[Wolves] Fame at Last for Ade

[Andy Wootton]

Jono Bacon wrote:

> Hi Woo,
>
>> I realised on re-reading the transcript that the humour didn't come
>> across at all. You did actually sound quite dangerous. I left him trying
>> to clean up your act so you sounded like the kind of potential customers
>> we would be prepared to accept money from.
>
> I suppose the moral of this story is that no-one should ever use 
> LUGRadio for evangelical means. I think the only way LUGRadio can 
> really help promote Open Source is by demonstrating the social and 
> community aspect. It should certainly not be used to promote it within 
> business. Full points for determination though Woo. :)
>
> Incidentally, could you post the transcript here so we can see how 
> dangerous it sounds?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jono

The effect would have been the same but my motivation wasn't FOSS 
evangelism. I'm fighting an internal battle to stop our infrastructure 
being pulled into the gravitational field of an M$-only black hole from 
which there will be no escape. I'm assuming that Aq had gone to the web 
site considering that he might buy a service and we have lost a 
potential customer. By the end of the year we could be losing 10% of 
customers if Firefox reaches its target.'Customer churn' has a very high 
profile so I'm using it as a lever to stop the rot of allowing M$ to 
dictate our technical standards.

I don't do blatent evangelism. I think the way to spread any faith is to 
be a good neighbour and live an obviously better life. Eventually the 
heathen come to you asking for enlightenment. I'm happy just to promote 
religious tolerance for now.

Here's the transcript. The highlighting shows the problem, the solution 
and the business impact. "Complaints are a gift" and they don't come 
much better than that.

Ade: … and Powergen remember.

Aq: Oh yea, ******* Powergen

Jono: The ********.

Matt: Maybe we should talk about that.

Ade: We did.

Aq: Yeah, *******, we should abuse them mightily. Powergen!

Jono: Ah, I read that in the blog

Aq: You go to their web site in Firefox and it says “*Y**our browser is 
not supported**.* You need to be using Internet Explorer 5.5 [Ade: 
Firescape] or Netscape 6.0 or better or Conquerer or Opera* b**ut not** 
Firefox* and you just think “No”, you need a ******* good hiding.* Stop 
using browser detect*. Right? Just don’t …

Ade: Was the first thing that you did – did you just go and get the user 
agent extension which was what I did?

Aq: No. The first thing that I did was that I went ****, they’re noise* 
and didn**’**t look at their website*.

Jono: Why do you need an extension? You can hack the config thing can’t you?

Aq: Yeah but you have to hack the config thing, unless you’re Leet and I 
don’t know how to do that.


Cheers,
Woo