This Thanksgiving I truly have something to be thankful for. It isn’t my Wife, my home, my family, my friends, my health or my business. Although I am thankful for all those things. What I’m most thankful for this Thanksgiving is: I got me a stalker!!!
Yep. I’ve got my very own nutjob on the internet who has decided he is going to go out of his way to fling poo at me! Seems like I did something to offend the, dare I say infamous, Rick Downes.
OK. I must admit when they were handing out the stalkers I wasn’t at the front of the queue. No Glenn Close (when she was still pretty darn hot) style femme fatales are after me alas. Instead I get some bitter, semi-retired Swedish geek who has oddly decided that I needed to be brought to task, for whatever it is I did to get his goat.
So who is this Rick Downes character? From his own site: “Rick Downes is an internationally acclaimed and respected computer scientist, long specialising in taking care of the ‘common man’ and in defending the rights of the common man against corporate and political abuses of power.” Go on, google him now, it should be easy to find some positive information on this person for who “hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide know and well respect”.
Rick, who has a extraordinary fondness for using ©, ® and ™ symbols for ironic emphasis, apparently runs a software company in Cyprus where he likes to release poetry inspiring Mac OS X software (if you only follow one link from this blog post follow that one), has been arrested for commercial spamming and drug trafficking and has absolutely nothing positive to say about other people’s Mac OS X software.
Apparently I am in good company. Rick isn’t frugal with his diatribes against, well apparently lots of things. Rick dislikes a whole lot of things. And people. And software. And TIFF files. Rick especially dislikes TIFF files. Oh and bloat. He really doesn’t like bloat.
And what does Rick say about things he doesn’t like? Why, you get your very own page on rixstep.com where Rick will lay into you about how un-optimised your TIFF files are. He might even accuse of you of being a Texan (yes, really he believes someone who spells optimise with an S is Texan)! Or maybe he’ll call you a tool. Or try to disparage the work you’re doing helping to teach technology to children.
Rick seems to think he can use the internet and his professional web-site to attack whatever it is he doesn’t like. Generally he limits his attacks to software but occasionally he decides individuals are fair game. Unfortunately for Rick these attacks have done nothing more than turn him into a laughing stock amongst the developer community.
So what did I do to deserve the wrath of such a vengeful spirit? Well I participated in the comment thread of a blog post about software optimisation (yes, that blog post). That’s all it takes to unleash the bile and slobbering attacks. I may have also referred to Rick as a “911 conspiracy theory-level fucking nutter.” My bad. But then in my defence I was linking to this posting of Rick’s where he seems to go slightly off the rails about some conspiracy of the imaginary elite Mac developers, the so called “Landed Gentry of Mac Development™“ (note that the United States Patent and Trademark Office doesn’t seem to have that trademark on file yet, I can only assume the application is in the mail).
Rick started on me gently, merely (and quite randomly I might point out) mentioning me in his totally unbiased review of MarsEdit, calling me an “insufferable blogger”, amongst other things. I emailed Rick at this point to see if we could resolve this seemingly bizarre issue. But the chances are that my e-mail got deleted by his rather paranoid email filters (for a company that claims to pride itself on serving the customer I find it odd that e-mail from such large providers as gmail and mac.com are summarily discarded).
But then the big guns came out. Rick devoted a whole blog post to just me, or rather to “Johnathan Right” (a misspelling I can only assume Rick is intentionally making to be just that extra bit juvenile), linking to it from his Industry Watch page (yes really, slagging off a fellow developer is considered “Industry Watch”).
In the blog post Rick posts select quotes from a what was believed to be private conversation between myself and a 3rd party. Not quite sure what this has to do with, well anything really, but when someone takes the time and energy to write a whole blog post trying to character assassinate someone, rationality isn’t a priority. For some reason Rick seems to think a comparison between his qualifications and mine are in order. Bizarre! Batshit insane bizarre? Well go read the blog post. You be the judge. And of course Rick dredges up two applications that have long since been abandoned. Rick is nothing if not swift. By the way, Rick, have you ever considered abandoning some of your apps? Funny Haiku’s aside, some of your apps could really do with being taken out back and put out of their misery.
The funniest quote of the whole bizarre episode is “Ah Texas boy. We can relax. Texas has produced some ace programmers over the years. Like George Walker Bush.” Ignoring the half-arsed attempt at a Bush joke, Rick obviously spent 2 minutes searching my blog trying to find more mud to sling. And the best he could come up with is that I’m a Texan. Which of course, just happens not to be where I’m from at all.
I thought the Mac developer community had some oddballs in it before. But Rick totally takes the cake. A Mac software publisher whose catalog is so awful that there exists Haiku extolling their awfulness. A blogger who takes great pride in picking apart apps and slurring the developers of said apps with insults and ad-hominem attacks. Encouraging script-kiddies to deface websites. And let’s not forget the spamming and drug trafficking arrests.
So while I’m disappointed that my stalker isn’t a leggy blonde unafraid to do cruel things to bunnies, I must admit that as nutjobs go I think I’ve attracted one of timecubesque magnitude.
Of course I’ve committed the the biggest blunder on the internet: “Do not feed the trolls!”. Guilty I’m afraid. But maybe someone will hit this page while googling for Rick and realise what kind of person he is.