Cleaning out private data from Google

About a year ago I landed what I thought was a good job in a very small web development company, the role wasn't what I expected, the people were total dicks and not surprisingly I left under a cloud. Every now and then, like most people, I type names into google to see what pops up, mostly for me it tends to be lots of random actors, muggers, sports people and random teenagers with myspace pages. So the last thing I wanted to find when I googled my own name and hit the link to 'results from my country only' was a big grinning photo of moi at number 1, sat under the name of my old nemesis.

Why? Because I did not want to put this company on my CV, because they fired me. Now I could have come clean and explained it to any future employer with ease but the fact is, the world isn't perfect and people are prejudiced - I fully expected to get to the interview stage if I left it in. So of course, I left it out. Now I know that a lot of employers will google peoples name to find out information about you before the interview. This very company I got fired from embarrassed a candidate applying for the secretary's role by talking about the erm... 'artistic photographs' of her on her facebook page (that gives you an idea of the kind of dicks they were). Privacy is dead and companies have no morals.

So what to do about sorting this mess out? Well, firstly I got the old boss to remove the content by emailing him and politely suggesting that it doesn't benefit either of us (tip: avoid being confrontational at this stage). He saw things my way and removed it. The next step was to remove google's cache of the image and search results that linked to my name by using this tool:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

It's easy enough to remove if the content has already been removed and is 404-ed or the content has changed. It takes a couple of weeks or so sometimes. Once you've done google, I suggest checking yahoo and possibly MSN (but I didn't seem to have a problem with these).

However, this is only the start of the quest to regain your privacy. Sites like 123people.co.uk seem to cache google searches and not only that, they search a bewildering array of sites that you'd completely taken for granted. For instance, a search for my name hit my Amazon wishlist and told you were I lived and what my girlfriends name was, fairly harmless but still more than I want known by just anyone. Needless to say I changed my 'unique facts' to something short and simple that only family would understand. Even if you removed the content from google, some of the content on this search site can stick around for MONTHS! I hate sites like these, they're about as sleazy as you can get - only a stalker thinks that a site like this is cool.

You might also want to check the Wayback machine (which keeps old copies of websites) and make sure that this hasn't grabbed your offending page. It's a little more than most employers would do to search this but it doesn't hurt to be thorough.

So if information does leak out onto the net, it's not the end of the world but it can be very time consuming and difficult (but not impossible) to remove.

Why I allways build my own PCs

We recently bought a hand-full of DELL PCs for a development project at work that I'm managing and boy are they slow.

I know DELL gets bad press because they're pretty non-upgradable unless you buy the 'DELL-variety' of card you're looking for but that didn't bother me. What concerned me was the fact that my 1.5 Ghz PC was checking out code from the CVS server in seconds, whereas my colleagues took about half an hour on their 'super-fast' shiny new DELLs (2-3 Ghz I think).

Turns out, DELL install all these n00b-filters like McCrappy virus scanner and the Google processor-hog/search toolbar. That means that whenever you run a shell command it has to virus-scan the .exe file (even though it's the same damn one you ran several milliseconds ago) and each file you add or remove has to be (presumably) indexed by the Google desktop software. I never run anti-virus scanners in the background because most of them are pretty dumb and just kill performance.

Scanning through the program list looking for other stuff I could remove, there was all sorts of crap that nobody in their right mind would want installed on a laptop - why the hell does DELL think people want their 3Ghz PC to run like a 486?

This is why I buy the parts and install my own O/S and apps myself - I'm not paying for someone to 'dumb-down' my PC with stupid features that I don't need, save that crap for AOL users.

Damn... it's been a while

No, the monkey isn't dead. Just really, really bussy for the last year or so.

New job, new girl, new town...

...and I forgot my password(s) (damn, I'm such a n00b).

I don't have a whole lot of free time right now - so much is going on in my new job as a contractor, life has really changed (mostly for the better). I now make over twice as much money as I did in my last job - confirming my opinion that contractors are paid properly and full-time employees are just slaves to the system.

Anyway, I'll post again soon.

Insult JC all you want, just don't mention Mohamed!

The other night, a South Park episode (cartoon wars II) was censored from showing Mohamed (even though they've done this before in the episode called 'super friends' - see above), just because of recent events surrounding the Danish cartoons. They gave in to terror, so I guess the terrorists have won this round.

I did a little looking around and read some of the far-right Muslim sites reaction to the cartoons and I have to say, I've never read such arrogant, self-righteous crap in all my life -and I've read Rush Limbaugh. Just who the FUCK do these people think they are to impose their religious beliefs and laws on the rest of the world? They threaten us with economic sanctions, violence and terrorism all over some stupid cartoons -and people wonder why the Muslim faith is getting a bad reputation?

I took a look at the cartoons and whilst I didn't find them funny, I didn't think they were actually that insulting, I wouldn't be linking to them if I wasn't doing so out of solidarity to all the people who've been harassed, imprisoned or killed over this issue. Clearly though, a lot of Muslims don't have any sense of humour. So, all because a minority of joy-less, pathetic little children got their delicate sensibilities hurt, the rest of the world gets told what they can and can't say. Well, fuck that.

Here you go.
You can also see some here
here's one from 1827. You see, there's nothing new about drawing offensive cartoons - funny how it's suddenly become such a big issue for them isn't it?