Rubenerd

I'm not just fed up with suspect political lobby groups this evening, I'm also irritated with internet trolls. Firstly to set the scene, I consult iPhoneUserNews.com for my iPhone news (surprising thought it may seem) for six irrefutable reasons that are so irrefutable as to be practically carved into stone. If stone carving could be scripted and delivered through the Internet Tubes. I guess they could be pneumatic. The tubes, not the stone.

1. Its written by a down to earth, honest person with a sense of humour
2. See number 1
3. It is not covered in advertisements or saturated with JavaScript and Flash
4. See number 1 again
5. Its not a dispassionate blogging network site with hundreds of interchangeable, generic authors that merely reproduce what we had in the newspaper realm without anything new
6. Seriously, I mean it, see number 1

Thanks to Neal, I learned about the Blackra1n software and now have a jailbroken iTelephone with 3.1.2, the subject of an up and coming post. Did I say jailbroken, I meant covered in $48 iPod socks.

All this said though, lately he seems to be attracting more of his fair share of comments from people who either don't get his sense of humour, or who merely hurl uncreative four letter insults. Come on folks, if you're going to act all high and mighty by anonymously insulting someone whom you've never met and if you did meet in public you'd probably cower away from, the least you could do is come back with some insults worthy of someone above the age of six. Is that too much to ask?

I remember Jim Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio saying he likes the idea of sites like Tumblr because they don't have comments by default, so you don't have to deal with abuse. For certain blogs I can definitely see where that'd be an advantage — particularly ones of a more intimate or personal nature. For me, the number of valuable comments from nice people far outweigh the negative ones by dull trolls, it's just you have to live with a few of the latter to get more of the former.

I reckon Neal and Joanne O'Carroll should log the IP addresses of the trolls on his iPhoneUserNews site, trace their addresses, greet them at their doors and throw potatoes or kegs full of Guinness or harps at them, or whatever it is Irish people do to get even. As long as he informed me in advance so I could get my jailbroken iPhone 3G to the scene to record the events and put them on YouTube. Not that I'm advocating people jailbreaking their iPhones. Interesting how I came to my own defence regarding jailbreaking hardware devices than physically assaulting people. Well, you know what those moronic advertisements said, you wouldn't steal a car!

On another note, Neal's also great for forgiving me for shamelessly recycling a screenshot from a blog post I wrote back in August.