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why do people have to be assholes?
Monday, April 3 2017
I took a long break from work this afternoon to make more progress on a project I'd started yesterday: adding a USB port to my Linksys 54GS (version 1). I'd found a PDF online with detailed instructions for precisely my model of router. Such routers are capable of supporting two USB 1.1 ports, though of course all one really needs is one. USB 1.1 is pretty slow, but it's fine for things like controlling an Arduino or getting pictures from a webcam. Yesterday I'd soldered two thin armature wires to the pads that had been beneath tiny surface-mount resistors. Today I salvaged a female USB-A port, soldered it to a tiny piece of circuit board, and then made a pair of tiny voltage dividers to adapt the native 3.3 volt logic of the router to the 5 volt logic of standard USB. I then hooked it all together, using a powered USB hub to avoid having to include a five volt power supply (the 54GS has no five volt source internally). Initially the damn thing refused to power up and I feared I'd bricked it. But a hard reset (the kind that happens after holding the reset button for ten seconds) restored the defaults (of DD-WRT, not the stock Linksys firmware) and it came back fully. Better still, I was able to get it to mount a thumb drive with no additional electronic work. It's unlikely I'd actually be attaching a thumb drive to this thing given the slow USB 1.1 connection, but it proved that USB is working.
This evening, Gretchen got back from a court date in Sloatsburg, the one that came of her having been seen holding a cellphone while driving at night more than half a year ago. Evidently holding the penalty for holding a cellphone in a moving car are severe because even after showing up for her court date, Gretchen couldn't get the penalty to be any smaller than two points on her license and a fine of somewhere between two hundred and three hundred dollars, and that had taken an hour of waiting in a slow-moving line in a dreary Sloatsburg courtroom.
Then, to top it all off, Gretchen checked her phone (the one responsible for her being in Sloatsburg to begin with) and found that Rich, the general contractor working on our Brewster Street house, had been receiving a series of hostile voice messages from the next-door-neighbor to the north, the wifely half of which had been lodging frivolous complaints about smushed flowers beneath the snow and damage to a stone wall even as we greatly increased her property values by fixing up the abandoned house to her south. This time the messages were from the husband, who, according to Rich, had served time in the hoosegow for embezzlement. The messages demanded that Rich remove all his stuff from the neighbors' property and that if he made any further use of their property he would be charged with trespassing. He also promised to serve us (the owners of the property) with some sort of lawsuit "tomorrow." Also, mixed in with all of this, the husband had demanded that Rich powerwash his house. The houses are all close to one another, and it's impossible to work on one without making incursions onto the properties of neighbors. One would think people would recognize such things in a crowded urban environment. Beyond that, it's mind-boggling why anyone would be so unnecessarily hostile to brand new neighbors. I have to figure that the complaining household is in dire financial shape what with the husband's rap sheet, and intimidating people into settling threatened lawsuits is a possible source of revenue. They might've also decided Rich is an easy mark, because he's an unusually nice guy. Gretchen, by contrast, quickly turned acid in the only conversation the complaining wife managed to have with her. It all sounded to me like bluffing and intimidation, but it raised an issue in our immediate life that we've also been observing in dismay as it plays out on the world stage: why do people have to be assholes? Especially when it's obviously counterproductive? What's even the short-game goal of making foreigners feel unwelcome in the United States? Of defunding the State Department? Of leaving irate messages on the phone of a hired general contractor?
Partly to make up for all the non-workplace-work I did this afternoon while fiddling with my router, I made a hard push tonight to get a complex of SQL statements to produce the correct forms of updates in thousands of records in The Organization's fundraising database. This all had to happen within the context of multiple currencies, and getting it to work amounted to a series of refinements across several passages of similar (though different) code. By midnight, I'd mostly gotten it all working correctly, though I still had to figure out what to do about all the people who had made no direct donations themselves but needed to be credited with the donations of others.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170403 feedback
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