How to be a Gumshoe
March 8, 2006
Wow, you are one fat dude. Figures we can see an empty place in the distance. You even have fat on your fingers!!! Go on diet fat boy.
Such was the comment left for me, like a flaming bag of poo, in the comments of my article Thanks a Lot, AppleCare. Now it’s not like I’m sensitive about being a fat guy, but some things just aren’t polite. So I decided to sleuth around.
The comment was left by a user calling themselves “The Real Matt Thomas” with the email address mtt251@hotmail.com.
Well, a Hotmail address. That makes it difficult to discern the real culprit. Let’s check Mint to see what their IP address was.
plksgate.mssny.org
167.206.249.151
Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. Mint also lets us know that this alleged “real Matt Thomas” found iammattthomas.com by searching on Yahoo! for the phrase Matt T. I could have told him that a search like that wasn’t going to get him very far but, alas, he never asked for my advice.
The Medical Society of the State of New York owns the address mssny.org. Let’s go to their web site and see if we can find any clues. The Contact Us page is a good place to start.
Hmm, no Matt Thomases work there, but there is a person there named Matt Talty. Doing a simple search at Switchboard.com for everyone with his name in the state of New York brings up a lone result. And as it turns out, that result is for a person who lives just outside Lake Success, NY, the headquarters of MSSNY.
And it also leads us to another clue. Remember the email address they left—mtt251@hotmail.com. It just so happens that 251 is also the first three digits of the home address of that person.
So, are “The Real Matt Thomas” and Matt Talty one in the same? It’s hard to say—or it was, until I tried searching for “Matthew T. Talty” (remember, the email address is mtt251@hotmail.com. MTT looks an awful lot like initials).
That led me to a page that I won’t reference out of a respect I have for the person’s privacy that I am certain he would not extend to me. Because while being a gumshoe is fun, I’m not entirely heartless.
It looks like I found my culprit. What am I going to do? Well, there’s not a whole lot to do. Our friend Matt just thinks I’m a big fat ass, for whatever reason, and I guess that makes him upset. For me, it was just fun to figure everything out.
I’m not encouraging anyone to use the easily-findable personal identification about Matt to get in touch with him at all. But he should know—as should we all—that the internet’s a wide-open place, and if finding random people to criticize for being fat is the best use he can find for it, he can’t complain about the consequences.
Oh snap.
from one gay man to another, i think your fabulously hot shit mr. matty :-)
you’re my god damn hero.
What a jackass. Good job on hunting him down!
So that’s where the ‘injected into a jam donut’ part comes from!
Just for fun, I used Google Earth to “fly” to his residence. Boy does the world get small when you realize you can do that! That being said, how the heck do you know how to do all that stuff??
On a more important note – since you are leaving Baltimore, can I have your car? I need one.
And I mean have. Not buy. Or you can give it to me. The car. Not bootylove.
Thanks. I’ll pick it up later.
If you’re wrong I think Mr. Talty definitly has the right to sue the pants off of you.
That email addy made things just a little too easy.
If I were wrong, I wouldn’t have posted it in the first place.
My gut reaction was to email this prick and give him a piece of my mind. Maybe set up a burning monument in his front yard or send anonymous hate mail but then I deceided to go outside of the norm.
Punks who screw around at work sending “fat emails” really are not worth any second glance. He is probably a single, over paid janitor who was surfing the web during the night shift. He became angry when unable to maintain an erection and started to hateblog.
Which is fine “Matt T”, no one really cares what you think. Thank you for taking the blue ribbon in ignorance. I hope you see this and realize you have no life and now everyone knows how pathetic you are.