In 20 or 30 years, will I look back and remember this day? Can I do something or build something today that affects me positively for years to come? If I lounge around and waste time today, that is such a waste of life. I owe it to myself to either focus on having fun or focus on getting shit done today.
This evening I was walking to the train in a bit of a daze, having a conversation but feeling tired and drained. Not only did I stay up entirely too late the night before (reading a book. yes, it was real crazy) but my team got the boot from round one of the playoffs (Hockey) after what was a high-energy fast paced and exciting start. The series began to look more like playoff round-ones of our past coming back to haunt us, and in the end provided the same dismal outcome.
Anyway, weather-wise it was a fairly nice evening and most people were in a celebratory mood because I live in the city of the other team- the winners (boo). I was making it a point not to look in the bar windows I was passing on the way to the train and brushed off the “I’m sorry about your team’s loss” from my companion because it just made me mad to hear it out loud.
I changed the subject as we entered the train station, digging in my purse for my CTA pass, knowing i’d just had it in my hand yesterday. I slowed as I approached the turnstile and balanced on one foot as I rested my bag on my knee to get a better look at where the heck my card was. A train had just pulled in overhead and a stream of people started coming down the stairs and clicking through the turnstile. This guy came out with headphones on, a fade cut to his blonde hair, sunglasses and a backpack strung across his shoulders. I backed up to get out of his path, as I realized I had inched up pretty close as I was rooting around for my freaking card.
He didn’t bob and weave out of my way but instead matched my move to the side, turned and tapped his own CTA card on the turnstile. It turned green, welcoming me; I smiled and said thank-you, though I couldn’t see his eyes and wasn’t sure he could hear me over whatever music he was listening to.
My mood instantly got better. such a small and inconsequential thing to him really meant a lot to me. How such a simple gesture felt so good. My CTA card? I realized as I boarded the train and headed off into the setting sun towards home…was in my pants pocket from yesterday.
Thank you guy; I bet you have great taste in music to match your sweet and surprising manners.
I just wanted to do a quick tutorial on a solution to a problem that I recently had. We are hosting a wordpress site on 3 amazon EC2 instances, this was causing an issue where the local files of each server were getting out of sync when someone made an edit in the wordpress admin (installed a new plugin, uploaded an image ect….). This article is as much of a resource for future use for myself so please pardon the lack of polish.
Programs used:
cgwyn: http://cygwin.com/install.html
wamp server: http://www.wampserver.com/en/
I started by hosting the wordpress site locally on my wamp server. I’m going to leave out how to setup wamp server, a great resource for that is (setting up wamp server). Any changes/updates to the site are first made on the local dev environment and then with rsync are pushed to the 3 EC2 instances. So lets get into the rsync setup and commands:
1.) Install cywyn (note make sure to install rsync and ssh packages) Use the search bar in the top right and search rsync and ssh when installing, then make sure to click the + sign and click the actual package name so that the words “skip” are removed.
2.) create a sync file and save it as a shell file in C:\cygwin64\home\your-username\ The sync file I used is shown below, you will need to replace with your local computer info and remote server info:
rsync -avz /cygdrive/c/wamp/www/youre-file-name/ your-user-name@SERVER-IP:/path-to-your-public-html
3.) open up cgwyn and run the following commands:
chmod +x your-file-name.sh
and then you can run
./your-file-name.sh
Thats it, if successful you will get asked if you trust the remote server (only on first login) and you will also need the remote server password
Categories
Re: Color Blind
I starting replying as a comment to the great article Julia wrote about affirmative action, if you haven’t read it you can find it here . Julia has such a great perspective on life, and I loved her article. I also love the ending line (sharing a strong opinion is liberating).
Seeing as I am neither black, nor grew up in a poor family with only 1 parental figure I am confident that I’m woefully unqualified to pass judgment on affirmative action, however I feel that both affirmative action & the bit on female rights that Julia touched on fall under the bigger umbrella of “fairness” which I would like to share my perspective on.
Julia touches on a very sensitive subject with her paragraph on female sexual abuse. I agree with her 100% that blaming the victim is the exact opposite way to go. Women should feel comfortable wearing whatever clothing they want too, and no one should ever make a sexual comment or advance towards a women that is unwanted. That being said I would like to see women (and men) everywhere take their personal protection into their own hands. This is one of the biggest reasons that if I ever have a daughter I will be teaching her martial arts. The world is a hard, unfair place. People everywhere will take advantage of you if you let them. Women especially need to empower themselves to defend themselves if/when necessary. This does not nessisaraly mean physical conflict, but the confidence to assert yourself verbally starts with the knowledge that you can physically defend yourself. The best way I can explain my point is to use the words of my Kempo instructor in.
“You need to define your personal line of comfort for all social interactions. The line is completely your choice. It does not have to be related to the law, or any external view point what so ever. Its your line, and your line alone. If your line is someone putting their hands on you without your consent, then when that line is crossed you execute your game plan and that’s all there is too it. No hesitations, no guess work. No should I do x,y,z. Your line is crossed, and there is a consequence for whoever crossed it. Which brings us to the next point, you have a simple “go to” game plan for any situation where your line has been crossed. Again there is no guess work on what you will do, you have a simple plan, you execute it and the conflict is brought to a conclusion. But the biggest thing I want to stress is that our own personal safety is OUR RESPONSIBILITY, no one else’s. Of course we strive to live in a society where bad things like female sexual harassment don’t happen. But the facts of life are you control whether someone takes advantage of you. If you don’t stand up for yourself, no one else can.
Affirmative action for college entrance is an extremely complicated situation. Ultimately I think something needs to be done to help even “the playing field of life” for kids. Many people are born into basically impossible situations. 1 or no parent, no social support system or extended family, not enough money to live adequately. For someone like that to prosper they need to have some advantages pointed their way. In lew of college entrance I think we would be a lot better served a society if we tried to help kids sooner. I think once they hit college age that its too late. I’d love to see something done much earlier, but again I’m not sure what this would be exactly…. I think I will give it more thought and maybe discuss with Julia to try and form an idea for something better than the current system we have in place.
If your like me and waking up in the morning is a real struggle, you may find one or both of these wake up songs helpful. I know I enjoy starting my day with them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu5q_awytxU (as an alarm)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNCSxqcOOTQ (as my snooze alarm)
Categories
Color Blind
“I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.”
-William Golding
Over the past couple of days I have read several articles about The University of Michigan being allowed by the Supreme Court to uphold their ban on Affirmative Action, and I cannot help but feel the above quote so adequately fits the situation – for those six on the Court who voted to uphold the ban. I’m sorry, but I do not wish to live in a “color-blind” society. it creeps me out, like some Utopic book where the beginning seems so lovely and nice and then as the pages turn more is revealed about how creativity is stiffled, big brother is controlling everything, or SURPRISE you’re living in a fake microcosm literally locked away from the real world.
There are people of different colors, languages, religions, beliefs, and cultures just as there are people of different genders, sexes, ages and sizes; each with a unique experience of the world (both putting things out differently into the world and receiving things differently from the world).
Justice Roberts had a simple opinion (circa 2007) of the issue, stating “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But why does the discrimination have to stop first in an area that is providing a benefit to those who suffered/suffer most from discrimination? Why shouldn’t the discrimination have to stop on the side- the side of those inflicting their prejudices and racism on others from an individual level to the institutional racism?
It reminds me of the simple, passionate, and wrong judgement that the best way to stop a rape from occurring is for the girl to dress more conservatively. Its utter ridiculousness. Our society needs to stop needling the victim and start asking how conversations can begin and behaviors can be taught differently so women can wear what they want and minorities can stop feeling racism and discrimination coming at them every day.
Times are different from the days of segregation and Jim Crow laws, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t much more to work on- and it certainly doesn’t mean America is “off the hook” when in comes to Affirmative Action. I think the day we can safely remove Affirmative Action is two part: 1a. The statistics on hate crimes based on race and skin color are slim to none- or at least consistently even with all other violent crime involving the majority, white society/ 1b. That social cues sighting institutional racism are also gone (my social science research friends can certainly find a way to measure this) and 2. that each child in ANY public school has the same opportunities and learning available to them; to honestly give them a fair playing field on the way to achieving their higher education dreams.
Mic drop. (P.S. sharing a strong opinion is liberating).