I’d also like to also thank the guys at Disqus for providing excellent comment software, it runs very nicely in my environment, and has sufficient moderation tools to keep discussions focused and not abusive. The community at Scripting News is becoming visible again, and I’m happy to report that they’re still the smartest, most knowledgable, helpful and generous mofos I know. It’s making this blog much more fun for me. And you can quote me on that. smile
Dave’s moderation keeps discussions “focused and not abusive”… what he meant is that Disqus offers enough moderation options to allow Dave to turn his comments into his own personal echo chamber, which is good, because you know he’s missed having one of those.
The funniest bit is where he explains that he gave away his first Slingbox because he was frustrated attempting to set it up. “The reason it didn’t work the first time is that the connections on the back of a modern TV and settop box were foreign to me.”
Now that he has comments he can ask his community for help when he’s got problems with a new purchase.
He did that with his Wii issues and was able to get a replacement.
Dilbert advises that “everyone is stupid about something.” The trick is not being afraid to ask for help.
In the age of Google you can typically find help because someone has documented the issue you’re probably fighting already.
It’s rarely the case (it seems) that “it just works”.
Dave’s problem is willful ignorance. He seems to believe he’s doing the world a service by playing the role of the world’s dumbest user, and complaining to all who will listen when things don’t work out for him. This would be bad enough if he didn’t exaggerate the ineptitude of the utter novice.
Dave’s take on moveon.org is a new story arc:
He gave them money because they are working against President Bushes continued support of military involvement in Irag and Afghanistan. Fair enough. Put your money where you’re blog is…
But they took a stance on a FaceBook privacy issue that Dave probably agrees with in principle: “Let users opt-in to services that track their activity” but Dave didn’t give them money to do his work… :^)
And, moveon is now sending Dave repeated emails… likely asking for additional financial support.
This story is similar to Dave sending money to the EFF and later havig them disagree with his position on a Google feature that added extra links to blogs… he turned on EFF and hasn’t had much good to say about them since.
He’s a pretty binary guy: like|hate and not one for shades of grey.
One final thought: binary thinkers are easy to program: it’s like pushing buttons.
Who here has NOT pushed one of Dave’s buttons? Not many I’ll wager. That’s why were here. We hit a nerve and got our Winer “bit” flipped to “off”. If a “bit” is flipped to “off” too many times, it can’t be flipped to “on”.