I'm sure he'd be astonished to find that anyone thought that.

It's an interesting data point about what a minefield it is to be a public figure though. People get offended by the stuff you write, so you go off and stop writing for a month, and then they're offended that you were able to go on vacation for so long.

I'm not offended by the fact that he went on a long vacation, or even that he wrote an article about it. What bugs me is that somehow it's front-page news. This article has zero content.

The news is not the part about where he stayed; it's that he's back on the job.

The information about the Hanalei Surfboard House was the most interesting thing I've ever gotten out of TechCruch for years.

You just have to deal with it. People _will_ get offended.

Being several (quite a lot of) orders of magnitude less influential than TC (and you), I try hard not to deal with it. I will invariably offend a more or less constant portion of my readership every article I write. I try to be as fair and as truthful as I can and, if that offends, say, 10% of my readers, so be it. There is nothing more I could do without compromising my own integrity.

And that is far more important than how many people I may offend.

You are just being grumpy. The airfare to Hawaii from the bay area is less than $300 round trip. If you are going alone and want to stay in a "surf shack" style apartment, it's probably less money than renting a single room in Atherton or wherever Arrington lives. Plus the down economy means everything else is on sale. It's actually a great time to go to Hawaii IMO. (I am on vacation in Hawaii)

Carl Jung has a fascinating theory of archetypes - you may be familiar with it - that are unconscious processes that impact our conscious mind in ways that are subtle and difficult to detect. One manner of this effect is projection. In that case your Shadow ( a prominent archetype) projects itself onto other people and onto external events and you end up interacting with essentially yourself, even though you think you are interacting with the world. Perhaps you are projecting some aspect onto Arrington's post.

Then again, you could be just grumpy.

I think it's just you. I doubt that most people are really much poorer than this time last year.