and months: to be able to plan a future that has a place for them in it.

Distress causes a person to close their own window. But uncertainty in your life closes it for you. The reason I don’t know where I’ll live (or work, given that I work from home!) in two weeks is because, well, that’s uncertain! It is, at least, easier to be rational about a window of future vision that’s being closed by an external factor… but it still isn’t a pleasant feeling.

Ugh.

A dim place

All of which is to say, I guess… thanks, Spotify and Pagan Wanderer Lu?⁴ Thanks for throwing a stumbling block right in front of me when I was already limping. Thanks for tripping me up such that I landed on a 15-year-old blog post, written from a dark place, and had to look back on it from a somewhat dim⁵ place of my own.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel in the saga of our flood. My brain just lags a little behind, I guess.

Footnotes

¹ By the metrics, I’m doing better now, on F-Day plus 22, than I was earlier on: even with Lu’s successful attempt to bring me to tears this afternoon, I’m now crying fewer days than not, so that’s a win, right?

² Why do I mention Bowie’s death? It features in the first line of the song and acts as an anchor in time to the events it describes, as well – perhaps – as a catalyst.

³ Obviously the author’s using a pseudonym for anonymity, but I’m pretty confident that I could pick them out of a line-up of “everybody I ever helped train to volunteer on an emotional support helpline that happened to be underpinned by similar psychological principles”, possibly with my eyes closed.

⁴ Clearly this whole thing is the result of an RNG/PWL collusion!

⁵ This bit is a coded way of saying “no, I don’t think I’m depressed, just… fragile”. This footnote is a non-coded way of saying the same thing. Footnotes are great. Why don’t Andy’s lyrics come with footnotes, hmm?

Fucking Vibe Coding

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My workplace is now name-and-shaming/praising engineering teams based on a ranking of what proportion of their PRs use generative AI, with more-vibe-codey teams scoring “higher” than less-vibe-codey ones.

There are no metrics to back up the assumption that these teams are more-productive, or produce fewer regressions, or develop and maintain their skills better. It’s just supposed to be a given. When challenged, senior management falls back on “it’s used at [name of large company], so we need to use it too” arguments.

Fuck.

Dead Dad Day

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Happy Dead Dad Day to those who celebrate (which I guess, in reality, is just me and my sisters).

I could have really appreciated being able to phone my dad, today, to talk about the ongoing challenges with making my house habitable after the flood.

Ah well. At least we’ve now got (some) electricity in (some of) the house: that’s an exciting development. And we’ve got somewhere to live for the next two weeks: that’s good news, too.

Thermal Cut-Out

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Note to self: when running a big ol’ 13 amp dehumidifier through an extension cable that’s longer than you need, do not leave the excess cable on the spool, or else what you’ve made is a 13 amp electromagnet and that shit gets hot. 😅

(Fortunately nobody is stupid enough to sell me a 10 metre, 13 amp extension cable without a thermal cut-out.)

Laurels

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Sometimes I feel like I’m resting on my laurels.

The most-important thing that I’ve given to the world is almost-certainly Three Rings. Three Rings facilitates several volunteer-years of volunteer work every day. Over the last 23 years it’s become so essential a service that several major charities – and innumerable smaller grassroots groups – can’t conceive of how they functioned without it.

A distant second is probably FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, through which I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to change their name for free. Plus, through this I’ve learned enough about the law that I’ve been able to support people fighting discriminatory behaviour by high street banks, and trans kids whose parents don’t support their identity, and dual-citizens standing up against illiberal laws in their ‘other’ countries, and divorcees whose estranged exes won’t let them share their name with their children.

Everything else is a far-distant third. All the voluntary work, all the open-source, all the… everything… will probably never leave a mark so significant as, y’know, those two. (If any of this sounds like a humblebrag, I’m sorry: that’s truly not my intention.)

What if I waste the second half of my adult life producing… nothing? At least: nothing of even remotely-comparable value? Have I “peaked”? Have I already done the most-good for the world that I ever will? Where will that leave me in five, ten, or twenty years?

Ultimately, the problem is that I might never be “enough” for my own standards. Possibly what I need isn’t to “make more things”, it’s to “have more therapy”!

But for now: this is what weighs on me from time to time.

Assing

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I feel like I’ve spent the last week or so half-assing everything. Both at work and at home I’ve started countless tasks but finished almost none.

Not entirely sure what’s gotten me. Some opportunistic bug that’s left me feeling run-down, but not quite enough to call myself “sick”? An insufficiency of sleep? Too damn little sunlight this time of year? Not enough fibre (which is apparently the solution to everything this year)???

Whatever it is, my body and brain wish I were hibernating, and are making known their displeasure at my having to do useful things like wrangle children and code. Thinking’s a little bit like wading through treacle.

Wake me when it’s spring. Meanwhile, I’ve picked out two tasks that, if I can complete today, will at least make me feel like I’ve achieved something this week. Let’s see how we get on.

2026 Kicks Off

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At first I couldn’t get behind the “reboot to 2016” trend. It feels like if you want a nostalgic “simpler time” you need to go back around two decades, not one¹… plus 2016 wasn’t even that great, was it?²

But so far, I’ve got to admit, 2026 feels like it’s off to a… challenging start, too. Several of the folks closest to me seem to be struggling, and it sucks.

Don’t get me wrong: 2026 doesn’t suck like 2012 sucked. It definitely doesn’t suck like 2017 sucked.³

But… I don’t know, it just feels like the first couple of weeks of 2026 have been… “playing on hard mode”.

Not pictured: the dog. Because as much as I love her, I don’t feel like she’s “got my back” like everybody else depicted here.

Fortunately, I’m backed by the same kickass family team that handled the (tough!) challenges of those previous years, so I’m confident that we’ve got this.

But for a couple of moments, I’ve been enticed by the idea that maybe we could reboot ourselves back a decade! Wouldn’t it be nice if wishing something hard enough could make it so!

Anyway: better get back to trying to make this year… better. There’s lots of time left to turn it around, at least.

Footnotes

¹ Although the trend’s been spearheaded by Gen-Zs, so I guess 2006 will be earlier than they can remember, if they were born at all!

² The UK voted for Brexit, the USA voted for Trump, and Turkey failed to overthrow their authoritarian leader, resulting in even-tighter crackdowns on civil liberties. The USA saw its deadliest ever mass-shooting (at the time) at the Orlando Pulse gay nightclub, Islamic extremists killed and injured hundreds in France, and Hurricane Matthew flattened Haiti. We lost Carrie Fisher, Prince, and David Bowie. If you’re reminiscing about 2016 as a “good year”, you might be doing it wrong.

³ If you know, you know.

Note #27698

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It’s Thanksgiving, and so the vast majority of my team and wider colleagues – who are based in the US – are off. That’s fine, I figured: a chance to me to get my heads down for some undistracted coding time.

The Universe had a different idea:

On the upside, today I learned a lot about the internals of the system that was at fault. 🤪

Sick Day

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I hate being ill.

Not (just) for the obvious and immediate reasons: (this time around: the nausea, the musculoskeletal aches, the dizziness) the physical symptoms.

It’s a psychological issue I get hung up on. It feels wastefully unproductive to put aside time to rest and recover; extravagantly selfish to take care of myself before others: an unearned luxury to lie in bed while the rest of the world works.

Clearly there’s a deeper issue here. Feeling (seen as?) underproductive or not pulling my weight is a real hangup for me. I’ve long established a pecking order of my priorities that puts my self-care… pretty low down.

That turns out to be a general psychological sticking point for me, probably for most of my life. I’ve been working on it for a few years, though, and I think I’m getting better at it. This morning, I managed to stop myself from staggering downstairs to help ensure the kids got up and ate breakfast, before a bleary-eyed stagger to my desk to check my work email. Instead, I’m still just lying here in bed, an hour after my alarm rang.

I still hate being ill. But maybe I’m getting better (at it)?