Author: Jesse

A Thing that has made me unhappy Of Late

I want to recount an ongoing conversation I’ve had with a family friend on facebook regarding politics lately. He’s of the opinion that I live in a bubble and that I take in info from a very limited source, and that I’ve not yet opened my eyes. He’s given me some sources and things to read, and I’ve started looking at them at least a little. Only a little. It’s hard to challenge your beliefs and to accept information from sources that are counter to what you think.

Anyway… he and I have always challenged one another in conversation for many months on end. Since the Trump election, it’s been different. Now his ideas have won at the ballot box, and the impetus to get out of my bubble and take in more and different info has grown. And it seems more and more relevant to me to take in what he’s saying and try to listen to opinions that are different to mine.

Yet… I have the things I care about, and I confront and engage him in conversation about it. Tonight, he finally declared himself done. He said that he’s done trying to engage me and trying to change my mind. “I’ve given you the tools” he said. It’s up to me now, he implies.

I know what that feels like. That certainty that you’re right, and that history is on your side, and that your opponent is misguided. Given enough time, truth with out, and they’ll be forced to come around. The way the world works wins in the end. That attitude and mindset is why the Democrats lost. That sort of dismissive, benevolent arrogance.

There’s no need to listen when you’re right.

It’s easy to walk away when you win.

Maybe I don’t listen either, since I feel pretty right about the things that I believe in. There sure are a lot of others who do too. In the end, I firmly believe this. We literally just got done learning that dismissing the arguments of those who oppose you does not win victories in the end. I’ve always tried to be engaging and thorough in debate, and to respond and include those who respond back to me. It hurts when someone says they’re done. It hurts to be told I’m misguided. It hurts when, in the high of victory, they decide you’re not worth engaging anymore.

Maybe that’s what I need to feel, so I learn from it and know not to repeat it. Maybe I need to feel that so that I _do_ start taking in more sources of info and start changing my world view just a little. But I know and feel this deep down. The world has lots of room for all kinds and types of ideas. Dismissing one side does no one any favors, no matter how good it feels.

Added Some New Features to the Site | Updated Stream Page!

Greetings all! Wow, what a day… when I haven’t been in class I’ve been either working on the site or some aspect of the site or some aspect of the server or what not. Quite a lot of progress has been made.

If you haven’t noticed, then you should check out the stream page. I went about properly building an HTML environment for the stream object to sit in, and I’ve put in some good tips for everyone while they’re watching Chopstick being a lizard. The internet is a really cool place, you know? I was able to find some very clear cut resources (with examples) that helped me to slap that page together in very little time at all. Knowing that some of you are no doubt interested to know what I found helpful, I’ve included them below.

html.am

w3schools.com

I’ve added some new features to the site as well! You might have noticed that I’ve reformatted the home page to not look like such a mess as before, and I’ve added a widget that shows my most recent blog posts for anyone who cares to review what goop I’ve typed up. I used a text widget to embed the LizardCam button in a side bar as well, which looks much nicer than it did before.

I also added an About Me page, and I included a whole bunch of images that — I think — tell my story fairly well. At least, I think that they tell my story better than words ever could. I dunno about you, but when I write about my life it always comes across as some sort of encyclopedic entry, and that tires me out after a while. Pictures really convey a lot more than my words ever could.

Now for a little more geeky server stuff. Today in class I learned about something called NTP, which stands for Network Timing Protocol. It’s basically a way to sync up the system time of all of the machines on a particular network. This was of particular interest to me, since I’m running my LizardCam with two separate machines on a single network (the Desktop runs the camera while the Server runs the stream). My problem previously was that these two machines had different system times, and since I’m running cron jobs to make everything work… yeah.

I didn’t really have a reliable way to sync up the system times until tonight, and I jumped at the chance to install NTP on both my desktop and on the server to ensure that they both have the exact same system time. Then I modified my cron jobs to take that into account. The benefit for all of you? Since I can now trust my timing on my cron jobs better than before, I’ve managed to cut down the stream downtime during cycles by a good minute or so. 😀 Now we’ll just have to wait and see if this works out tomorrow…