Happy St Dwynwen’s day to all my Welsh friends and anyone else who celebrates this day. =) <3

[Last year’s card also here]

A few days ago, a very nice Taiwanese friend of mine, Lolita, gave me a pack of Taiwanese beef jerky. Something that I had never before tried. =) At the first glance the package contents looked more or less like any other beef jerky I had ever seen before. But after I opened the package and had a taste… well, let’s just say it’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted before!! This was probably one of the bigger surprises I’ve ever had in terms of foreign food taste. =) Well, the Taiwanese jerky is sweet. And I mean really, truly, cake icing kind of sweet. There’s also a ton of cinnamon in there, and it’s generally softer than common jerky. After the initial surprise slap has worn off, I’m finding myself stealing bits from the package more and more. The taste is so unusual that keeps drawing me back. As you can see, not much of it remains now…. =P

YAY there’s a new Satori demo, and it is as usual awesome! =) In addition to the usual Satori goodness, there’s the soundtrack by Chaser to make things even more interesting. [If you’ve been reading, you’ve probably seen posts here about a couple of tracks by Chaser in the past… my favourite being “Petarda” so far!] So, check out the demo’s Pouet page here.

Recently I randomly came across one of these quotation ecards that fly around the web, and the quotation somehow got into me enough to do a search and find the book that it came out of. It’s called “The History of Love”, by Nicole Krauss. I got me the ebook, and the 260 pages took me about a month to read [which is the time in which I usually read about 10 times that amount!]. I suppose you could say I meditated on each page. I think this is one of the greatest non sci-fi books I’ve ever read. Probably will read it again after some time. =) More info here.

Can’t get enough of this new Spythriller track… and the video is pretty awesome too!

A couple of days ago on the train back from Zürich I finally read the recent Marvel woohoow, a.k.a. “Point One“. This 1 shot issue consists of 7 pilot stories for Marvel’s upcoming story arcs for 2011, only 1 of which was of particular interest to me. I was very excited when I found out there was going to be something related to “Nova” in there, and well, there was. The “Harbinger” chapter is about Nova… except, this is “A” Nova and not “the” Nova. This is some Nova from some possible alternate reality, with a lower rank than “the” Nova… and there’s no reason to believe that this story will somehow bring back our Nova. Also, according to the list at the end of the issue, none of the immediate upcoming arcs actually include Nova, so as of yet we can’t even have a solid idea as to where this alt-Nova is going to show up. And that, well, sucks. =P

To be honest [and to repeat what gzillion other people have said already] Marvel is doing a pretty huge injustice to their cosmic arcs and characters in general. They’ve killed Nova and Starlord, and well, Adam Warlock is nowhere to be found. They also cancelled “Guardians of the Galaxy” altogether which I believe was a huge mistake. So at the current state of things, once “Annihilators : Earthfall” is done, there are no more real cosmic arcs. In addition, it appears that Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning [a.k.a. DnA] have absolutely no idea about what’s happening with Nova which is horrible, seeing how they’re the authors of the best of Marvel Cosmic. And of course whoever’s writing FF, has managed to reset the Kree and Inhumans to their pre-Annihilation status which means all of the brilliant work of DnA and the rest of the authors of “Annihilation” and “Annihilation : Conquest” has simply vanished. So yes, a bloody load of injustice.

Anyhow, if any of you guys know anything more about what’s happening with Marvel Cosmic, do let me know!

When I first started using Google+, the name on my profile was obviously my nickname which I had always used on my Google account. A nickname which by no means gives me anonymity, seeing that it has been attached to my real name all over the web, and even people in real world very often call me with it. The nickname has been around since my first days of hacker-spaces and various other tech sub-societies and as a result a lot of people would look for me by it, hence my persistence in using it…

When I received the warning message on my account saying that I had to use my real name, despite the bad taste that was left in my mouth, I went ahead and switched to my real name. I figured I was way too busy for the drama that would follow, were I to keep the nickname. That was a bit more than a month ago.

Well, big surprise, the drama came anyway. 2 days later my contacts started telling me that my Google+ profile was no longer accessible, showing a “not found” message. I checked my profile and saw the message on the top of it, saying that my profile was suspended due to my name not being acceptable by their “standards”, and was waiting to be reviewed, which would probably take a few days. A week later, my profile was still suspended, I had received no communication from Google, and I had come to realized that my ability to use other Google services was also limited.

That was when I started looking for ways to communicate with whomever was in charge. First thing I noticed, was that there basically are no functional ways for doing that. I tried sending a number of feedbacks which clearly had no effect. Then I landed on the support forums which is apparently where Google intends for you to end up, if you go looking for help/support. Of course what you’ll never receive on these forums is help or support. My requests for help were ignored and eventually buried, same as many others. Soon it became clear that a terribly large number of people are on the same boat.

While searching the forums for answers, I came across a few mentions of writing an appeal, using a link that should be somewhere on the suspended profile, but I saw no such link anywhere. Then I found out that the appeal link only shows up once your profile has been reviewed and “really” suspended. My profile seemed to not even qualify for that. So, for the duration of an entire month, my profile was stuck in the proverbial limbo.

By the end of the 3rd week, I was thoroughly inflamed. With everything I had read in other people’s complaints, responses and stories, it had become quite obvious what the problem was. My uncommon name and even less common last name didn’t look enough like a real name to Google. That’s just so deliciously ironic, seeing that a simple Google search would have cleared out my identity. My name’s all over the web. I have a couple of domain names and as a result who-is records which happen to tie my Gmail address directly to my name. For Pete’s sakes, how difficult would it be to verify my identity?

Doing some more digging, eventually I found a link to the appeal form somewhere and sent a number of appeals through. Then a good friend of mine offered to talk to his contacts in various departments in Google… but what finally did it, was another dear friend talking to her contact in Google+ , and getting my profile released [thanks a lot =) ].

So now, after a month of bloody struggle my account is usable again, and that only because of my friend and her friend. I find many aspects of Google+ quite brilliant, but this experience has been a true disaster, and the whole “real name policy” is looking like serious folly.

As I once wrote in the forums, it was my impression that this was supposed to be a social network for people from everywhere. But these so called policies seem to be shaping the service such that mainly people from North America and certain parts of Europe can use it without trouble. In the past decade Google has slowly taken over the web so that one way or the other you’re using some of their services, and now a lot of people who for some reason or the other can’t do exactly as almighty Google commands, are in trouble.

There are many people out there who have very good reasons for not using their real names on the web. For instance, just look at the amount of political activity on services like Facebook or Twitter in the past year, by people from the middle east. Well, ban the use of nicknames, and you ban all these people. There goes all that political and humanitarian activity. There goes what was one of the most important contribution of social networks. There goes the platform for freedom of speech.

Of course these are only a part of the reasons people might have, for not wanting to use their real names. Google says that they want people to interact on Google+ the same way they would in the real world. Well, look around you. There are many people who don’t use their legal names in their day to day lives. Plus, wake up and smell the coffee, this is the web, it was never supposed to be the real world. Google says that the real name policy is there, so that they can provide users with better service. Sorry, but would it have been benefits for users that you’re concerned about and not your own pocket, matters could have been much simpler. Instead of suspending user accounts, you could just warn them of the possible service quality issues, leave them to use whatever names they preferred, and put an end to this grand fiasco. Instead you’ve bought yourself a great deal of anger….

And then there is of course the small and insignificant problem of those of us who have names that you have not heard before. I even know of people who’s accounts have been suspended several times simply because they have uncommon names. So what exactly is it that we’re supposed to do? Prove to the almighty gods of social networks that I’m actually called this? Well that would be pretty much the end of both my patience and my interest.

So thanks to my friend, I have my account back which is pretty important for my use of several other Google services, but as to Google+… I don’t know. After all of this, I’m no longer certain that I’m all that interested in using the service. For the moment the only reason I’m sticking around is my connections in there. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what will happen next….

Further reading: A similar story, and an interesting article

That was a few seconds ago here in Switzerland. =D Make the ultimate wish people… this is a memorable moment!

Cheers!

Ever since the news broke last year that they were creating a Tintin movie, I’ve hardly been able to wait to see it. On one hand it’s a very exciting prospect to see one of my all time favourite books as motion picture, on the other hand there’s always the worry that the movie will not do the books justice. It happens very often that the motion picture adaptation of awesome literature ends up being a pretty weak representation of the work they were based upon. So when the movie finally showed up in movie theatres, [and to my sheer delight, about a month earlier in Europe than in North America! =D] I turned my schedule upside down to find the time to go and see it, and last night I finally did. =)

Well, let me just say that this is easily one of the the very best conversions of a book to motion picture that I’ve EVER seen! Between Steven Spielber’s directing, Steven Moffat’s screen writing and some of the best actors in the British cinema, this movie is a real work of magic. And then there’s of course the visuals… oh… wow! I can’t believe how they’ve managed to bring the characters to life, exactly as I had always imagined them in my mind while reading the books. Everything is completely perfect, from Captain Haddock’s nose to Bianca Castafiore’s voice.

So, if you’re a fan of Tintin, make sure not to miss this movie, and if by some small chance you’ve never read the Tintin books, still make sure not to miss this movie. Now I can’t wait for the next one… I’m pretty sure there is going to be a next one! 😉