Weekly Update, September 28, 2020

Welcome back

Howdy internet friend and welcome back to my blog. This week I am going to share my river of fail and my waterfalls of success from last week and also talk about Black Lives Matter. Much to write about and I am late from fighting with computers so let’s get started.

Black Lives Matter

Wow what a bad week last week was. Twitter isn’t trending the protests for me anymore, but just wow. It is really sad to see what there is no justice in the criminal justice system. It turns out that Donald Trump payed less in taxes in 2016 than I do every month. I mean, he is a super smart businessman so I guess it makes sense, but haven’t other celebs gone to jail for similiar hijinx? To be clear, I have not changed my position that prisons should be abolished, but it really seems like there are at least two different justice systems in the United States - one for rich people, and one for everyone else.

Breonna Taylor is just one name in a far too long list of people for whom the system did not provide justice. Countless black and brown people in the United States are denied justice by the system while the rich and powerful suffer no consequences. When people say that Black Lives Matter, they obviously don’t mean that other lives don’t, it just means that there have to be consequences for the taking of black lives. They matter too!

Like every week I have much more to write on this subject, but I’m just going to leave you with what I’ve written so far. We have to be better and our leadership needs to show up. We are getting tired of waiting.

Political rant

I want to keep going a little bit and continue my rant from last week.

Merrick Garland

Every day I want to tweet that at all American politicians - particularly the hypocrites in the GOP who swore it was inappropriate to appoint a new justice eight months before an election but 36 days is now OK for some reason. Perhaps it is because they think we are stupid and have no respect for us. I am also interested to know how many crimes Donald Trump allowed to commit before anyone can do anything? I mean, do we ACTUALLY have to watch him shoot someone without consequence before the Democrats can do anything? Nancy Pelosi is very clearly not equipped for the fight that she has on her hands, and clapping sideways, smirking, and ripping up papers just isn’t going to get the job done anymore! Frankly it’s never gotten the job done and now it’s insulting! My most sincere hope is that she loses her relection campaign to a real progressive - one whom she has thus far refused to debate. In a justice world, all the politicians who did nothing while the country burned would be voted out! In a really just world, a new political party would form from the ashes of the Democrats, but that’s a post for another day.

I also want to write about how millions are on unemployment and Nancy can find a way to work across the isle to pass a bill to fund the government but can’t find another stimulus to help desperate and starving people out of work and running out of time! Again I ask, WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS? Now is not the time for posturing on Twitter, it is time to figure out how to work with Republicans to help save people who are in big trouble! If you cannot figure out how to do that, then quit and make way for people who will!

I wonder if there will ever be a point in the United States where politicians do the right thing without people begging and screaming? I would like to imagine a future where a state finds a way to help people instead of just murdering them without consequence. Where they feed hungry people instead of funding riot police to brutalize protesters.

There is much more I could say but I am clearly too upset and need to move on to the next part of this post. However, I have a much longer essay on my political philosophy coming out soon, I’ve been derailed by computer failures for the last few weeks but that essay is coming. One final round of editing and I am sharing it, so be on the lookout for that soon.

Personal

Last week was frustrating because my personal laptop started dying. Fortunately I only lost a few weeks work, and I now have a much more aggressive and robust backup strategy. I had previously installed Slackware and was glad to have successfully installed it for the first time. However, there were many things about it that were too annoying and didn’t work that I just installed Linux Mint. Every time I install Mint I wonder why I ever left. My bluetooth headphones finally work for the first time in months and if that means I have to use SystemD for a little while longer, I just want crap to work.

I originally wrote that I had been making slow progress in the wood shop building my mallet. My hands hurt last week so I took it easy this weekend. Monday I found some time to work and finally punched a hole in the mallet head. It’s taken weeks of work but I finally managed to make it through. All I need to do is shape down the handle and make the hole a little bigger and the hardest job is done. All that will be left is to seal it (if I want to) or finally move on to my second project. It has really taken a long time to do this and I am really glad to finally be done with the hardest part of the job!

I spent most of my time this weekend building out a WordPress (WP) site for my wife on AWS and trying to fix my laptop. I also spent a bunch of time playing this game I bought on the Nintendo Switch called American Fugitive. It’s a really fun sandbox-style game where you are trying to figure out who killed your Dad, a crime for which you have been framed. It’s similiar to the older Grand Theft Auto games but set in the rural south rather than in big cities. It went on sale in the Nintendo store for like seven bucks and it is WELL worth the money. Graphics aren’t super great but the gameplay more than makes up for it!

NOTE TO MY FUTURE SELF: Just install Linux Mint first if you want to keep using Linux. It’s worth it for the time and effort saved and running more bleeding edge distros is just a pain in the neck and almost certainly not worth it. Remember this the next time you decide you want to install Gentoo or something like that!

Professional

Last week I worked on a cool project I cannot share anything about yet. This week I’m working on another interesting project that I cannot really talk about right now either. I have also been building things in AWS and wrote a blog post yesterday about stuff I learned from building the WP site. There will be a link at the bottom of this post, as always.

Not much to share professionally, so I will just end it there.

Peple to follow

As I do every week, here are some tech and non-tech people you might consider following on Twitter.

Martin Luther King III - The son of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bernice King - The daughter of Dr. King

@cetolyne - great friend, awesome programmer, super helpful!

@blenster - cool maker, very positive, well worth a follow!

@GWeessies - very smart person doing interesting research!

Marley - first place champ! Marley is one of the best on Twitter!

Null Coder - another awesome person to keep an eye on!

@EvilMog - creator of the DC MUD and an interesting person to follow.

That’s it, internet friend. Thanks for reading this weekly update post. Click here for the previous post, and click here for the next post. Finally, I hope you have a very nice day and a most excellent week!