Churn for Churn's Sake

Google's Blogger (Blogspot) editor has suddenly become 'new'.

(Okay, not really 'suddenly'. And 'Help' is no help, whether the 'user community' or the official help line.)

So I'm trying out the 'new'. But all the worst old bugs are still there, and they've added some new bad bugs, as well. 

One thing that drives me nuts is that I can't discard an edit. Even if the bugs have destroyed my work, the destructive results are automagically saved over what I had before. This is a bug in the design -- a design flaw. A failed design.

I haven't yet figured out how to leave off editing without publishing, except for hitting the browser's back button or just closing the browser window. To me, that feels too much like shutting the computer down by pulling the power cord.

The Enter key now means paragraph break instead of line break. To get a line break, you have to use shift-Enter. That's arbitrarily changing the meaning of the Enter key -- and why? Turn 40 years of tradition upside down, just because some college intern has been indoctrinated in the ideals and idolatries of that perversion of markup languages, XML? (Once upon a time, I thought XML was a good thing.)

Arbitrary changes are another of those practices direct from the worst practices handbook.

Too many things have changed without explanation, too much expects the user to understand the new metaphor (like the hamburger mark meaning something specific), too much expects the connection to be constant, undelayed, and following the latest changes to the Internet Specifications. (If your Internet connection coughs, be patient. It'll either bomb out on you or recover, eventually.)

Importing images into a blog that was started with the legacy editor will do stupid things. The image won't drop where the cursor is, it will drop at the next paragraph break, which is probably at the end of the document. Here's how I fixed that with the chapter of the novel that I'm currently working on:

1. The pencil at the top left -- click the tiny triangle to its right and select HTML view.
2. Click in the edit window, then right click and select all.
3. Copy the HTML and paste it into an open, empty Gedit window. Any plain text editor that can match and replace on end-of-line/newline will do.
4. Type a paragraph start

   <p>

   at the beginning of the document and a paragraph end

   </p>

   at the end.
   
5. Replace all line break pairs with paragraph breaks split by newline. In Gedit, that's
   1. ctrl-H,
   2. check the "enable regular expressions" button,
   3. and replace

      <br /><br />

      with

      </p>\n<p>

6. Check that the results are sane before selecting all and copying to a new blogger document. Keep the old document in case it doesn't work well.
7. Now you can insert an image at any paragraph break.
   

The new editor was was supposed to have table editing, but that appears to have disappeared. As it usually does. HTML tables are too ambiguous for a general editor. Can't college students be given a preview on the implications of NP-completeness in their freshman year?

And it looks like Google has decided pop-up windows are no longer a vulnerable feature in web browsers or something, because the 'new' way to do previews, and, apparently, interact with the user about what to do with an open document, has Firefox asking me if I want to change pop-up settings. I have to give blogspot/blogger permission to impersonate Firefox to interact with the editor.

I'm not going to do that. That's yet another from the worst practices handbook.

Reporting bugs? How do you take a screen shot of yourself hitting the Enter key? How do you get the pop-up blocker in the screen-shot when the screen-shot is limited to the active window? And how do you get feedback, to be sure that anyone has even looked at your bug report, much less understood it?

And let's not forget that intermittent Internet access just makes all the bugs more prominent.

And Blogger/Blogspot/Google is now going to force everyone using Blogspot to use the new editor. You can still revert to the 'legacy' editor, but it is no longer functional. And the next time you log on, it has you back in the 'new' editor. And you get the message saying "You will be moved. Resistance is futile."

Why does new have to mean more bugs?

Why is new necessary if it doesn't fix anything?

You may wonder why I use Blogspot if I have so many complaints about it. 

It was convenient. That's the only reason. 

 It was convenient. No longer. Apparently, I will now be migrating my blogs away from Blogspot. I've migrated before, I will do so again. 

And I suppose that means my gmail account will be terminated within a few years.

Why does a company as rich as Google feel it necessary to force us to accept churn for churn's sake?

F*** Is a Euphemism for Foul

When I was in my twenties, and realized that swearing in the privacy of my own car at the other drivers and their bad driving habits was getting me into bad habits of my own, God taught me how to divert the Tourette's reaction:

Say what you mean!

You don't really mean you want that driver who cut in front of you to be condemned to hell. You mean you wish he'd drive better. So that's what you should say:

Drive better!

You don't really mean you want to rape the car (or the driver) that turned left in front of you and would have caused a really bad accident if your reactions had been slower. Even if he or she won't hear you, instead of "F*** you!" say,

Quit that!
Slow down!
Drive safe!

"And you really, really, really don't mean you want the stop light that turned red when you thought you wanted to go through it to melt down into excrement. This one is a little harder. Instead of "S***!", Say,

Getting there a couple of minutes later is better than having someone call from the hospital to tell them I won't be making it into work any more.

And the conversation continued, with a little discussion of some priorities I had misplaced that were causing me stress.

(If you're curious, the lyrics from The Fixx's hit song probably helped me focus on saying what one means -- one thing does lead to another. But I had been aware of the idea well before then, as from Matthew 5: 37 -- "Yea (for) yea, nay (for) nay".)

But the lesson of saying what I mean has helped me to divert myself from Tourette's syndrome-like behavior on a number of occasions, and has actually helped me learn to communicate better. (I'm still pretty bad at communicating.)

(BTW, you do know that "Oh, my God!" is actually the beginning of a prayer -- usually for help, right? "Oh, my God, please help me not to be so jealous of my neighbor!" or some such.)

Recently, stress has been building up again, and I find myself referring to Bill Cosby's euphemistic substitutions

Fow! Fi-eau! Fow-fau!

(I forget from which routine.)

And I say things like

• Foul!
• That's a foul! (red card)
• (Things are all) fouled up!
• You (committer of) foul (deeds)! 

although those are all a bit more judgemental words than I should be using, especially the last one.

Well, maybe

I call foul!

is not so overly judgemental.

The thing is, when we say what we mean, we often find that we care more about other people and what happens to them than we think we want to admit. What we really mean is

• Play fair!
• Let's do that again, right this time.
• What a mess! Let's try to clean it up.
• Is doing that going to make you happy?

And I recall today something that occurred to me many years ago -- that "fuck", "shit", "hell", "damn", etc. are actually the euphemisms. We use them when for some reason we are too tired, too embarrassed, too lazy (or too something!) to say what we really mean, or (especially) what we really should mean.

(There is some non-literary irony in this. Erstwhile expletives are developing new, softer semantics. For instance, in many cases, in the local vernacular,

F*** off!

no longer means

Go somewhere I don't have to watch and play with your genitals by yourself!

so much as

Go take a time-out.

Still, since the expletives are somewhat ambiguous, I think it's better to try to understand what we mean and say it.)