Weblog Entry for 24 June 2002

Those assholes at Bigfoot have been sending my mail telling me that I’ve exceeded the limit on the free email forwarding service that didn’t have a fucking limit when I signed up for it. In fact, they’ve sent me two such messages in the past few hours, which I suspect means that somebody out there is sending mail to my Bigfoot address. If it’s you, send to avram@grumer.org instead; there’s a good chance that stuff sent to the Bigfoot address won’t reach me in a reasonable amount of time. Those fuckheads.

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I’m getting pretty pissed off at the reactions I’m seeing to Apple’s new “Real People” ads. Not that the ads themselves are without flaw, but the criticisms I’m seeing from The Register and John Dvorak are stupid and downright offensive. Look here:

The Reg: "It's like being stuck in a bad relationship!" says one 'Mark Frauenfelder'. But you only need to take one look at the boy to know that not only is he probably he an expert on the subject, but he's the kind of twitchy, self-loathing bore from whom women flee.

Dvorak: Then there's the spike-haired Mike Frauenfelder (if that is, indeed, his real name). This guy looks as if he wants to wash a camel with cream cheese. Maybe if he tucked in his shirt he would be more respectable. [...] Next is Dave Haxton, who says he's a programmer who switched to the Mac and put his PC on eBay. Dave wears glasses from 1975, has a blue work shirt, sports a beard and has a pen in his shirt pocket. I have no idea who identifies with this bloke. He doesn't even match the Mac stereotypes. He looks like a twice-divorced high school shop teacher to me.

I checked out the photos on Apple’s site, and I don’t see the kind of wacked-out lunatics that Dvorak and Orlowski see. I see regular, normal people. People like myself, my friends, my family, my neighbors. Clearly, we’re the sort of people who are worthy only of contempt in Dvorak’s and Orlowski’s model of the universe; people who should be living under bridges instead of ever being allowed near a TV camera.

And speaking of Dvorak, why the hell does this guy have a column? Why is anybody paying money for this idiot’s words? What does “looks as if he wants to wash a camel with cream cheese” mean anyway? I haven’t taken him seriously since like a decade back, when he wrote a column about how he wanted a word processor that could make neon text.

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