The Life of Lou Ruppert

Every now and then, there’s a story in the news about some lady who has over forty cats in her trailer. The media does a big story about the mess, and then the issue gets forgotten. I found out today that there’s actually a term for this sort of person. She’s a “cat collector” or, my favorite, a “cat hoarder”. Usually it’s an older woman who lives alone, and usually she has no idea how bad her condition has become. Sometimes there are as many as a hundred cats, and oftentimes the place she lives in is condemned because of the cat urine soaking into the wood and structural materials. I’ve been to houses where neglected cats were kept, and it’s one of the worst smells I’ve ever smelled. As a point of comparison, I’ve also been to open latrines in the third world, walked downwind from sewage treatment plants, and lived near manure lagoons in farm country, and none of those even come close to the overpowering stench of unkept cats in a poorly-ventilated and cluttered room. It’s unimaginably bad, but the hoarder usually has no idea because she’s become used to it. Here’s a good article about cat hoarders for the full story.

How does someone come to own forty cats? Nobody starts off deciding to live in the middle of a feline death camp. If I had to excuse it, I’d say it’s a side effect of an inability to say “no”, combined with an “if not me, then who?” attitude. The path to cat hoarding probably starts the first time you say to yourself “If I don’t take this cat in, who will? It’ll die of starvation or be euthanised. I can’t let that happen to this cute little kitty.” So, you take in the stray, just for now, and then another, and before you know it, you’re knee-deep in diseased feral cats, and everything you own smells of them. It’s a slow process, so you don’t realize it’s happening until, suddenly, your whole world is smelly cats and you can’t get away from it.

I wonder if it’s possible to be a job hoarder. I was mulling the thought over for a while last night, as I wondered why I never seem to have enough time for taking care of all of my things. The number of responsibilities I’ve taken on over the years has grown out of control, such that I can’t possibly give them the care they need. As I gear up for launching a business and try to acquire a wide range of new skills, I can’t bear to part with the old, even though there’s just no more room. So many times, people have come to me to ask me to do “just a small favor” for them, and I’ve always asked myself “If not me, then who will do it? I can’t let this fall to the ground undone.” It’s the wrong question. Just like there are more cats than there are caring people to take them in, there are more things in this world that need to be done than there are responsible people to do them. At some point you have to say “no.” Nobody understands.

Imagine the cat hoarder trying to turn down a new stray someone has brought her. Imagine facing the outrage of the person trying to unload the cat. “What? You have no problem caring for twenty cats, but you can’t take my one? Why don’t you love my cat? Look at him. See how cute he is? Why do you want to kill him? Don’t you care about cats at all?” It’s understandable. When faced with a stray, wouldn’t you rather bring it to the cat lady down the street than try to beg someone who may hate cats or not know how to take care of them? To say “no,” as the cat hoarder, is to fight determination, hope, typecasting, and every emotional trick people know how to play. Meanwhile, none of the cats get the attention they deserve, and there isn’t even time to find them all homes if you wanted to. But people keep bringing more of them because you’re the cat lady. You’re the convenient answer to their inconvenient problems.

I have friends and relatives who are in the same boat. I know people who work twelve-hour days, seven days a week, always stressed, never finding rest or a sense of completion. I know people who never have time to nurture relationships, meet new people, or even spend time with themselves. I know people who have a reputation for being sloppy, unreliable, disorganized, untrustworthy, and so on, not because they don’t care, but because they care about too much and have spread themselves far too thin. These are people who even prevent others from relaxing around them, because they bring with them the fetid stench of unfulfilled responsibilities, noxious to everyone else, but undetected by their numbed senses. We’ve all seen the guy on vacation, screaming into his cell phone with two laptops hanging off his shoulders, and a thick pile of printed out spreadsheets and reports on his lap, while his family stands in the airport, silent and uncomfortable. Does anyone start their adult life wanting to be that guy? Does anyone, as a child, say “I want to be a workaholic when I grow up, and never know peace as long as I live?”

So, on behalf of the world, I’m going to say that it’s OK to say “no” to things, if you’re finding that you have no time for the things you really care about. You’re not being lazy. You’re not a selfish prick. You’re not turning your back on your friends, family, coworkers, country, future, and God. You’re simply acknowledging the fact that there will always be too many cats in the world, no matter what you do, and that they don’t all need to live in your house. In fact, it’s better to give five cats the best life a cat can live than torture a hundred to death out of guilt-ridden neglect. So, find those five things, or ten, that you are meant to own, which you love and can take good care of, and say “no” to the rest. Don’t let yourself become the cat lady. It stinks.

I was talking with my friends tonight about how some people overindulge themselves in certain emotions and situations. They’re like dogs who get into the trash, or the bag of dog food, and just keep gorging themselves on what they’ve found until they make themselves sick. It might be bad romance novels, angry music, tear-jerker movies, violent action films, scary horror movies, cliff-hangers, abusive relationships, overbearing job situations, or anything really. We noticed that the results never seem to be healthy. A glass or two of wine every day is healthy. A jug of it after dinner every night is a sign of a problem. We have friends who are addicted to video games, television, sports, work, relationships, and of course boring old drugs.

Instead of seeking balance and authenticity in our lives, the natural tendency, the human force of entropy, is to plunge headlong towards some grotesque extreme. While exceptional specimens will produce symphonies and cures for cancer, if left to their own devices, the vast majority of us will eventually do nothing more than deform the cushions of the couch, shoving bonbon after decadent bonbon into our sugared lips, as our life flickers before our eyes, trapped in the box we keep it in on the other side of the room. Why do wealthy celebrities always seem to go insane so spectacularly? Strap a rocket to a plane with no rudder, and see how safe the crash is…

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a corvette. Yet, if you have six of them in the garage already and are considering demolishing the house next door to make room to store more of them, you may have a problem. Wisdom is found in being able to recognize the border between normalcy and excess, between your bowl of life and getting your head caught in the food sack. There’s a point where you have to say “I’m angry at government, and one more political commentary show isn’t going to help that go away.” or “I’ve been sad all my life, and listening to weepy music and wearing black all the time isn’t helping it. I don’t need more sadness; I need less!” Find a balance. Find something good, and trustworthy, and helpful, and try to get more of that, not of stuff you already have too much of. That’s a life worth living. Nobody wants to live in a house full of knick-knacks with nothing in the fridge. Choose your investments wisely.

Every now and again, I ask myself why I am a Christian. How did I manage to start believing in God, specifically the Christian view of God, which is one of the most inconvenient ones? Surely I’m smarter than that! And worse, how did I manage to attach myself to a church, which requires me to sacrifice my scarce time and money, and to endure the glaring faults of other people in close quarters? Why would I limit my own freedom, squander some of my best resources and the most fruitful years of my life, for something which would appear on the surface to have no tangible value?

To be honest, I got there in a really roundabout fashion. Like all scientifically minded boys, I was taught that believing in God was stupid. It was a sign of intellectual weakness. I prided myself on how independent I was to be discarding this outmoded world view along with all of the other science geeks. This stage of my life probably lasted into high school.

In high school, I started believing in God in an abstract sense. I knew there were things we couldn’t explain, things which were probably even outside mankind’s ability to grasp them. It was a kind of science fiction theology, where God was some kind of benevolent force who would hear our prayers and answer them if the signal was just right. During one family vacation, I had an argument with my father, a fairly staunch atheist, about something stupid that only a teenager would argue about, and he sent me to the motel room we were staying in, to ground me. I found a Gideon Bible in the drawer, which was the only thing I hadn’t read up until that point, and decided to read it. Everything in there seemed so real and true. And I found that I wasn’t angry at all anymore when I read it. I couldn’t explain how I lost my anger. When my father came to let me out a few hours later, I had probably gotten through about half of the old testament and was calm and in my right mind. The transformation fascinated me.

So, by the time I got to college, I had read most of the Bible. I believed in the God of Genesis and Revelation, but thought all of the Jesus stuff was stupid. I took a comparative religions and mythologies course, and decided that I liked Buddhism. Everybody likes Buddhism in college. Everyone. It’s the only religion with no father figure. But in the first two years of school, the only friends I had who were generally happy and pretty laid back without being dorks were fairly devout Christians. I decided I’d give the Jesus stuff a chance and went out and bought an old King James Bible. Church was still for chumps, though.

Fast forward to the last couple years of college, and I started going to a Bible study in the dorm room next door to mine. It was more interesting than church, much closer, and the people teaching it seemed to be able to explain the Bible in a way that didn’t sound all hokey and pretentious. It was more like a conversation than a guy in a bathrobe standing on a pedestal behind a microphone droning on about thees and thous and assorted “begats”. That was my gateway drug for church.

Ten years later, I’m an elder in a church I helped to start. What happened? I guess it boils down to the fact that I wanted to be happy, and this stuff has a supernatural ability to do that to me. It also neatly explains phenomena that I have seen and read about that I can’t explain with my old religion of sola scientia. Either the stuff in the Bible is real, as far as there being a God, and as far as what sort of being he is, or there is a powerful force in the universe that tolerates being referred to as Jesus in order to foster communication with us meat-bags.

As far as the church thing goes, it serves as a sort of petri dish to help me to see how people work and what sorts of things God does with them. It’s also a good way to help me to remember to pray and study, since I’ve proven to myself that I need structure in order to learn stuff that isn’t always interesting. I haven’t touched my Russian since I got my degree, and I haven’t touched my Arabic since I took the last class Syracuse University offered last spring. And I haven’t touched my French since I came home from Québec last fall. I really need accountability when it comes to staying focused. Church, while it costs me dearly sometimes, is the best way I’ve found to keep that focus and accountability.

Nobody should believe stuff “just because.” It’s like driving off of a cliff because “that’s just where the wheel is pointed.” It’s essential to reexamine your assumptions and beliefs from time to time, just to make sure you’re pointed in the right direction, and are getting what you’re paying for.

The spring clock switch always reveals to me the foolishness of mankind. We agree together for half a year to pretend it’s a different time than it really is, and then we switch back. The result is that twice a year, every man, woman, and child in America is cranky and jet lagged. People have done studies recently and have shown that it actually costs more energy to switch than it does for us to stay in one time. So why do we do it? Inertia.

The thing is, even a drastic change like this, twice a year even, doesn’t cause people to question their underlying assumptions about life. Nobody asks, “Why are we doing this?” We just accept our fate and funnel out of the pasture and onto the train to the new timezone. What other circumstances have we blindly come to accept? What other old things, even things more basic than what time it is, have we come to take for granted before they got taken away from us?

And so ends the first of two semiannual days of confusion. They’re the equinoxes of the industrial age. And to show how truly advanced our civilization is, we now pass from one season to another so quickly that we get jet lag! And this is progress?

Apparently there are a small number of people whose job is to read every single blog posting that has certain keywords in it. I received a visit by one of my coworkers today regarding a post I made a couple days ago about my pork chops, and a certain brightly colored network appliance whose name begins with the letter G. Apparently one of their G-men called him to complain about it, because they thought I was complaining about the appliance itself. I was asked to remove the post, which I politely refused to do. Instead, I updated the wording to explicitly mention that the device was not at fault. But really. What kind of company needs to pay people to chase down people who might say bad things about them? The sort of company I won’t ever personally advise my clients to buy from unless there is no viable alternative.

The sad thing is, up until this point, I was really thrilled about their product. I think it’s one of our more exciting toys. What else will handle the crazy amount of traffic we have at our facility, and still allow us to filter, slice, dice, and rearrange, all in real time, and then share it to the cluster of machines and appliances that gobble it up and tell us what we need to know? And on top of that, they seem to know a thing about industrial design, which is refreshing in this time of datacenters full of soul-less black pizza boxes. But I won’t say a word more about it now. I’d just as soon not deal with their PR insecurities. It’s like what happens to your infatuation with a strikingly attractive and intelligent woman, once you realize that you can’t even take your first bite of dinner with her without having to sit through fifteen minutes of conversation reassuring her that her hips aren’t too big, or that the mole on the back of her neck doesn’t make her nose look ugly, or whatever Cosmo’s got her thinking this week. It’s creepy.

So that’s all I’m going to write about that for now. Meanwhile, check out my friend Erin’s blog in my blogroll, and Tina’s blog next to it. They’re both getting back into the swing of things in Southern Senegal, and have some really nice pictures.

I like to tinker. I like to tinker so much that I will make more work for myself than I have the time to do it. There are plenty of examples. Here is one:

I have two friends in West Africa now. They have cameras and a copy of Skype. Only days ago, I got their network connection sorted. So, I went out and bought a webcam of my own, a cheap Chinese gadget from Gamtec which claimed on the box (in some of the most horrible English I’ve ever seen, I might add) to be compatible with Linux. As with most cheap Chinese products, I’ve found that the label is only for decoration. No drivers are included in Linux for it. No drivers for Linux were on the included CD. No instructions for installing under Linux were available in the manual. No Linux drivers were available for download from their web site. And no instructions for Linux were available on their site, or on any site on the Internet that I could see from my Google search.

Here are the details for anyone coming here from Google:

USB ID: 06a2:0003 Model number mb-301 pc webcam

As an aside, why do Chinese companies insist on not having someone who actually speaks English proofread their materials? Gamtec’s paper manual was embarrassingly bad. Here’s an excerpt:

Thank for using the latest digital pc-camera of our company, it is the latest design and high technology digital product the function can reach ahead of world level, it has a good appearance and very easy take away, meanwhile is has clearly display and high frame rate, it can improve you communication with your-far away friends and make your life more wonderful.

Can you believe it? The first time I read it, I thought they were implying that the camera could somehow launch you into the future. I guess that’s a really creative way of accounting for all of the time you would inexplicably waste trying to get it to work. You didn’t really waste that time, you were just able to reach ahead of world level as part of the camera’s rumored ability to make your life more wonderful. And what’s with the hyphen between “your” and “far”? It’s as if whatever lackey they had sequestered in the sweaty “translation room” was afraid he would be forced to feel more shame if he was unable to show that he could use every single one of the funny punctuation symbols on the western keyboard they handcuffed him to. In any case, they could have done better. And I’m guessing that what I could easily understate as their profound lack of understanding is probably the main reason why they printed the Linux compatibility on the box. Beyond a certain point of illiteracy, words become indistinguishable from pictures. Someone probably just needed to fill a space on the side of a box with computer terms and pasted all of the ones he could find from the three or four English web pages not filtered by the Communist Chinese Government.

Joking about cheap and shoddy products aside, this camera very likely will make my life more wonderful. I have so many irons in the fire right now, not because I am cursed, but because I enjoy tinkering. In a strange form of English never seen by me before, this camera has challenged me to get it to work. I know that there’s a French guy who has gotten over three hundred of these cheap cameras to work. They all use the same basic chips inside, apparently. So, if I’m right, by following his technique, I can be one of the first people to see it work. That’s pretty cool.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges of learning more about ourselves, about problem solving, and about the world around us, just by tinkering and building things. Most people just plop in front of a television and that’s their entertainment. If they can’t find what they want in life, they don’t build it. They escape to a fantasy world someone else rents to them. If something stops doing what they want it to, they don’t fix it or try to understand it better. Whether it’s a television, a computer, a piece of furniture, a spouse, an old friend, or a pet, they discard it like a spoiled rich kid and go try to find another one.

I read a couple articles today about how people are losing the skills needed to build and repair things. Nobody wants to be bothered. Fortunately, as evidenced by the fact that someone wrote those articles, some people really are interested in how things work. They love to invent and tinker and salvage things others would have given up hope on. I am one of those people.

So, I have a tiny black plastic tutor from China who is going to teach me about camera drivers for the next ninety days. If I figure it out, I keep the camera. If I don’t, I get my money back. There’s nothing that compelling on television these days anyway.

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 audience, so it was refreshing to hear well-thought-out questions. Nice work guys (and gals).

The new bits boil down to timing issues. The trojan, as currently implemented, is a bit sloppy. Where Windows trojan horses are nearly invisible and integrate seamlessly into the operating system, the Mac trojan is still rather amateur. So, as it’s updating the /etc/resolv.conf file once a minute, the normal process that produces that file will step in from time to time and produce a thin veneer of normalcy. Depending on when you look, you’ll get two different results. To break past that façade, you need to be familiar with the crontab command. Running sudo crontab -l will let you know if the administrator has evil scheduled to run once a minute or not.

Hoarding the wealth

I mailed the RAM off to 18004memory today and was abruptly reminded of why I hate the US Postal Service. I shouldn’t hate the postal service, because my father was a postman before I was born, but I’ve grown to hate them nonetheless. It started with them leaving expensive books out in the snow in my front yard, years ago. And now they’re all stingy with the packing materials. It used to be that if you needed an inch or two of tape to seal up your package, they’d provide it. Now they steadfastly refuse to help, because they are in the business of selling packing materials. Postmaster doesn’t like your packing job, or wants to inspect the package? Too bad. Either you go back home to reseal the envelope, or you pay them a few bucks for a fresh roll of tape. Come on, people! You have a monopoly on first class mail. Can you really not spare five cents worth of tape once a year for some of your customers?

It’s a prime example of how Americans have forgotten how to do business. Yes, granted, you’ll save five cents on having to help your customers do business with you today, but the bad taste the customer has gotten in his mouth from your ridiculousness means that he won’t likely use your services tomorrow. Look at all of the delivery companies that have sprung up in the last decade or so. Why are they here? People are less interested in preserving the customer relationship and making money in the long term, and more interested in the monkey-level instant figures. The USPS of ten years ago would have said “Hey, grab a piece of tape. We’ve got your back. See you tomorrow.” The USPS of today simply sneers and says “We don’t care who or what you are. We just care about your money. As long as the quarterly figures line up, we don’t care if you get hit by a bus on your way out.”

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 somewhat ill, I’m doubly handicapped, because it’s hard to focus to remember what exactly did happen today.

I started the day reminding myself that Linux doesn’t really benefit from a team of usability experts like Apple and Microsoft do. I was looking at why my friend Tina’s machine wasn’t picking up the mic for Skype and I opened the Volume Control in Linux and checked out the settings. Instead of an Input tab and an Output tab, there were four tabs. Input, Output, Capture Select, and one other one. The input levels were correct, and Front Mic was selected in the Capture Select. That left the final “Miscellaneous” tab, which had no sliders and only one checkbox, mysteriously labeled something like ACDMUX. There was no help button. There were no tooltips describing the setting. The box was unchecked. For all I knew, someone in Germany could be getting a powerful electric shock every time someone clicks that checkbox. When I finally said my apologies and checked the box, sound immediately began working in Skype, and would stop working only when I unchecked the box. But who begins their debugging process for muted inputs by saying “Hmm, must be the ACDMUX, look for the hidden tab, behind the bookcase.” And why four tabs?

I had a dream last night that I was in some kind of computer science class I was auditing at Syracuse University. The professor was a chubby Portuguese guy who was involved with some kind of crime syndicate or something. I was doing my best to pay attention, when the professor turned to me and said “You’re not really here right now because you’re in a dream. Everything I’m saying is stuff that your mind is making up.” Rather than flying, having sex with a supermodel, talking with dead relatives, or going to work without pants like most people would do if they found themselves dreaming lucidly, I answered the professor “Yes, but dreaming is often a time where the brain sorts through stuff it’s learning, so I think I’ll stay for the rest of the class and see what I pick up.” I’m even a geek when I’m sleeping.

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. It’s a boring process from the perspective of a modern enlightened man. You’re watching the shadow of a big rock creep across a smaller rock whirling around in the middle of nothing. What is there to get excited about?

Last night, I decided to take a different perspective. I would spend the eclipse imagining it as best I could from the perspective of one of my ancestors three thousand years ago. What would the eclipse look like to a guy whose culture never told him the myths and bedtime stories of the two rocks spinning in the void, and the tiny rays of light doing a complicated mathematical dance to produce the meaningless show he was watching? To this guy, maybe a giant creature was eating the moon. How would he know when to plant if the moon was eaten up? Or what would this thing eating the moon eat next? How did it climb up there? What else would disappear from the heavens? If it could happen to the moon, it could happen to the sun. They’re about the same size and do approximately the same thing. What kind of omen was this?

The conditions were perfect. It was brutally cold out. The cloud cover would come in at random times and produce a kind of horror film effect. There was a light prickly snow that fell like raindrops, but didn’t obscure the view. There was a biting wind, and it would ring the neighbors’ windchimes that sounded just like the cowbells I heard when I was in the Alps. Occasionally it would creak the creaky tree on my neighbor’s property. For a few moments, I was able to suspend disbelief, and as the reddish crescent swallowed up my moon, it seemed perfectly rational to wonder if some Lovecraftian horror was about to come ravage the earth and everything I held dear.

Light

When the moon finally sent the first gleaming sliver of its all-clear signal, I went back inside to fogged glasses. While Earth has luckily escaped unscathed, I was not so lucky. I woke up with my sinus cold much worse than it was. I find myself closing my eyes randomly all day, as if to sleep, but not out of sleepiness. I’ve got uneasy chills and no mental clarity, as you can probably guess if you’ve read this far. Or not.

BOSS

I used the sickness as an excuse to order my favorite Chinese food from Mr Stirfry. It’s about a block from my house. They have a dish called “Garlic Two-Kinds” (these people really need more creativity with their names) which has giant whitey-with-his-chopsticks friendly pork pieces, giant shrimp, and just the right spiciness. Garlic is supposed to help fight colds, apparently, so that was all the justification I needed. When I got my receipt, it drove home the lessons from the book I finished yesterday about the Chinese being a rigidly hierarchical society. The receipt said: "Server: BOSS" Not something like the more typically American “Hi, I’m Jim, and I’m the manager of branch #245 of the franchise. Let’s be friends.” No, this basically said “I am in charge, and that is all you need to know. Here is your food.” I like it. I smiled all the way home.

Erin

My friend Erin, the future Chinese missionary, stopped by my house for some finishing touches on her laptop before she goes to our training center in Senegal next week. I’ll probably throw her blog onto the blogroll once she gets situated over there. She’s not a prolific writer, but she takes good photographs and plans to dabble in videography if she has time. I hope she does, because there are a lot of fascinating sights over there. Bon Voyage, Erin!

Back in the days before cell phones and pocket pcs, people still used to hang around together. Way back when I was in college, my friends and I would often stop by each others’ rooms unannounced to visit. And certain friends would always hit the same venues at the same time each week, and so people would know that Lou would be collecting tickets at Gifford every Friday night, so if Doctor Death wanted to hang out, he needed only to swing by the movie theater. Joe might be sitting in the lounge waiting for three or four people to join him before heading down to Hungry Charley’s, so if you wanted to touch base with Joe, you’d swing by the TV lounge around 9pm. There was no need to coordinate or text back and forth to set it up. It just happened.

When I was in England, the local pubs all had weird hours. They’d be open like Tuesdays 8-10pm and Thursdays 6-9:45pm. The cool thing was that everyone in the surrounding area, and their dogs, would descend on the same place at the same time. It was like an impromptu party. It’s probably a kind of centuries-old tradition at its core. Nobody could text or phone each other, but they wanted to hang out each week and stay in touch with their neighbors, so they’d just agree to show up at the same place at the same time each week. There was no sending Bob an SMS to see how he was doing. You could walk over to his farm, but if he was in the middle of shearing sheep, you’d have to help him and that could take hours. Luckily, you knew Bob was always at the tavern on Thursdays around 6pm, and so you’d wander down there and meet him there instead. Problem solved. You’d catch him at his office hours at the pub.

My friends and I have a few “office hours.” There are so many of us that it’s hard to coordinate things on short notice. Luckily we know that on Mondays, for instance, there’ll usually be ten or fifteen of us at the Tully’s on Seventh North, so we need only drift down around 10pm and we will see people there. It’s a great way to build a close-knit community like in the old villages or like the floor unity of the old college days.