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BIZARRO THEATER FIGHTS BACK! UPDATE ON THE FIGHT AGAINST GOOGLE AND FIXING THE CHARTS YOU RELY UPON!

Many readers know that Google programmers initiated a takedown of Bizarro Theater over a few programming mistakes made by myself. Nonetheless, Google will fail to prevail in their takedown.

Slowly, I am re-building the linkages between sheets as IDs have changed under the new Google Drive account. Please be patient. It should be only a few days at most. I must tread through over 400 blog entries to see what charts were there and one needs to be fixed and what needs to be made new.

Along the way, I have learned a bit and feel I should share my experiences.

First, if you have Google Drive, do not use Google Drive from your primary Google Gmail address, ever, Instead, setup a Gmail Account exactly for having Google Drive. Assuming you rely on Google products, here are the steps that you can protect yourself from the titanium fist of Google's dictatorship:


  1. Sign up for another Gmail account specifically for your Google Drive
    e.g., my-google-drive@gmail.com
  2. Log into this email account.
  3. Go to Google Drive
  4. Download and install the Drive app
  5. Set the app to sync to your Drive Folder
    Note: if you have the app installed, go into preferences and unlink your account and then link it to your new Google Drive Gmail
  6. From Google Drive on the web, decide on folders you want to create files and edit files
  7. Share those folders to yourself at your real Gmail address, anointing your real Gmail as an editor
  8. Every file you create, you must "download as" the Microsoft equivalent in case Google decides to kill your account, which they can, anytime for any reason.
    You want to do this because the "files" that show up in your Google Drive folder in your directory tree on Windows aren't files at all. Rather those names are merely symbolic links — text description in the JSON layout that can be parsed by a Javascript virtual machine.
    So if you download a spreadsheet once you create it in Google Spreadsheets, you'll get an actual file that you can use with MS Excel or upload again to Google Drive for use with Google Spreadsheets.
If you work this way, you can keep your real email address (I lost mine) and have all the files you need to upload should the worst case happen to you.

I like Google. I am grateful for their many apps. However, their lack of live customer support and legitimate dispute resolution has me considering a move to Microsoft Onedrive and Excel at a later date.




To comment about this story or work of the True Dollar Journal, you can @ me through the Fediverse. You can find me @johngritt@freespeechextremist.com

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