Commentary about Commentary

There is a funny phenomenon on blogs and sites like Digg.com. People lose their damned minds. I don’t know about you, but I have pretty good manners when it comes to dealing with people.

Today I received a comment on an old post of mine that convinced me to write this post. Thank you Mr. Bryan Blevins for his lovely comment, it goes something like this:

I had a hard time installing OS X Leopard. Turns out there was a bug with an app called Clear Dock that totally hosed my install. After two failed attempts, I had to do an archive install, reinstall all of my applications, copy over all of my data and re-create all of my personal settings. I don’t know about you but I call that a pain in the ass. I blogged my experience with the title “My day of hell installing OS X Leopard” and I thought it was. I spent 8 hours getting my laptop back to usable.

http://www.philoking.com/2007/10/26/my-day-of-hell-installing-os-x-leopard/

So today, Mr. Blevins spoke up to tell me what he thought of the difficulty I had:

“Oh Jesus H. Christ! Are you kidding me? You had a DAY of HELL installing Leopard? Box up your computer and send it back to Apple, ’cause you’re too stupid to own a computer.

My install of Leopard took 20 minutes tops, on a system nearly the same as yours.

You had to endure a boring screen for an hour. Oh the horror, how did you ever survive?”

So what I take from this is that:

1. 8 hours of getting your computer back to working is a walk in the park and should be not only accepted but embraced as part of the Apple experience.
2. Since his install too 20 minutes on similar hardware, any issues I encounter are no longer valid.
3. Even though the bug was caused by another program and later recognized by Apple as a bug that affected thousands of users, I should give up all of my computers because not being able to overcome the bug on install day is obviously a leading indicator of my knowledge with computers.

Now I don’t think that’s quite fair, but that’s another issue. The question I have is if I had met Mr. Blevins in public, would he have spoke to me with such disdain and animosity? Reading through a few comments on Digg.com and you would think that the internet is inhabited with sociopaths. If you want to read more you should check out some of my articles where I dared to say I didn’t like a particular game or said something bad about Linux. You would think I was the anti-christ blogging about burning newborn babies.

In this rarest of cases, Brian was nice enough to supply me with his email address. Since I am betting that he did not subscribe to my feed (who wants to hear what such an idiot has to say) I will email him a link to this post and maybe he’ll come back to attack me again.

Chill out dude, so I didn’t like my experience installing OS X, I love Macs so you don’t have to hit me with your fanboy hate.

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