Where I will be in '23

 

I've been everywhere on the Internet since 1990. On every network, chat, social media experiment their is. At the end of the day what is the best for you? What is the best for me?

I've been trying to use Facebook Business. I filled out everything, I made sure its update. I post, I have a little over 400 followers but only have a reach to a little over 100 of them. Why? The algorithm, the thing that dictates if your popular or not by the amount of engagement you get. Obviously because 300 of my followers aren't engaging with me I'm low on the totem pole. 

Twitter is worse, but they are different than Facebook. On Twitter you have to constantly work for your engagement because of the high amount of information being thrown at you. Wait, now that I think about it its not far off the issue on Facebook. I never really was a fan of Twitter I had it be in the room. Twitter for me doesn't give enough room for my idea. If you seen my blog posts here, on My Thoughts and the Litzsey Tech Services blog. Then you  know I can be long winded depending on the subject. Twitter just doesn't flow with my jive. 

Mastodon, that is some fun stuff. When I first got on before the exodus from Twitter it was kinda boring. It have great potential because at least I could get out my opinions in a toot that I couldn't get out in a tweet. Then the Fediverse is that includes Mastodon, Pixelfed and other services opens a lot of doors and crosses an lot of lines. To me its like if Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and your favorite blogger all spoke on the same network. Think of the possibilities. I'm starting to post more for business and personal. I'm getting good feedback and reactions. I know I have to continue posting to allow people to find me. There is a tip for people just starting. Use hashtags to post and to search for posts. Its the easiest way to get around the Fediverse. 

Then last but not least is what I'm using right now. It gives me the best freedom of everything. I post what I want how I want and you can access it free of any restrictions. My downside is posting links to my blog on Facebook won't get you brownie points, unless your post becomes an internet sensation. Its probably gonna fall in the algorithm pit. Twitter might give you a better chance if you use hashtags that people check on a regular bases. Same with Mastodon but I get more responses there than on Twitter.

As thing move along I'm starting to blog more. I need my ideas to flow but I also need interaction. Both things make it a better experience for both of us. I just recently closed a Facebook group of mine because of that. I had people but no engagement. It pretty much was me talking to no one. I looked at the post stats and saw the same 4-5 people out of like 15 members. So I had to close it. Here I might shout to the wind most of the time. Every so often I'll get a winner that my "Where are the big man's slippers." Which is still and issue right now. Don't let me start ranting about that again. LOL

I hope you enjoy my blog posts cause this is where I will mainly be in '23. I also hope you find some useful information along the way. Please give me feedback I do look. Like I said before it enhances me so I make more better and focused blog post. 

Ron DeSantis Isn't Prepared For This Historic Lawsuit

This is DeSantis trying to scrub black history. Reducing the fight for black rights to sit-ins, marches and speeches. 

Stories of the 80s and 90s #2

 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 :)

Perfect fit? (Stories of the 80s and 90s #1)

 

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.

Change happens

 

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 the real craziness started. I was using bottles and boxes which is wine and qemu in a nice package. Bottles worked but not where i needed it to be. I was trying to run Paltalk and video chat software. I had fun there starting in 2005 when I was off work for an injury. So I have some friends still on there so I wanted to at least run it so I can get on when I can. It wasn't working because first Pal makes sure your running windows. Now I heard this reason that people were using VMs and other means to circumvent paying for subscriptions services. I think it was BS but I'm not gonna get into that now. So why I say this is because they run windows specific elements that wine has a hard time dealing with. So it wasn't a good option. 

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.) 

 

So I installed it and this is Day 2. Some things I immediately notices. the video is much smoother and responsive than on Fedora. There is this icon in the tray. I clicked it. It allows me to switch between the Intel and Nvidia graphic that are in the laptop. I right clicked the icon, "Nvidia Optimus" then has the GitHub link (https://github.com/linuxmint/nvidia-prime-applet). How cool. After I updated and personalized it. Feels good. The laptop is responsive I can actually read the text on every screen without having to resize it which I've had to do in the past. So we are looking good. 

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.

Most solutions are simple.

 

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!

Gloomy days make you think.

 

Days like this, gloomy make me feel a certain way. I feel less productive. I feel down. I wanted to go over a friends house but I can't even leave the house. I'm sitting here typing this hoping a can work up the mental energy to get dress and leave. 

I think if I had the car working it would be a different thing. The issue with the car since last year was, I would drive it, it would get warm not overheated or anything and just flat out stop were ever I am. No matter what I'm doing, stopped in traffic or just driving along. I get it pulled over in half if the cases or have to push it to the side. 

The first time it happened to me I was in a grocery store parking lot. I just finished shopping and went out to the car. Wouldn't start. I tried for a while. checked under the hood. I didn't see anything so after sitting there for a while I called a tow truck. While they were on their way there I tried the car one more time. It started. So I drove home no problem. 

The next time it happened I'm driving on Commercial Ave it just flat out stopped in the middle of the street as I was pulling up to stop behind a car. I got some guys that were standing around to push me to the side. Again I waited, tried and couldn't get it started. So I called a tow, wasn't lucky like last time. So when i got home he was letting it down. He reach in and turned the key and the damn care started like it was nothing wrong. 

I took it to a mechanic that had it for a week and couldn't find anything wrong. So I got it back drove it for a week until it stopped on my again and I just left it in the driveway. 

You might ask. Why don't you buy another car? Well if you have noticed the used car market is nuts. Prices are high and these deals aren't in favor of the consumer. So I'm waiting for everything to come back down. Of course as I'm doing that other issues have creeped in. So I'm back to fixing the old car.

On top of all of that one night I heard gunshots, really close gunshots. At the time I wasn't going out a lot. So a friend told me my window was busted. Well it was more than busted. There was a bullet that hit the top frame of the door shattering the glass and making body damage to where I can't just get a window put in. Geez.

    Lastly this was my mother's car, So I'm going to have to resolved that situation as I'll have to get it registered in my name in order to get new tags. SMH

Yeah its a lot but I'm gonna have to figure out my transportation issue soon. The Chicago winter is coming up and I know its gonna be harder to get a ride then.