None Of The Above

The blogger interface has a whole new look. For a while, I could see no way to create a new post.

It turns out that it is an orange circle with a + sign on it, which hovers near the bottom right corner of the screen; diametrically opposed to where the old button, which was labelled "new post" used to be.

This is supposedly intuitive to anyone who has been using applications since kindergarten, and is more of a "universal symbol," so Google won't have to translate "new post" into thousands of languages.

Still, I actually had to look up how to create a post in blogger, after having had a blog for 15 years.

Is It Just Me?

Of course the thought occurred to me that only my blog had had the new post button disabled; and my imagination ran wild, during that panic stricken few minutes...

Did someone who hates me flag my blog as inappropriate? Would that make it so I would have new posts frozen for a certain period of time, while Google's "Blogger Team" reviews the thing?

Would that bring me face to face with Chuck Kroll (aka NiteCruzer) who was leading the team ten years ago when my blog was "removed" because of "malicious code" that was found on it (It was a third party "free" hit counter that I put in my layout, which was counting the number of visitors, but also trying to invade their computers, or at the least, record all their addresses to spam them, or something).

The upshot was that, when I posted to the forum, asking for help with the problem, I seemed to have opened a can of worms by starting a new thread, when there was already a thread on the very subject.

One of the forum members, commented; "why did he start a new thread?"

To which NiteKruzer answered something I paraphrase as: "Because he's a troll. He's after all of us!"

Chuck then went on to say that "I" used to post as this other user name - an 18 digit or so name that had numbers and symbols in it, which he gave.

He then vowed to "see where else he has posted," and take some drastic action, maybe not stopping at alerting the authorities; whatever.

So, back in 2009, this was a bizarre circumstance for me.
I didn't have the wherewithal to Google: "What to do if the help forum guru thinks you're a troll and refuses to help you."

It was kind of unsettling to think that a guy, whom you would believe to be a computer genius (in order to have ascended to becoming the moderator of the Blogger help forum) is on a cyber "seek and delete" mission, intent upon putting an end to my "trolling."

It could be that the hit counter had been invented by this same troll, and maybe that was just a side project for him, and, since I had been using this totally anonymous computer at the homeless shelter; where all 55 people who use it in a given month are all seen as being the same person; where one day this user might log onto the food stamp website and put in all of her vital information, and apply for food stamps online; and then "the same person" logs on again the next morning and applies using totally different information, and is approved.

Not to mention this person having 55 different e-mail accounts....

It is easy to imagine how this computer might become infected with stuff; stuff that is even out of the "purview" of Chuck Kroll, aka. NiteCruzer.

He thought I was a troll; yet, I knew that he was an idiot, because I wasn't.

An idiot, at least, when it came to being able to weed a troll out from someone who just used an infected computer, and had a malicious hit counter on his blog.

So, I decided to just leave Chuck Kroll alone.

I think I took the precaution using a different e-mail account, then started another blog (this one).

I guess the fallout from the Kroll thing is that I back up the blog more frequently now; never leaving more than a megabyte on the table, so to speak...

But, about 5 years ago, I see the smiling face of Chuck Kroll, of Menendez, California, and it is an invitation to be his friend on Facebook.

I wondered if he wanted to apologize, maybe say that he has since then, read my blog out of sympathy for how he had mislabeled me and cost me 3 years worth of blog posts.

Or, if he was still after me, but needed access to some of my facebook-friend-only data, so that he could ramp up his troll hunt and shut me down for good; the end of this, or any other blog on Blogger for me...

I decided to leave Chuck Kroll's friend request "unconfirmed."
Can You Describe Him?
And I am trying to figure out if there is a way to bring up old unrequited friend requests on Facebook, so I can at least post a shot of Chuck here.

He had a shaven head and looked to be in his mid 40's and I guess resembled Rick Nielsen of the (late 70's through 2 years ago) band Cheap Trick, as much as any celebrity I can think of...

Answer To Comment

 Having gotten this comment from Alex in California, I realized that A: He no longer reads this blog, because I did a whole post about the"non filers" stimulus check, and:
B: I might actually get the thing, and maybe sooner than I think.

I was able to find Alex's new blog, which he never disclosed the name of to me, by merely doing a Metacrawler search, filtered by geographic region (central California) time (past 48 hours) and by looking for documents that contained any or all of the terms, "chicory" "Ken" "ebay" and/or: "Ms. Crackhead."


Out of something like 23 billion pages published recently (which it supposedly only took 43 seconds to "crawl") Alex in California's blog contained the only instance of the term "Ms. crackhead" (case insensitive) being used. Sometimes it seems like a small web...I didn't even have to use "contains all or some of the following." "Ms. Crackhead" was the ticket. 

Now it is about noon on this Thursday, and I guess it will be time to check the mailbox soon. My sister said she was going to send me money, but that entails her buying a stamp and an envelope, and that is something that I once procrastinated (in between plumb forgetting about) over for weeks; when I wanted to send Howard Westra a letter....

But, I suppose I will see which comes first, her letter, or the stimulus check, or if it will be none of the above...