The Life of Lou Ruppert

Laou the Sfaxi

My friend Mr Ahmed informed me today that the African Football Cup was won this weekend by the Club Sportif Sfaxien from Sfax, Tunisia! Nice work guys! I know a few Tunisians from when I went there last winter. I spent a week traveling from Tunis down to Sfax, intending to practice my Arabic, but using more French instead. I’d intended to write all about it when I got back, but it’s yet another unwritten travelogue. I swear sometimes I need a staff of clones to get all of the projects done that I have vision for.

The new bedroom

The room is still plugging along. No pictures yet, but they’re coming. I’m beginning to think that the only person who will like the weird modern “melted mint chocolate chip ice cream” look is me, but I’ve not yet asked anyone else to sleep there, so it doesn’t matter. Painting is a great way to exercise self-discipline. It’s boring, time consuming, and an ideal way to expose your latent perfectionism.

The focus knob for my brain

I don’t normally advertise on my blogs, but think of it as more of an offer of an experience than an advertisement. One of the local entrepreneurs, Matt Godard, deals in artisan roasted coffee. If you’ve ever wanted to taste what the perfect cup of coffee tastes like, check out Café Kubal. When I’m dead and resurrected, and sitting around the legendary banquet table with Jesus and pals, I’m expecting the after dinner cup of coffee in heaven, intended to keep me awake for eternity, to taste exactly like Matt’s brew. He roasts the beans in his store in a rotating iron roaster that is nearly a hundred years old. I think it fills the place with weird roasty scents that subliminally rewire your brain chemistry to need it, so if any of you try his coffee without actually going there, let me know if you’re hooked too. Cost of tasting the best coffee ever: $8 for a 12 oz bag. They should print it in the vacation section.

The dubious bliss of protocol ignorance

I read about an intriguing spam-blocking technique this week, called “Greet Pause”. We use it on our sendmail servers to block a behaviour known as “slamming”. In slamming, the spammer will try to jam as many emails into the mail server as possible before it can decide that it doesn’t want them. With greetpause, the sendmail server will twiddle its thumbs before saying hello. It then disregards anything said before it greeted the new connection, which usually dumps the spammer’s email into the void. The mailer I prefer, postfix, uses a more effective collection of techniques to accomplish the same thing, but this technique was interesting to me because it reminded me of the sort of conversations Americans have with French speaking people sometimes.

Americans are very direct. When we go someplace to do business, we get right to the point. With French, and perhaps with Latin cultures in general, there is an order to things, sort of a protocol. So, a conversation might actually go like this:
American: Hi, I’d like to buy a phone.
Clerk: Um, Good day? How are you? *clears throat*
American: Right, sorry. Hello.
Clerk: Hello.
American: How are you doing?
Clerk: Very well, thank you. Can I help you?
American: Yes, I’d like to buy a phone.

Fun stuff.