Blogger can't seem to handle long comments

Before some readers think it's my fault, I just need to make yet another Google-hates-us-all post concerning the bloated bureaucracy's inability to handle long comment posts in its Blogger sites. You may have seen the dreaded user-hostile Google error if your posts were too long. Strangely, when I reach this error page, it turns out that the comment had posted anyways! I recommend to commenters who experience this issue to first check whether your comment has posted despite the error on my page. (Remember to refresh the page.) Another very handy trick is to first highlight the entire message you're about to send (press Ctrl-A), then copy it (press Ctrl-C) so that if Google does eat your time-consuming message, you can still repaste it (by pressing Ctrl-V) into the commentbox again or by saving it in a file for a later attempt. Keeping messages brief and to-the-point is always well-advised of course. Sorry about this but my hands are tied here.

Google has sat on their ass for at least two months on this important issue while commenters keep voicing the problem. Which is why I assert...

Google hates us all. <;o(

Blogger reluctantly fights spam

This past week or so, Blogger notified its users that it's finally decided to fight spam. You can read all about it here. Perhaps many of us would have found this impressive if implemented several months or, quite frankly, a few years ago but the admins seem to have only responded to this common problem now, and only after a deluge of complaints have been posted on their unresponsive feedback site (through Google), over the course of uncountable eons. Some other bloggers are mildly more hopeful than I about this banal update.

I'm one of those crabby realists who doesn't buy into the overused "better late than never" excuse that barely keeps typical bureaucracies from imploding into failure. Behind the scenes, I've been spending my precious time deleting and redeleting automatic spam from some computer-savvy psychopath writing short quips (half in Chinese & half in English, oddly enough) with a trail of elipses anchored with tags to Russian porn sites and the like, purposely designed to capitalize on accidental user click-through by bloggers trying hard to moderate their commentboxes from this very stupidity. From browsing other sites, I see I'm not the only one of his victims since his spam has successfully rooted itself in other commentboxes by more careless Blogger users. For some odd marketing reason that I can't fathom, Blogger allowed this to go on for quite a long time with no solution, no doubt driving yet more bloggers to their competitors. If I could find a Wordpress solution that was free like Blogger and matching all the capabilities of this system, I'd be gone too. Soooooo gone. But we must do with what we got and make lemonade out of the sour lemons.

After perusing Google's explanation of the new system however, I see some obvious flaws. It would make far more sense to simply allow us bloggers to individually determine for ourselves what constitutes "spam" and not force Google's comparatively blind algorithms on people. For example, I would like to specifically block a few rather dense and obsessive commenters permanently from my blog without having to go through the motion of specifically deleting their consistent nonsense in my mailbox. Can I do this in the new system? It doesn't appear so and this irritates me.

But then, as capitalistically glib as it is, they say "you get what you pay for" and Blogger is as free as they come.

My Etruscan temple gets a splash of paint

Here was the newest colourless version of my model. Tiles fill the roof and a moulded front and back was added. I went nuts with the front, adding some showy detail and I think it really "pops" now. If only I could live in my temple, hehehe.



As much as it looks cool in white, I then splashed it with some colour and chose a pallette based on the ample pictures available online of a physical model already created by others and which I, obviously, mimicked (see below).


And so this is the palette I copied.



Now first, Google's Sketchup doesn't render patterns nicely. It could be that I'm overlooking some special "trick" but the repetition of the patterns are obvious and annoying me. Second, while I now hate Google for randomly shutting down my site and being completely asleep at the wheel, we can still exploit Sketchup for all its worth and convert models into other 3d programs like Blender to fight against Google monopoly. It's also free to download. Blender also has some neat features that Sketchup doesn't have so I've been curious about playing around some more with this model in another program.

One site I've found shows how to convert a Blender model into Sketchup while another tells you how to convert models from Sketchup into Blender. I'll try these methods out and see what happens. Vive la resistance.

Google is officially random. (And yes, my blog is back...)

Today, possibly around noon or so, my blog was removed. It turns out that Blogger, owned by Google, decided that it was a neat idea to block access to my Gmail account and my blogger account at the same time, while also blocking everyone else's access to my blog that I've been faithfully contributing to for years. A damaging message was placed on it to the effect of "This blog has been removed." Obviously, it's not... now.

At the time all Google told me is that it was due to a "violation". Violation of what? From me? How on earth?? I maintain a mundane linguistics blog. How did this become too X-rated to handle all of a sudden? Sufficed to say, my heart dropped and I was completely floored that Google's system could really be this asinine. Yet it is. And it gets even more suspect as I was to soon discover.

I was given only two options to remedy the situation. The first thing I tried was to use their contact form. But let's face it. We all know that the Google Team would take their sweet time responding because I, you and everyone else is just a number in their overblown bureaucracy. By that point, all my readers would be completely gone and my blog effectively destroyed just by some retarded technicality. And keep in mind, Google was just not telling me what the "violation" was! Why the secret?

I was leery of the second option that Google provided. Supposedly, my account could be "immediately" unblocked if I simply provided them one teensy thing: my cellphone number. Excuse me? That's really getting personal. I don't hand my cellphone to everybody because I don't want jerks phoning me or advertisers harassing me with their wares. But Google had me by the balls and was essentially holding my blog and email account for randsome until I divulged my personal info which may or may not be compromised in the future. I caved in, shelled out the number, and magically, the block was lifted and my blog restored.

WTF IS GOING ON?!!!!

Checking into my gmail, I noticed a message in my account that I never wrote. Now I had the disturbing answer. Apparently some jackass hacker from Russia had cracked into Google's servers and used numerous accounts just to spam some stupid site of theirs to each victim's contact emails. Swell! So basically, my worst fears realized: Google, not being able to keep my email, my blog account or even its own server secure now has my cellphone number to be abused too. Hooray!

I'm so turned off with Google at this point, I mean war. I'm thinking of ways to wean myself off of Google products quickly and Wordpress is looking good now. I'll be looking into that shortly. I expect better handling of the problem than this from a legitimate "service" but it seems that nowdays "service" has become a jaded term designating its complete opposite. Freedom is slavery; war is peace; service is random.