Categories
Julia

How can we go forward from here…

I am sick of just being outraged as I sit at home or at the office or at the gym or walking down the street. I feel like my energy towards these recent injustices is not helping anyone and is frustrating me more.

How can we, as a society, go forward from here when twice now two grand juries on opposite ends of the country let someone go with no indictment because he wears a badge? How can people be blocking out the larger discourse behind these isolated events and not see that its the results of a broken and inherently racist system?

So I’ve been trying to think constructively – who are the groups involved; what can be done to fight pervasive institutional racism?

I believe that because it’s the job of the police to offer protective services – they should be learning what that means and how it applies to everyone, regardless of their own personal biases as a person.

The issue isn’t just contained in the minutes surrounding the death of Michael Brown or Eric Garner – the issue begins in what people are learning about other groups of people and how, in a position of power, they are allowing their beliefs to cloud their professional duties.

So my constructive idea to this horrible fucked up situation took a while to think about because honestly, trying to surmount racism as a whole seems overwhelming and futile because- things are set up to run this way.
I am still working on where to next take this idea beyond the platform of this blog, which I know for a fact only 1 maybe 2 other people read, so that in the end it doesn’t make me feel like I am still doing nothing.

I would like it to be mandatory for police officers (during training and then throughout their position as a full-fledged cop) to take a social justice and human diversity class. In training it would be once a week – a part of their requirement to graduate – and across precincts it would be bi-monthly with the requirement to attend once a month or face consequences (lose a shift, or earn a desk.paperwork shift). Police officers need to be forced to examine their own biases and really acknowledge them before they can be asked to not act on them. This would be met with a lot of ‘boys will be boys’ attitude, and ‘what do grown men need to learn about themselves?’ but that is just fear/deflection from facing things that they don’t address daily on a conscious level. It isn’t easy to learn about your biases and admit to having them – especially while you are simultaneously learning how disenfranchised groups of people feel.
The course would being with working to identify biases with various activities (can you tell I took this class in graduate school for my Master of Social Work? good.) and then would build up with guest speakers and break out groups to discuss articles and current events surrounding race and racism. This way, at least when the officers are out in the communities they will be working with a more well-rounded and self-aware knowledge…

It isn’t enough to blame the officers in the cases of Michael or Eric if you’re not willing to blame the system, to tackle the system, to change the system.

 

 

Categories
Random News Samuel

Preventing gun sales to mentally unstable people

Stopping guns from being purchased by mentally unstable people is a pretty big topic in the news lately, and for whatever reason this idea popped into my head today so I decided to think about it for a while.  The common narrative is for the government to legislate a way to help prevent unstable people from buying guns, but seeing as how legislation that prohibits things is so rarely effective I think we would be much better served looking at a way to try and solve this on our own.

It occurred to me that a good place to start when looking for a solution to this would be to look at any company’s who have already solved the problem of weeding out crazy people from using their service. One such company came to mind instantly, AirBnB.  This company digs up so much shit on you when you sign up.  You have to give them your drivers licence and a few other details, and the amount of information they find on you is pretty amazing.  The first thing we should do is take a look at their algorithm and figure out how they are finding so much information about people and model our gun buying protection program after that.

Next when someone is purchasing a gun, an interesting approach we could take is we have the user temporarily download an APP onto their phone as part of the buying process.  This app could:

provide us their email address (which we could also scan for unstable emails)

provide us their login to twitter/facebook/whatever social network they have linked (which we could again scan for unstable messages)

provide us their text messages which we could scan for unstable messages

provide us their website browsing history which we could scan for troublesome website visits

**once the person was cleared they could could delete the app from their phone, and the app would not store any of the data it scanned

**we could incentivize gun stores to have users download and install this app (maybe a tax credit for every customer that does, maybe publicly shame the stores that don’t join the program, maybe just simply ask them to do it and see if the benefit of “doing the right thing” would be all that they need).  To get their buy in we would have to involve them in the process from the start.

Beyond the APP we could also look more into the AirBnB process of doing background checks, looking up school records, looking up a person credit ect… I think the moral of the story is if we look around advertising company’s spend countless millions of dollars data mining people and building profiles on them. All we need to do is look into a way to access this data before selling someone a gun, this type of approach will be much more effective than any kind of legislation.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Julia Twenty Somethings

Letting Go

Sometimes the fear behind the question “What now?” keeps you from acting. But if you stop worrying about how people could be disappointed by your choices and start focusing on how they might support them, the fear really lessens.

I feel like I’ve been on one track, full steam ahead but recently the track disappeared and I’m slamming the breaks as I approach the edge of a cliff.
My automatic process is to start thinking how to get that track back and how to build it ahead of me, minding the gap.

I’ve decided to work really hard to change my automatic response – and just keep going, track or not, and jump when I hit the cliff’s edge.
Instead of thinking of all the things that will go wrong, I’m just going to think “Maybe…”

I won’t know where my decisions take me until I try.

Categories
Fixing Stuff Samuel Technology

quick way to limit wp-admin logins on wordpress

this is a really helpful little code snippet to limit logins to your wordpress site.  You put this .htaccess file in your /wp-admin/ directory:

 

# Limit logins and admin by IP
<Limit GET POST PUT>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from YOUR IP ADDRESS
</Limit>

Categories
Inspirational Samuel

Great post on empathy

I stumbled upon this post today, not really sure what I was doing or how I came across the link but I loved the post. It hit home for me in a lot of ways and if nothing else just so I have an easy way to find it I wanted to jot it down:

 

http://sivers.org/real

Categories
Fixing Stuff Laravel Samuel

Setting up Laravel 4 for the first time onWAMP server

This post is meant as a helpful guide for setting up laravel 4 on a windows machine with WAMP server installed.  The process is a little cumbersome so I wanted to jot down the steps.  Hopefully these notes on setting up laravel on local windows dev environment help someone out there on the interwebs… and I’m sure I will refer back to these on occasion.

–edit–

for a list of helpful php artisan commands please refer to the bottom of this page

–end edit–

1.) Enable openSSL in wamp server (allows us to install composer which is step #2)

  • From the wamp tray icon hit php > php extensions > php_openSSL (note we also need both php_curl & php_socket enabled for later steps)
  • restart wamp server
  • navigate to and open (C:\wamp\bin\php\php-5.4.3\php.ini).  Search for openssl and remove the comment in front of the line (then save the file)
  • now were ready to install composer

2.) Install Composer.  On windows you can install composer by downloading this setup file (https://getcomposer.org/Composer-Setup.exe)

  • if you did not enable openssl correctly you will get the following error (The openssl extension is missing, which will reduce the security and stability of Composer. If possible you should enable it or recompile php with –with-openssl).  If you get this error go back and re-visit ((C:\wamp\bin\php\php-5.4.3\php.ini).  openSSL needs to be enabled in this file for composer to install
  • now open up the command prompt and navigate to the directory you will store laravel in and install composer.  e.x.  CD C:\wamp\www\laravel) then type “composer install”.  The install will run and provide you feedback on if it was successful or not.

—-helpful note for newer version of wamp server—-
after installing a new version of wamp server you might have an issue using composer (you will have to re-install it and re-setup your environment varialbes to get it to work). Even after that though if your getting the following error when trying to run composer install then the steps below will help: /c/ProgramData/ComposerSetup/bin/composer: line 10: php: command not found

  • : Open git bash
  • go to your work directory like if you have wamp then c:/wamp/www.
  • type “composer” if you can see the composer command list then its installed correctly
  • type “composer self-update”.

Once the update runs you will be able to then navigate to your project directory and run “composer install”.

3.) Add PHP to windows environment variables

  • start > environment variables for your account > Path > edit (now chose the path variable under “user variables”)
  • add (C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.5.12) so full line will look like: (C:\Program Files\Intel\WiFi\bin\;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Intel\WirelessCommon\;C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.5.12)

4.) Download Sqlite

5.) Download gitbash (http://git-scm.com/downloads).

  • this is not needed but it is a nicer user interface than the default windows command prompt
  • you can navigate to a file, right click > git bash, then command prompt opens up in this directory… no need to cd into the directory manually

6.) Run first local migrations

  • make a local database config file in (app\config\local\database.php)
  • change the default to sqlite (line 29 ‘default’ => ‘sqlite’,)
  • change the directory path to ../storage/database/ (line 51 ‘database’ => __DIR__.’/../../storage/database/production.sqlite’,)
  • open git bash in your laravel directory
  • run “php artisan migrate” (if having problems using local config run php artisan –env-local migrate)

7.) Run laravel on local environment

  • navigate to your laravel directory (either through windows command prompt, or by going to the file right clicking and hitting git bash)
  • type “php artisan serve”
  • go to http://localhost:8000

 

Hopefully these notes help someone out there in the interwebs.  Getting laravel up and running for the first time can feel like a somewhat daunting task, but the rewards of being able to work on a local environment are definitely worth it…. and a real plus to using sqlite is that you technically don’t even have to start wamp server now to test your local site. Once you have the local config files setup, you can open git bash, run php artisan serve and then artisan takes care of serving your actually website on localhost 8000…. which is pretty neat.

 

–random helpful notes & commands —

-runing migrations, open git bash in the laravel directory, and run: “php artisan migrate”

-to detect local and production environments edit bootstrap/start.php

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
‘local’ => array(‘homestead’, ‘computer-name’),
‘production’ => array(‘server-name’),
));

 

//to detect what your server/computer name is locally put this in the top of the starts.php file and navigate to any page

echo gethostname();exit();

-to seed the db run “php artisan db:seed”

  • to do seeds and migrations locally run “php artisan –env-local migrate” and or  “php artisan –env-local db:seed”
  • if getting an error of “cant replicate database seeder” run “composer dump-autoload”