52, the next day, back to life

 

I woke up this morning thinking I was going to feel different. Well that's not true and I knew it. I didn't feel different when I became 30 or 40 or even 2 years ago when I became 50. Aging is something that happens slowly over time and you don't notice until far later on. 

I woke up today after a nice day hanging out with my best friend Dawud. We played video games and talked stuff. It was all I needed. With the complex issues going on I didn't need to think of any I was going through. We played Shing! a game I played by myself but got stuck at this one level with this boss that i couldn't beat. Shing! is actually a collaborative game that should be played with friends. So because he played with me we were able to get past that point. Of course later on we hit a point where it would have been cool to have a 3rd or 4th person then we could have gotten past that. Hey here is the link to the game on steam, just in case you might want to play the game with me in the future. Shing!

Now I'm up at 7am writing this blog post, with the cat acting strange probably because she wants me to either feed her right now or pay attention to her. I'm thinking about this long process to get back to work. I have a job at First Student as a van driver but because of a medical paper I need to get done I'm currently paused. This is putting me in a horrible financial situation. It's forcing me back into my business financed or not. Most of my bills are 2 months behind. I'm on the brink of the next step of foreclosure. I'm in programs I'm doing all the things most people are thinking of right now. I've to the point where I pray everyday and trust in the people around me but even that is coming to a head. There are times I think about that outro to the Incredible Hulk tv series when Banner is always leaving the town he was just in. Outside of this house I really can just leave, but I don't want to. I love my neighborhood despite all the disinvestment. I'm working with people and organizations that want to make a change and change is coming. 

I'm scared more than I've ever been mostly because I'm in this house alone and no one every comes over. As much as I would like company sometimes it hardly happens. Me being alone is never a good thing, I know this. Its why I try to go to as many events as possible. Sometimes stuff i'm not totally into but someone is there I know or its a topic I know someone needs to know about. So I'll pass that info on to them. 

I love to cook but since I've been by myself I've realized that cooking is a communal thing for me. I have to either be cooking with or for someone for it to be enjoyable. Its why i made a group on Facebook called Let's Go Eat. I want to share recipes or restaurants with the hopes that we would either get together to cook or go to the restaurant as a group. 

My life is meant to be lived with other people which is something that isn't happening right now. So I have to make a choice do I fight to stay here or do I go and find my flock somewhere else. It has to happen soon. This current situation is taking a toll on me. 

Flexin' my connect game.

 

I have known for quite sometime that I'm the guy that puts the right people together. I might not be the negotiator but I'm the one that gets two sides into a room together. All that I do isn't something I talk about often because I want to make those connections on my own. I worry about people wondering who I know and if they find out try to manipulate their way into a situation. Trust is the key that makes things work. So I have to evaluate the resource and the person I'm going to connect to them before I get them together. 

Today I decided after all these years I should toot my own horn for a minute. For years I've found myself in rooms, rooms that people probably wondered why I was there. I listen, recall people that might benefit from knowing this person or organization.  

I don't even remember the last time I put people together and it didn't work. I'm careful to listen to people and what they are looking for. When I match someone I ask questions to get details and try to make sure I'm making the right connection. I think I did a good job today, I can't speak on what it was but I think its a good connect and it gets something started ahead of a lot of other people because I had early knowledge. I have another connect from this resource that I'm going to work this afternoon. Hopefully this works out also. 

I don't gain anything from most of these connections. There are times I might get something but I don't really care. Its something that comes natural to me and doesn't require a lot of work. Its just be listening and seeing the connection. I'm sure its a job classification out here for this and with me dealing with money issues I need to find that job LOL. 

This is one of my talents I never really tell anyone. I just do it. 

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.