Leaving Well Enough Alone

I hate change. I know, that sounds a bit funny given how I seem to have made a habit of lobbing change hand grenades into my life on a whim the last few years. But I really do detest change.

Especially change of the computer variety. I still play a very old version of Civilization. So old, in fact, that I can't even remember if it's Civ 2 or Civ 3 I don't care that it's ancient or the graphics are blocky. I like it. I'm always going to be the last kid on the block to get the latest operating system. Windows Vista might be very pretty, but I've no interested in abandoning a perfectly good O/S.

I resisted New Blogger for months. I didn't play in the Beta. I refused to sign in with my Google account. I skirted the issue for ages until Blogger started to go all naggy Mother on me. Only instead of insisting that I wear a hat, because what do I think it is, Palm Beach out there, Blogger insisted that I sign in with a Google account. I'd gotten on its last nerve with my insistence on playing old school. If I was going to blog, it was going to be Google's way or the highway.

My resistance was 60% knee-jerk reaction to change in general and 40% reaction to the fact that Google seems to be trying to rule the world and get me to log in for everything I do. Frankly, I don't want Google cross-indexing and data warehousing and doing whatever other sort of digital black magic that they do on the Internet. Oh, sure, Google is all benevolent now with its primary colours and funny doodles in its logo and mega-great gmail and personalized Google home pages. But what about when Google discovers all of your secrets? Then what are you going to do?

Blogger warned me the last time I logged in that I would get one last chance to use my old account and then, I would have to start playing by its rules. And sure enough, the next time I logged in, it was Google login or nothing. So I did things Google's way and I converted my blogs to New Blogger.

And what did I get for my troubles? Most of my dear commenters have been renamed as anonymous and, as my pal The Swearing Lady pointed out, I am now apparently 250 years old. All of which pretty much validates my point - why break your technology by upgrading if it's not already broken?