It's a Patriarchal Web (2.0)

My wife and I have finally got round to double barreling our names (long story but hers goes away entirely if she drops it, and there is a precedent for this kind of thing in my ancestry). I thought I'd go the whole hog, do it properly and change my email and all the places I've used it to sign up for things (that's a lot of places)

So I went to Google where I "live" online. I'd never really thought about having to do this before - not a thing guys do in a patriarchal society (not to mention a little wierd). I knew there'd be little chance of just changing the address I had (why not?) so I thought I could create a new address and then simply set up an auto forward or something. But to create a new address I had to "invite someone". To do this I had to create a temporary email address (good time to stake a claim on my new name at yahoo I rationalised), send them an invite from my existing gmail, accept, and then create a new gmail (or googlemail as it seems to be these days) account with my new, double barrelled name. Done. Fine. Quite a hassle, but fine.

OK, so now I want to have things "just work". It's optimistic I know but I take a lot of services from google (docs, calendar, blog, desktop, notebook, ...) and I want to be able to continue using them, but with my new name (/ email). After all, I didn't change it just to make my life more complicated.

So how do I do that? The answer seems to be "you can't". Everything I do I now realise is tied up to that same great email address-in-the-sky. My original, old one. It's damned annoying and seriously making me consider migrating to something a damn sight less monolithic. (I've already moved googledesktop to netvibes and am very pleased with the result). I mean it's "2.0" for crying-out-frikkin'-loud. What do I have to do? Wait until 3.0? I'm betting that if the web was created and run by women things would be a lot simpler (and maybe a little cuter too).

{Addendum 28/12/2006}
I managed to get it all done. As far as I know, I have now changed (or frigged) my online identity where ever it may lie to reflect my new identity. The Gmail thing definately sits in the "frig" category. I had to invite myself to GMail again, create a new address, and then set this in my old account as the primary address while setting a global forward and archive on the new account. Now as far as the outside world is concerned I have a new email. When in reality I've just "skinned" the old one. Still get access to all the archived mail and contacts. Sweet.