i have decided to through my archives and change some people's name to nicknames. this is something i didn't think about when i first started the blog but an issue that i have thought about since then. at first i don't think i used names so much, just said 'my friend' this or that. but then i saw how it could become too muddled when discussing more than one person at a time. since friend A and friend B is too boring, i went with just their first names. but that's now changing a bit.

i've read blogs of others and discussions on this matter and some people do post information about themselves/friends/family while others filter things. some people go as far as to never publish the names nor photos of their family. i've tried not to use full names or exact locations of friends/family as a matter of privacy, nor the names of any family members when possible. but i've decided that there are some friend's names who come up frequently and i should offer some sort of privacy filter for them as well. for those whose name appeared frequently, i have given them nicknames instead. these are not necessarily nicknames that we call each other in real life but i had to give them some sort of nickname. there are others who i didn't give them a nickname at all because of a combination of they do not appear frequently, they are not online much (this really should not be a factor though), and i couldn't think of a fucking nickname for them. so if you're one of those friends whom i've nicknamed, please don't be upset at the name i gave you. and if you'd rather have a nickname, email me privately.

the tricky part about doing this was i could not do a simple find and replace over the entire blog as i would have made mistakes doing that. for instance, if someone has a common name, say david for example, and i discuss other people named david such as actors and musicians in other entries, well then that's going to fuck things up isn't it? if i gave the nickname fulano to that person and then i had an entry talking about depeche mode, the entry would now read that the singer of depeche mode is fulano gahan. that would just be a terrible oversight of find and replace execution. similarly, the find and replace technique is not terribly sophisticated when it comes to proper names that are also words and/or are part of a word. to keep going with the example, let's suppose i had friends who names could also be ingredients, flowers, or countries. i have met people whose names were for example, canela, heather, and asia. these all mean other things besides a person's first name. to avoid such errors with common proper names, i had to skim over each entry and be sure the proper words were replaced.

the other issue is that some friends leave a comment with their real name. now that is entirely their own decision and i will not fuck with that. i too leave my real name here and there on the internet even though i debate on that issue myself in terms of privacy, anonymity, safety, etc. but then there's also issues of copyright and if you create something and put it online but want to retain the rights to it, i think you better well put your real name on it or else the legality might be at issue. then again, i'm not on expert on such things and that's another matter altogether.