The Life of Lou Ruppert

Sharing the wealth
The presentation on Mac Trojans went OK today. Most of the audience had read my previous stuff on the topic, so I only needed to review the material. The great thing was that a lot of people had really good questions. I’m used to speaking in front of a non-technical [...]

I was going to write more about the Mac Trojan, but I think we’ve heard enough about that for now. Maybe I’ll include a short writeup of what else I’ve learned, after my presentation tomorrow afternoon.
Today I want to write about my favorite salad. I first had this salad in Lyon, France, back [...]

Digital chat-up lines
I’ve been getting comment spam from Softlayer, specifically 74.86.186.66. It takes the form of a post praising a posting with a couple keywords related to the domainname of the spam site in question. In this case, it was a site called apple.whatever.com (not the real domainname) containing links to what I’d [...]

Lassitude
I was the ahh-counter and grammarian for the Toastmasters meeting tonight. Part of that role is choosing a vocabulary word to spring on the group so that they can practice using an otherwise useless word. The word I chose was lassitude, which means a kind of extreme sluggishness and lethargy. It described [...]

All of the walking around for winterfest finally caught up with me today. I began to regret my vow to post once for each of the days of Lent this year. What do you post about a day you spend walking around the house in your pajamas drinking tea? And still feeling [...]

I had a board meeting tonight at the church. One of the elders was missing in action due to a recent operation, so we patched her in with skype. It worked just as well for her as it did for Erin and me when we were in Québec this fall during the last [...]

I’ve noticed that when I drink espresso, I find myself wanting to clean my house. The cleanest area of my house is the table my espresso machine is on. It’s a really strange phenomenon. Does anybody else do this? Regular coffee makes me want to write code, but espresso apparently brings [...]

Tonight I met up with some friends for a comedy show. The comedian was Victor Varnado, and it was one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in a very long time. I was asleep all day with this sinus funk, but for an hour and a half, I was awake and laughing. [...]

Darkness
The eclipse was a great experience for me last night. I got to watch the moon go dark and then come back again. I’ve seen parts of other ones before, but it’s always been summer, so the timing never lined up right for me to see one when I had the patience to. [...]

I finished another book today: Foreign to Familiar. It’s about Hot and Cold-Climate cultures. It does a good job describing the difference between industrialized and non-industrialized cultures and the different mindsets associated with each. If you plan to interact meaningfully with people outside of your own culture, this book is a must. [...]