For the past few weeks my friend Chris has had an open invitation for me to play Settlers of Catan with him and couple of other guys in the U-district. Today I finally accepted and when I got there it turned out that one of the guys was Evan Martin, one of the devs for LiveJournal. It turns out Evan just graduated from college and this was his last weekend in Seattle before moving to the Bay Area to start work at Google. Once we were introduced he mentioned that he knew of me and in fact that I was the reason he unsubscribed from the atom-syntax mailing list. It seems in one of the early discussions about Atom I wrote something which he felt was a technically valid point but was delivered in a scathing manner (i.e. punctuated with a flame) so he decided to bow out of further discussions about "RSS with different tag names". This reminded me of a comment by Robert Sayre in Joshua's weblog

OTOH, your post was free of insults, hyperbole, and condescension. Dare is usually right when there is an actual technical issue, but we're talking politics

My level of exasperation with a lot of what was going on with the Atom effort made me more scathing than I tend to be in usual email discourse. This is one of the reasons I unsubscribed from the list but it seems I hurt a couple of people's feelings along the way. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the people on the other end of an email thread aren't former denizens of git.talk.flame who relish technical arguments spiced with flame. My apologies to any others that were as significantly affected by my comments.

Anyway, we all (Jag, Chris, Evan and I) played a three hour game of Catan while partaking of some of the nice Bourbon thoughtfully provided by Chris. Evan seems like he would have been a decent guy to talk to about blogging and syndication related technologies. I hope he enjoys his new job at Google.

TiVo calls...