[conspire] A dollop of community gossip

[Rick Moen]

I'll not kid myself that this is local Linux-community gossip, and am
not materially concealing whom I'm talking about, _but_ I'm deliberately
omitting the name so it won't show up on Web searching.  (After all, I 
always thought reasonably well of the guy.)  Please do likewise if moved
to comment.  Thanks.


Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2016 13:33:39 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Tony Godshall <togo at of.net>
Subject: Re: DNS Registrars link at http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Network_Other/
 has been redirected

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> In
> 
> http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Network_Other/
> 
> This link
> 
> DNS Registrars - $PERSON's list of discount domain registrars
> 
> Now redirects to someone selling server management services

Thanks.  Wow, the biggest problem is that $PERSON has always been a
serious flake.  I probably never should have put enough trust in his 
Web content to link to _any_ of it.

> Maybe link to wayback machine version?
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20131109154908/http://linux-sec.net/DNS/
> 
> Another comparable site wasn't readily located.

OK, substituted.  Thanks again!



Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2016 14:29:57 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Tony Godshall <togo at of.net>
Subject: Re: DNS Registrars link at http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Network_Other/
 has been redirected

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

[...]

> http://linux-sec.net/DNS/

$PERSON was an interesting pothole on the road of open source in the
Bay Area.  (He relocated up to Reno about a decade ago.)  He's a
Filipino immigrant with a strong Tagalog accent, very
passive-aggressively devoted to avoiding direct confrontation as many
Filipinos are, and showed up in the early Linux community as the sole
proprietor of a small computer assembler and hardware consultancy.  From
the time the Web came into existence, he's maintained a set of related
Web sites, always with the same hideously garish aesthetics, and always
with big collections of poorly selected data thrown together.

He would always put his foot figuratively into every management issue at
SVLUG to complicate things:  You would think for a while about what he
said, and slowly realise he'd said nothing the least bit useful.  He
always had an opinion about other people's volunteer efforts, but never
was willing to do anything himself.

Many mailing list discussions of organisational issues at SVLUG foundered 
primarily because of $PERSON:  He would post difficult-to-understand,
poorly written, somewhat incoherent, often probably irrelevant
objections to just about _anything_ someone proposed, seemingly just to do
bikeshedding -- and participants who weren't expert on the subject would
assume he'd said something others needed to address, chewing up time.  I
recently said to Deirdre about my sister Michele that 'Her superpower is
that of making simple things complicated', and the same is true of
$PERSON.

I noticed he seemed to trigger a truly fascinating social dysfunction &
leadership-vacuum problem found in many volunteer groups:  In many of
them, there's an assumption that no action, no decision, is permissible
as long as there is still one person generating objections that haven't
yet been thoroughly discussed and understood -- that total agreement by
everyone is mandatory as prerequisite, or nothing may happen.  The
fascinating thing is that even though 80%+ of the participants knew
$PERSON for a decade-plus and knew he basically never helped resolve
anything, these discussions _still_ foundered when he did that, and
would cease to move forward for months and sometimes people would just
quit.

Through tacit agreement, SVLUG eventually switched to making
organisational decisions only at in-person, face-to-face meetings, in part
as the easiest way to sidestep the bizarre $PERSON problem.

For some years, I'd wondered if the old coot were even still alive, as
he stopped posting to Bay Area mailing lists quite a few years ago.  I
monitor the expiration status (how many days/months/years from
expiration) of many acquaintances' domains including his, such as his
main domain linux-consulting.com .  This past July, he let one of them
(IIRC, his main domain) expire, seemingly inadvertently, so I found what
seemed his current e-mail via a mailto: link (to a pair of addresses)
for sales inquiries on the front page of his site
http://ddos-mitigator.net/ , to let him know.  I got initial delivery
failure because he'd mistyped the domain:  The mailto: link said
'sales at DDoS-Mitgator.net', misspelling 'mitigator'.  Spotting that error
and sending him mail permitted me, enfin, to let him know about his
domain expiration gaffe.

And I said, 'Um, $PERSON?  You probably should fix the link to two "sales"
e-mail addresses, at the bottom of the http://ddos-mitigator.net/ front
page.  I assume you'd like to make some sales?  Then, it might just be
important.  ;->  '  I also tactfully said that he really ought to test
such links, when they're for something as mission-critical as sales
inquiries.

His reply:  He said that there were too many links on his pages for him
to spend time finding broken ones.  Ohhhh-kaayyyy.

At least the old coot's still alive, even if no more competent than
before.  But it's a total mystery how he's ever been able to earn a
living.