It has long been a pass-time of mine, no actually, a hobby of mine to try to educate “keyboard warriors” about how pointless it is to try to start fights on the internet and how it very rarely, if ever, gets your point across without making you look like an idiot.

This point has never been proven better than by the recent twitter campaign by @edvendetta.

It is my opinion that @edvendetta is an ex-employee of a coffee shop in Lincoln called Coffee Aroma who has decided to set himself up with an “anonymous” twitter account and try to expose his previous employer for alleged tax fraud.

I can’t even begin to explain where he went wrong in his attempted retribution but I can list a few points that come to mind.

Firstly, he chose to emulate the persona of the group “anonymous” who recently made it big in the press with their alleged hacking of Visa, Mastercard and others in support of wikileaks. He badly copied the anonymous manifesto, bastardizing it to suit his own campaign, and chose an image from V for Vendetta to represent himself.
When you turn to the internet to help you with a personal issue or vendetta against a company, as he did, the people you want on your side are the exact same people you will completely piss off by miss-quoting and miss-understanding everything that Anonymous stands for.

Secondly, he actually replies to everyone who tries to wind him up on twitter with ill thought-out responses, almost completely destroying all his own credibility well in advance of his big announcement.

Thirdly, he started by claiming he had facts he wished to publish to the world and to the local press. As his campaign continued he stopped mentioning the press (presumably after he read up about libel), and then started claiming he had allegations rather than facts. I think this destroyed what was left of his credibility.

Lastly, when he finally came out with his announcement accusing the owners of Coffee Aroma of tax fraud (which incidentally he did almost 50minutes early of his self-set timescale), his single request was that the people of Lincoln boycott Coffee Aroma as revenge for their alleged previous tax fraud.

So to summarize he wants us all to boycott a coffee shop forcing half a dozen current employees to become unemployed a week before christmas. That is his solution? It sounds a lot more like an ex-employee wanting revenge for the way he felt he was treated.

Coffee Aroma has and will be for the foreseeable future one of the best coffee houses in the UK, loved by hundreds. Their staff always great you with a smile on their face and make you a truly excellent cup of coffee. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming and for those reasons alone I, along with many others, will carry on going there. If a partner of the company has committed any fraud, it is for current and past employees to resolve with him personally. It doesn’t affect the coffee I drink, it doesn’t affect the atmosphere and most importantly it doesn’t stop the people who work in the shop from being lovely people to spend time with.

Punishing innocent staff to get a perverse revenge on a previous employer is just plain selfish.

Ed Vendetta – I hope one day overcome your cowardliness, remove your mask, and face the person who you have a grievance with like a man rather than attacking the very people that you should be protecting.

 

London at Night, originally uploaded by Phil_Barker.

I spent last week in London on a Perl training course (more about that later). While I was there I took a walk in the snow around the town center and took some photos.

Check them out – let me know what you think

Modified Nationals 2010, originally uploaded by Phil_Barker.

I’ve not been to a car show in quite a long time now, but the weather was lovely last weekend and I decided to head over to Peterborough Showground to the Modified Nationals show. The cars there were utterly garbage but I did have a chance to practice a bit of glamour photography (if you can call it that).

I’ve upgraded a lot of my camera gear recently and am now using a Canon 50D with a 24-70 ƒ2.8L and a 70-200 ƒ4L. Both brilliant lenses and I loved taking photos with them.

Check out the rest of my shots on my flickr!