That's the surprising thing -- Patrick's an exceptionally nice guy in person, but his social-media wankery is, for whatever reason, completely insufferable to me. Especially when he's overtly gunning to claim Gruber's pulpit. In that way, he's much like Zed Shaw from the Zed's So Fucking Awesome days: A kind, down-to-earth guy with a strangely abrasive online persona.

Citation: I attended undergrad at Patrick's last employer, and worked indirectly with him in IT Services for a year. He really is fantastic in person.

I didn't mean to pick on Patrick. This "honored/humbled" thing has been going on in our culture for a while now.

According to Google, it's been on the rise since the 40's.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=honored+and+humbl...

Pretty interesting graph. It started growing exponentially in the 90's.