You almost got that right - I don't run away from assholes. That's how the whole Scott Abraham thing got so bad - so bad that I made a point of bringing it up during job interviews, just in case they were going to do an online history search. I guess it is no longer unusual for people to be the target of internet assholes, but in 2000 or so it was just a beginning thing.
Brief history - I had internet access at work starting around 1992 - SAIC had an early www page associated with their support of San Diego Yacht Club's America's Cup defense (executives of the company who were SDYC members gave so much money to the defense that we got to have the actual Cup in its plexiglass traveling case at the annual stockholders meeting and other employee meetings for a couple of years). In 1996 Cox Cable started offering internet access in Poway where we lived and I was one of the first to sign up. One of the first things I did online was to look up skiing resources, and I discovered the usenet group rec.skiing.alpine. Usenet is a peer-to-peer communication linkage founded about 1980 that allowed users email-like communication grouped in common-interest hierarchies, leading to groups with names like comp.software or sci.physics. Most users were located at universities (and had email and usenet addresses that ended in .edu), government labs (.gov), military installations (.mil), or private companies with government/military contracts that benefitted from or required the connection (.com). Naturally the users also developed spare time newsgroups, which led to the rec.* groups. and rec.skiing had been around for about 10 years by the time I got a home connection (Cox's first home service was cleverly called @Home) and had already had establishment votes for subgroups like rec.skiing.alpine, rec.skiing.nordic, and rec.skiing.snowboard.
Anyway -- the company that provided email and newsgroup services to Cox, @Home.com, went bankrupt after a couple of years so Cox reconfigured its email service as an in-house function. As a result, I lost connection to all Usenet groups for a time, until my sister-in-law, who was a customer service rep for Cox, came to visit near Christmas 1999. She asked me how I liked the service, and when I told her about the loss of connection to usenet she sat down at my keyboard and had me hooked up within a few minutes. Hoo boy! - 1999 had been a big bad year for RSA - because of an incident at Whistler Ski Resort in British Columbia, the group had more or less split into 2 factions - those who supported Scott Abraham (then working as the moderator of K2 Skis web page) and an Australian ski instructor named Anthea Kerrison in an argument over free lift tickets to an obscure Canadian ski resort. Those like me who stumbled in late and tried to mediate things back to the happy community it had once been were quickly swept by SA into the enemy camp. During my absence from the group, things had gotten so bad that people on both sides had been fired from their jobs for abusing their company computer connections, online threats of violence had been posted, SA had brought in a semi-retired lawyer friend Bert Hoff, and the Seattle Police had launched an effort to mediate (SA and BH lived in Seattle, as did some of the other participants). Both sides filed for restraining orders in a Seattle court, and the judge after hearing bioth sides's arguments, ordered SA to stay off usenet and other public computer connections for a year - the first time that had ever happened. SA didn't even slow down - he created several online alternate identities (like Bob Aloobob) who "supported" SA's position in a way that was transparent to anyone who had been paying attention. Totally by accident, in a response to one of my rsa posts after SA's year-long banishment had expired, he admitted being the author of one of the messages I was quoting - one that had been posted by Bob during the period of SA's legal banishment, thus putting him at risk of legal punishment. I ended up being one of SA's online enemies, which after a while became a daily recreation fr both of us - thus the warning to any prospective employer.
