Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Names

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You often need a name for yourself. And my favourite name is ‘ssp’. Which was quite a natural choice back in the days of C-64 computer games where you could enter three initials only for your high scores. And it stuck for me. I tried getting ssp accounts whenever the possibility arose. And it didn’t arise too often because such short names are often not allowed or, if they are, have already been taken if the machine you want the account on has many users. My next strategy was to just extend that and add in extra s-es. Somehow sssp didn’t work when I first tried it, so I ended up using ssssp for a while.

Questions that Yahoo want answered And when the complete suck, i.e. eBay, entered the Internet I had to add another pair of s-es to get an account. Oh well! So at some stage I switched my strategy and tried to get my current post code as a login name – figuring that this would help me to at least remember the post code. And thus a streak of cv47al accounts was born. An account name that is usually easy to get because nobody in their right mind would want it.

Times have changed even more and flickr told me that I have to bend over and get a Yahoo account so they have a better time playing with my data. Well that sucked of course – not only because they wanted me to re-enter all the information I had already given to flickr and possibly a lot more and agree to some other dubious terms of service which I naturally didn’t read but because they didn’t want to give me any of my preferred login names. So now I’ll have to remember that at flickr, i.e. at Yahoo I need the crappy eBay login name. Let’s see how that works out.

And I really fail to see why Yahoo need to know my ‘preferred content’, ‘gender’, ‘birthday’ and ‘security question’ to give me an account. Of course it’s not that they are particularly original or bad with this, but I really appreciate those newer ‘web 2’ sites which only require a user name and a password and leave all other items as optional entries. That just makes sense, me feel better and doesn’t waste as much time.

January 31, 2007, 1:16

Tagged as software.

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