I have Asperger's. Plus PTSD from various stuff that happened as a result of that.

So the idea of a safe place to share my strengths (and weaknesses) and try to find a job that doesn't stress me out was really exciteding. So I fired up Tor[2] and tried to register.

Then the confirmation email never name. I tried resending. Set a timer. Wait 15 minutes. Try not to perseverate.

I only have two emails - my main, plus a very old hotmail account which has now been morphed into an Outlook addy. Outlook has a pretty rich feature set, including aliases[1]. So I thought I'd try that.

"There's a temporary problem with the service. Please try again. If you continue to get this message, try again later".

I go through the process again on Outlook. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Try not to perseverate.

I guess I could use my personal email (my first name at my last name dot com), but frankly part of why I was excited about registering.

Maybe the issue is I did the initial account registration over Tor. Or maybe I'm just particuarly unlucky today.

All I know is my rational brain quietly whisper "Oh, just go back later, it's probably some server side bug", and my emotional brain yells back... other things.

I guess I could sign in with my Twitter, but if you'd been through what I've been through, you'd have trouble trusting people too. That's how I got into privacy and security work... feeling like I had a secret, and I needed to protect it.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/add-alias-account [2] Yeah, a VPN is probably sufficient but lately I'm interested in how much of the web is closed off to Tor users due to crazy captchas and other gotchas.