I was going to do this weekly but my inner artist works in spurts. I might give you 2-3 posts in a week and you not hear from me for a week or 2. So get ready for the inconsistency. I would type it out in word then paste on the day I'm suppose to post but I know me I'll put that thing through edit hell and it will not be the same so here is #2 in the series. Remember I don't go in chronological order, that's boring :)
I'm out trying to find a job lately. The words "perfect fit" keep ringing in my head like a bell. Its annoying because I never see life as perfect. So why do companies keep putting it in their job listings.
I came from a situation and time where nothing was perfect you had to make do. I lived my life in misfit groups. My friends were misfits. My situations were never perfect but I always made do.
My neighborhood from when I was little until now has always been racially mixed. From my earliest times my friends were the rainbow. Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, Africans etc and I never though any different about any of them.
My schooling wasn't a perfect fit. I've had all kinds of teachers and I had to deal with it. Great teachers that pushed you and made you better, to indifferent teachers who were here to work and wasn't going to put more into it that the job description said. Lastly, teachers who seem to act as road blocks, that would bring in personal thoughts and feelings and manage their classrooms like that.
I had one of those in the 5th grade. Its been so long I don't remember her name. But she was a white lady that would do strange things. We were lining up to go anywhere, lunch, home what ever. She would say we needed to be quiet and behave and she would call us. At first me and some other black friends were always at the back of the line always getting called last. So we talked and decided to be quiet and see if we could get called earlier. Didn't matter we were quieter than other people she called before us.
Now to give you a more area overview of the situations this is how we realized she would call people. White girls first, then white boys, then spanish girls, then spanish boys, then black girls and lastly black boys. Again no matter how we acted we were always last.
Even in academics we were treated differently. By opinions of others I'm an intelligent person. Things came easy to me academically. There was no subject that gave me issues. But I knew I passed those mastery learning reading tests. Later I had to prove it but I seem to be failing which didn't seem possible. After the situation I'm going to describe below. I showed the paper work from my test and assignments to prove that I wasn't failing.
So one day we were going downstairs and the teacher were mumbling something. We heard the words niggers and wet backs. We looked at each other. My friend Ali said he is going to tell his dad. I said I'm gonna tell my grandmother and my other classmates said they were gonna tell their parents.
It wasn't coordinated but all of our parents showed up to talk to the principal about this. I don't know the details of what happened but the next day we talked into the class to Ms Bruce being out teacher.
They never told us what happened probably because the didn't feel we could understand, we did. We were happy that we effected change. a small group of male black and spanish kids fix something that needed to be fixed.
It always stuck with me. Its probably the reason for some of the future posts I will do to bring an understanding great work comes from collaborative efforts from people who may not be a perfect fit, but come together to make things work.
I'll post every week with the title "Stories of the 80s and 90s" A lot of these stories haven't been told in years. A lot of them are only known by the people involved or the few people I told. It needs to be said. See you guys next time.
I bought a laptop earlier this year. I thought I needed a Windows laptop to play games. Then work started to happen and me being a Linux guy since the early 2000s started to get annoyed with windows and with the Steamdeck getting popular and Linux gaming improving. I thought it was time to go back.
I had options, Pop OS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and a couple of Arch distros. I went in the end with Fedora. I had been using it for about a month. There had been little quirks but I figured I could work through them.
Then i did Boxes where I ran Windows 10. Works great problem solved. Then I started to see another issue. I was running out of space on my 1TB drive. WTH? So I started looking. Three things stuck out. One was Bottles and Boxes and how much space it was taking up. But the last one got me, Flatpak.
Flatpak is a way to install Linux programs.
Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system. (1)
So its sand-boxed which means all that the program needs is included in the download. Which could lead to multiple programs with multiple instances of the same library. So if you are installing a lot of Flatpaks you could be taking up a lot of hard drive space.
I'm looking at the disk management software saying I have 3% I'm like WTH. So first I removed any VMs I spun up, then removed boxes, removed all my flatpak applications plus purged unnecessary libraries after that. I only gained back 25-30% of the drive. I'm like OK maybe I just need to reinstall but I thought about the quirks I was having with the video. So I thought about old trusty. Its not the first Linux distro I've tried but its the 2nd sturdiest behind Debian. Linux Mint was the distro I gave my mother on a laptop and she used it until the hardware broke down. She never had issues and it ran like a champ for her. (she didn't know I would ssh into it and doing updates.)
Oh, wait here is my trade off. Sound to the laptop is great but I have a speaker. I can connect wired or Bluetooth. When I was on Fedora I had a external USB-c Sound Blaster G3 that the speaker and a boom mic were attached to. It worked OK. On Mint its not working so well. I can hook up the boom mic no issue but I can't play on the speakers from it. So I just did Bluetooth and it works good except for my quirk. Its always a quirk you have to deal with when you install Linux on a laptop that is made for Windows. I have to manually reconnect every time i logout or reboot.It could be a feature not a bug but either way I can deal with it.
So everything is good for now, but with Linux change is always afoot. I might get interested in a new distro and run off to try it. For now me and Linux Mint are gonna hang out.
You know how it's said that most solutions are simple. Today I've proved it to be right again. I've been having an issue with the back of the house being too cold over this cold snap. I had been talking to friends about all kinds of solutions, insulation, fixing the heater, cement for the foundation (house was built in 1895). I never thought it was this simple.
So this morning why I was bleeding the furnace (I have a steam furnace + radiators) I was thinking why is it so cold back here? I'm walking around the basement checking where the draft is coming from. One part of the basement was like a shotgun of cold air. So I'm dumping out the water in the sink. I'm looking at that wall and saw where I put this metal plate. Then I started to wonder.
Let me give you the back story. Years ago we had a gas dryer that suddenly stopped working. Like most work done in this house we had a handiman come over and remove it from the gas and move it to another part of the basement. So the one thing that's left is the exhaust that takes the air out of the house. That's what I covered with the metal sheet. Since the time this happened 8029 Muskegon was torn down. Now there is a vacant lot. So With that all happening. The cold air was coming in the exhaust. DUH.
So I stuffed the exhaust with some old used towels for now just to stop the flow until I can come up with a better solution which may include just getting another gas dryer and using that exhaust for what it was meant for.
Now that I've done it the back of the house is warmer. DAMN! the smallest detail causes the biggest issues. On top of that it could be the solution to my how do the mice get in my house too. DAMN!
People who know me know I work in IT. I fix networks, I set up systems, I make sure things run the way they're supposed to. That's...
