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.

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BIZARRO THEATER THREATENED BY GOOGLE! GOOGLE BOTS HAVE BLOCKED MY GOOGLE DRIVE ACCOUNT!

During testing to add new features to Bizarro Theater, a likely automated process at Google has blocked my Google Drive account.



Here is what I was doing:

• I ran a SQL-like query on a spreadsheet to extract only two columns of the data from a spreadsheet.
• I saved the downloaded data to a text file.
• I copied the text file to a publicly accessible folder on Google Drive.

And here is what happened:

• I forgot to change the sharing settings on that spreadsheet to anyone with a link
• So while I thought I was downloading two-column dates and numbers, instead, I downloaded HTML.
• The Google Drive filtering program on uploads must have read the HTML, which I am guessing reads "Not Authorized to this" (I'll check)
• And then I received notification that my Google Drive has been suspended!

As all of the charts for Bizarro Theater run from that Google Drive / Gmail account, I don't know what will happen to over 400 blog entries. For now, the charts seem to be working.

In the meantime, I am trying to get up a new Google Drive account complete with syncing. Having done some of that already, I see that many spreadsheets created with Google Spreadsheets could not be copied to the new Google Drive account. In effect, the program that handles uploading to Google Drive sees those files as "corrupted."

Most of those "corrupted" Google Spreadsheets contained only data generated from other Google Spreadsheets that I own.

There is no one to call at Google to tell my story and plead my case. There is only a stupid online form. I have no idea if anyone at Google with review the form submission. 

Effectively, by suspending my Google Drive account, Google has made my Gmail worthless along with Picasa (Photos), all of the sign ups to countless services I used either my Gmail address or Google one-click log in as well as G+.

From a technical standpoint, heed this:

EXPORT EVERY GOOGLE DOC AND GOOGLE SPREADSHEET IN THEIR MICROSOFT EQUIVALENT LAYOUTS, THAT IS AS MICROSOFT FILES. 

The files that you see on your local hard drive of Google-made documents aren't files at all, but merely links data encoded in Javascript, specifically in the JSON.

Here are a few screenshots of what I downloaded that Google programmers thought worthy of me having my Google Drive account banned and hence wrecking all of my Google accounts associated with the same email address:

Because behind the scenes, the HTML had these codes. Notice the object "botguard" with an associated function and a huge string of data being passed.

And more code dealing with "anti-spam." 

And this is a shot of the SQL query on sheets that I can't access anymore.

Google computer programmers ("software engineers") need to explain how anyone can spam himself. It looks like Google does nothing by IP address. Because if they managed Google Drive accounts and highest-level access by IP addresses, this would not have happened to me.

This is such a mess for me to clean up.

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