July 12, 2003

• Contrariness

  
  When I was young, in my teens, I was somewhat of a social outcast. Well, I had always been a social outcast, mostly by choice, but as a teen people began pointing it out to me, sometimes with malice in mind. I gravitated to what became known as geeky endeavors in later years. Naturally the girls I was attracted to were my polar opposites and I had no chance in the world with them ... or so I thought, and was told, at the time. Later, when it was too late to do anything about it, I was advised otherwise ... but that is a different story.
  
  In my third decade, the girls I was attracted to always turned out to be either nurses or teachers (or students of those arts). Both are occupations for people who can tolerate frustration and unpleasant working conditions. In that period I was working at geeky things but hanging out with two different groups, one of musicians and the other that could loosely be described as highly individualistic loners who somehow banded together against all odds. Convinced I was a poor fit with society in general, I failed to make any close friendships. By the end of that decade I had been living on a desert island for two years and was being asked to leave, to take employment in a land I had been avoiding because of the tales my father told of his misadventures there, Panamá.
  
  I never planned to stay in Panamá. When I arrived I expected to leave within thirty to sixty days. I kept trying to leave for the next two decades.
  
  I found myself speaking Spanish, a language I had never studied and never expected to have to speak, almost more often than I spoke my own native tongue. I had studied Latin in high school and had briefly flirted with trying to learn French in college. With my background in Latin and French, I enjoyed my brief study of Chaucer more for the language than for the literature, although that was fun, too. I dealved into the roots of English and, in my Anthropology studies, spent some time studying their version of the science of linguistics.
  
  The Spanish of the capital city of Panamá is relatively pure, much like the language you would expect to encounter throughout Spain. The Interior of the country, however, is occupied by immigrants, many from Europe, especially Eastern Europe, for whom Spanish is a second language. Even among later generations, the language spoken in the Interior has taken on a flavor that is distinctly different. Speaking it is not for the faint of heart, as even the sounds and cadences are different from what is heard in the capital. It was like an Oriental having to learn both English and Cockney. Eventually, after many mistakes, some embarassing, I learned well enough to get by.
  
  Somehow I acquired a new family during those years. It wasn't something I had planned on doing but the result of seeing something I wanted come available and acting before the opportunity passed me by, a series of events that, in hindsight, I had very little control over.
  
  People who work with computers are, necessarily, masochistic. That is, you have to either enjoy pain and frustration or have in incredibly high tolerance for it to continue working with computers. Computers are as contrary as anything else in my life has been. My threshold of pain must be shifting, though, because I've begun to enjoy it less. Perhaps that's a sign that my passtime has indeed become an addiction.
  
  My wife and daughter are away. They are in Panamá with the family we have there. There's nobody but me and the dog. So I decided to have a night out.
  
  I went to a KPLUG (Kernel-Panic Linux Users Group) meeting to listen to a two hour presentation on tape backup software.
  
  At each meeting, certain goodies are raffled off. At this meeting, three of us whose combined ages totaled two centuries were among the winners. I walked off with a book on C++ programming. I don't do programming and especially not in C++, one of the most frustrating languages devised. I could have had one of the two Cisco routers that were available but I have no idea what to do with one. None of the three of us had previously won anything at these meetings. Two other people each won twice, including one who was attending for the very first time. They always seem to win two prizes when they show up for the first time.
  
  I have arranged to dispose of my prize and I've been thinking about bus drivers and the holidays they take. A normal person would have gone out to see a movie, would have hit the bars or the casinos or would have gotten a decent meal. I spent my time with misfits like myself, people who spend significant amounts of time banging their heads against the wall because computer work, done correctly, is terribly frustrating.
  
  As a further example of the contrariness of life: I dislike Windows. I resent the Microsoft corporation and their attitudes towards their customers, including the fact that their profit margin exceeds 80%. I don't much care for Apple and don't use their products although they are superior in many ways. I do like Linux and have two different Linux systems at the moment. But both of my Linux systems are so badly screwed up that I find myself using Windows about 95% of the time ... and that is going to increase because I'm about to drop my dial-up ISP, leaving me with only the high speed link. It doesn't work with either Linux system.
  
  I know that compatible WiFi cards exist to connect my Linux systems to my router. I spent a good part of the day today visiting computer stores, trying to find one. All of the stores in the area seem to stock the same three brands of Windows-only hardware. To get something that will work with my Linux systems, I'll have to special order it through the Internet using my Windows system. I've tried to compile the modules that are supposed to work with my Linux systems. So far, my efforts have amounted to total failure. I'll keep trying, of course, but the odds are against me.
  
  If it worked, I wouldn't get my dose of frustration.

  • 02:58
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