Gadfly: pest: a persistently annoying person.
We're all annoying, we can't help it. Imperfect humans will always sometimes rub each other the wrong way.
And let's face it, sometimes we CHOOSE to be annoying. It can even be fun.
With that in mind, I must try to show more patience to annoying gadflies (whoops, that's redundant, isn't it?) who hang around blogs of certain technologies and bash the technologies in question.
I guess I don't understand the mentality of the blog gadfly.
Example: I think the New York Yankees are Satan incarnate. The team has wealth beyond imagination, and an impotent management structure over major league baseball refuses to consider a salary cap. Ergo, small-market teams raise talent in their farm systems and watch helplessly as they eventually sell their souls to Hank Steinbrenner and begin wearing pinstripes.
That being said, what I don't do is hang around Yankee discussion boards and annoy their fans.
But there are individuals who love doing things like that, and they delight in being a troll, or, as I prefer to call them, a gadfly.
One such induhvidual hangs around the blog of one Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols over at Computerworld. His/her/its message is always the same: "Typical Linux (fill in blank here)." And his/her/its handle is "Anonymous." Brilliant.
SJVN is an open source fan, and so am I. That's why I spend so much time there.
The gadfly apparently despises the FOSS movement. Thus come the same repetitious comments, over and over.
I wonder why all of that energy isn't spent among his/her/its like-minded fellows at anti-Linux blogs. He/she/it is certainly not alone.
I guess because being a gadfly is appealing to some. I just wish those who do so in a boring, unimaginative manner would move on to something else. If you're going to be critical, can't you do so with imagination?
If I was a better person, I would set the ignore switch. Alas, I'm not.
