Author: Jesse

Well hello all! I have been fairly quiet over the past few weeks, mostly because I’ve been on holiday! I’ve been in the UK for the past two weeks spending time with my dearest friends in the lovely town of Milton Keynes.

I won’t be posting much about this today, mostly because I think this visit will be better told in pictures. I’ll get around to posting those in the Photos section once I’m back in the states.

For now, at least, a pool match beckons, so more will follow later! Bye!

Hello blog my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.

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Job and Apartment Changes

I haven’t actually updated this blog since March, back when I reported that my site was compromised with various PHP shells. A lot of things have changed then, and while I have kept up with various people over Twitter and Facebook and in person, I haven’t really taken the time or the effort to record my goings on here. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but they can generally be summed up as follows:

1. Laziness.
2. Fear – yes, fear. I’ve been feeling a lot of things for months now that I didn’t want people to know.
3. Respect for other people’s privacy.

But a great, great deal has changed in six months, so much so that I finally let some folks go, and I’m going to talk about a few of the things I’ve been afraid to discuss here in public.

I guess I’ll discuss first various big life changes I’ve gone through over the last six months. I now live alone. One of my roommates and I had serious disagreements in the second half of last year that badly damaged our trust in one another. It was very traumatic for both of us. We’d previously been very close friends, and after our disagreements and arguments it just wasn’t quite the same. We mutually agreed that I needed to live on my own, and I resigned from the shared lease we were on and got my own apartment further in Austin.

Since then, we’ve stopped speaking. We’re no longer friends on Facebook, Twitter, or Skype, or elsewhere, and honestly I’m ok with this. I’ve decided to let him go. I have various reasons for deciding that, but it’s simply that neither he nor I have expended any serious effort to stay in touch and after what we went through I don’t think that it will do either of us any good to try. Even now, I’m a little afraid that he will eventually find his way here and read this, but you know what, that’s ok. Mayhaps that will be a little closure for him, as writing this is for me in a way. Mayhaps he will feel betrayed and upset that I didn’t actually come to tell him this myself. I’ll understand that, but to be honest I want to move on with my life and enter this new chapter that I’m suddenly finding myself in.

Speaking of, I may or may not have mentioned this in one of my other blog posts. I have a new job! Well, not really new; I’ve been working at IPsoft for a year this September, but basically, I don’t work at HostGator anymore and I’ve transitioned over to “grown up” system administration at a much bigger company that is right in the center of the action in the IT industry.

I am a Linux Platform Engineer, doing what I have grown to love doing. Administering systems, fixing problems, being technical, and generally being amazing. It has been everything that I had hoped for in a change from web hosting to something bigger and more important, and it has been a huge boon to my personal and professional development. I have a boss who coaches and looks out for me, and I have a product and a service that I can believe in and provide service for. I can’t really ask for much more than that.

Changes, and Why it Terrifies Me…

Alas, the changes started one year ago are still ongoing. It wasn’t just switching jobs and then apartments. It’s been a coming of age experience.. yeah, another one (college, Korea, Austin, HostGator… those all used to be my coming of age experiences). It’s been an explosion of knowledge, exposure, trust, freedom, integrity, and responsibility. Put simply, I’ve entered a whole new world.

And it all terribly frightens me. This is a world I never really knew existed, and it’s starting to make sense to me. Politics, leadership, decision making, projects… people… I’m only just beginning to see it, and it’s both fascinating and terrific. It’s like… all this time I have been living in a layer below, which is in itself shocking. College, Korea, Jiffy Lube, HostGator. Despite all those experiences, it feels as though I have only just now broken through this layer below into a layer above, and doing so I begin to understand what people go through in adulthood and why they start believing what they believe. I struggle to try and keep who I am.

I am doing extremely well. So far, I’ve been very successful and I’ve been very happy with how I have acquitted myself. And I have received the respect and admiration of almost everyone I work with. And in this, I start to feel a certain sense of destiny… or doom. I feel very proud of myself, but also have a feeling of trepidation for what’s coming, like something big is in my future and I don’t know what it is. I just have to learn everything I can now so that I can deal with it when it comes.

A lot of this is probably frustratingly vague. That’s intentional. Satisfy yourself with this basic summary:

I feel my very character being tested very strongly at the moment. It frightens me, and I pray that I will pass that test.

Bernie Sanders, 2016, Optimism, and the Future of American Politics

It’s interesting that I’m feeling that doom on myself and, at the same time, we’re dealing with the very beginnings of the 2016 Presidential primaries. And my, what a circus it’s been – mostly on the Republican side. Donald Trump scares me. I’ll talk about him some other time though.

Bernie Sanders is what I really wanna talk about, at least for a little bit.

You should know that I studied political science in college, transitioned from Republican to Democrat in my last year of college, voted for Obama in 2008, and then promptly moved off to South Korea in 2009 after graduating. From that point, I was depressed on the state of American politics and governance and have been ever since. South Korea, by all standards I could apply to it, was a far better country and governed itself far more effectively than we – our American exceptional selves – seemed capable of imagining.

Korea had inexpensive and very good medicine, affordable food, a culture that worshiped a good education, the best rail system I’ve ever ridden and a world class infrastructure, yadda yadda. At this point, my experience catches up with my knowledge and current world view.

Continuing, I lived in Korea from 2009 to 2011. I moved back to Texas that year. I was as depressed over the state of American governance and politics as ever. I knew what I believed in and what I felt was right for the country, but there was no point talking about it or debating it. It would come to naught. The Idiot Right would shout it down and the “Mindless Middle” (as some say) would follow along cuz it sounded better. I didn’t belong here. My stake would eventually be planted elsewhere, so why care about what was happening in my own country?

And then 2015 shows up. Despite losing all of Congress in 2014 in a swell tide of conservatism and dissatisfaction with government, suddenly the American Left sees victory after victory. The ACA wins it’s second judicial challenge in the Supreme Court, and gay marriage is legalized everywhere by a court ruling just a few days later. The country celebrates! A few start complaining, and they are widely condemned by everyone.

And then, Bernie Sanders came forward to run for President, the one candidate who represented anything close to the kind of policies that I would dare dream for – some of the sensible social policies that I see out of Germany or Korea or Scandinavia, or at least the willingness to debate them and call it what it is instead of Crying Wolf (that is, SOCIALISM!!! or COMMUNISM!!!). And, to my complete astonishment, he starts drawing incredibly huge crowds and getting lots of attention! I felt emboldened, happy, optimistic, like the country wasn’t doomed to a perpetual state of deadlock and dysfunction. If thousands and thousands of folks would turn out to see a self-proclaimed socialist speaking optimistic things about a US where economic justice was a thing, where the state supported it’s students and poor folks, where we could again lead the world into a scary future instead of existing as a static, chaotic mishmash of opposing, state applied policies, then… maybe… just maybe, this country was a thing I could put my stake into. Maybe I could give a shit again.

Now, that’s by no means a complete statement on all of the things that Bernie promotes. I realize that his path to the Presidency is an incredible long shot. Fivethirtyeight.com puts his odds at about 15% right now compared to Hillary Clinton’s 85%, mostly because he’s not drawing any minority support in the Democratic party. That’s all fine. I support him anyway, and here are my reasons:

1. You should always vote your conscience in the primary. That vote, at least, is not quite so meaningless as the general election. 😛
2. Bernie is doing something for the American Left that I think Barry Goldwater did for the American Right back in the 1960s. Back then, the Left was ascendant. The FDR coalition had held for 30 years. And many conservatives who worked for his campaign and voted for him were immensely influenced by his candidacy, message, and methods. This butterfly wing flap didn’t really develop into a hurricane until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, but that’s where it really got started if history has anything to say about it.Point is, I taste something very similar happening with Sanders now. That significant portion of young people who are emboldened by his campaign to be left and proud are going to become a passionate force in American politics 20 years from now; mark my words. And it will be good, at least only if we can start talking about some of the sensible solutions the Left offers to our country instead of flinching in fear of the long dead Communism bogieman.

The same can also be said for Trump – who is currently leading a Know-Nothing Party revival – and the 20% of Republican voters that he is beating up into a froth. I weep for the state of our national politics if this sort of discourse that we’re going to have to have about immigration, and I know that this portion of the Right are also going to be a huge force in American politics for years to come.

Family, Death, Friends

My grandfather on my mother’s side died on August 17th. I attended his funeral up in Dallas yesterday. It was a very impressive event and I learned a few things about him that I’d not known before. Big Jim, as we called him, was in the Air Force and served in the Korean war, for instance.

The military presented him with a three gun salute and played taps for him, and the Dallas PD (for which he worked for 27 years, I think) were also present to give their respects. As for Big Jim himself, he was cremated and laid with us in an urn, to which we all faced. It struck me that the man I’d loved as my dear grandfather was now confined to such a small container.

After the ceremony, we went to have lunch with local family, and after that I went to visit my grandmother, Big Jim’s widow, Nana. I was profoundly affected during that visit, such was her state and how different it was from what I remember. It was very hard. 🙁

I was very, very glad that I got a chance to see her and give my love to her, though. I was touched at how happy our visit made her and how she was still able to express her love. I’m going to remember that forever…

Written while listening to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UlTJR9FY8Y

Hello again my long lost blog! How are you?

This is one of those rambling blogs that’s going to be something of a stream of consciousness. Normally, when I’m having a stream of consciousness moment, I run off to my twitter where I spooge all of my thoughts across short microblog tweets. That can be satisfying, kind of? Eh, not really. I’ve concluded that twitter is a horribad platform on which to methodically ramble on about stuff that isn’t important.

So what am I going to talk about in this particular blog post? What to ramble about? Well, to be honest, I’ve had this interesting situation on my mind. A few weeks or so ago, I started making a new friend on the twitter space. We interacted with some regularity and it was pretty good! I actually do enjoy some friendly and occasional casual interaction (I consider twitter to be casual enough). Sometimes? I guess? It depends on the person, as I’ve been reminded over the past few days.

Anywho, friend and I would interact a bit, and a about a week said friend added me to skype. Ok. I have no problem with that. I don’t really have some sort of off-limits rule with my skype list, and if someone wants to be on it I’ll generally add them and give it a shot. That is, if they want to talk to me more regularly, I’ll see how it goes and see if it develops well. If it doesn’t go well, I can always just remove them, right?

So the first conversation goes well! We talk about what we were doing in that moment and talked about jobs and beer and stuff. Harmless stuff, pretty much. Second conversation got off to an awkward start though, and that kinda set the tone of the rest of the conversations to me.

“Awkward in what way, Jesse?”

I’ll be honest, and I’ll say that it’s probably not entirely justified how I judged this, but it was basically a case of the fellow noticing me online, and saying that I ought to have said something. I made a joke, mentioning that I had only gotten off work a little while ago and asking for forgiveness if I didn’t turn to skype first thing. I was actually in the middle of getting settled in at a local cafe to do some drawing, so really and truly I wasn’t about to get on skype and start chatting with folks. Apparently my joke was out of place, though? Cuz friend sorta panics a bit and thinks I’m being horribly defensive, which caught me off guard.

And here’s the weird part. I tell him to relax. He then says that he was about to tell me to do the same thing, and that I was being very defensive. Umm… ok? And then the conversation goes well for the rest of the night and all is well until I head home.

That kinda set the tone for the rest of the short time that we were friends. We had a few more good conversations, but I started to feel like I was being pressured into conversations. It didn’t really help that I’d been having a few really tiring, icky days (blame me for staying up too late). But in any case, I spent some time feeling like he was freaking out over little things, and as I came to learn, he spent time thinking that I was freaking out and being defensive. This didn’t really make sense to me in the context I was talking to him in. It actually got really uncomfortable after a bit, and so one night I took some time to confront him on it.

I tried to be really nice and honest, but the conversation went very poorly and escalated very quickly. Needless to say, it felt like a nasty argument. Points exchanged were that I felt like he expected too much from me too quickly and that he was a bit overbearing in trying to converse. His points were that he was just trying to be friendly and that I was being inappropriately defensive in response.

But honestly, looking over the conversation, there was some silly stuff in there. Him accusing me of not being interested in anything that he was doing. Him judging me to be a “popufur,” as they’re called, due to my attitude regarding my skype list? It was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen someone call me. And I said some silly stuff too, like why did I have to talk to him in particular if I was in any particular mood to chat with folks? I guess point is, we both rubbed each other the completely wrong way.

After talking for a little more than an hour, I got tired and frustrated and we called it off for the night. I spent a lot of time after that being pretty upset and actually kinda angry about the whole thing, and considering that I’d only been talking with this guy over skype for a week, I made an executive decision to just cut it off. My logic went something like this:

“If we’re already miscommunicating with one another this badly after only talking for a week over skype, then we don’t need to be friends.”

And so I stopped following him on twitter and removed him from my skype. He followed up the next day with a comment as to how he was unsurprised that I was cutting and running, and so I followed up with a final comment on how I felt it wasn’t worth the effort to sort something out with someone I was miscommunicating with, someone who was judging me so sweepingly after having only known me for a week. I said that he didn’t do anything wrong, and that he was just being him by trying to be friendly, but that we couldn’t be friends if we were unable to communicate properly after such a short time of knowing each other. And then I let him have a last word in case he needed to call me something mean to gain some sense of closure over the whole thing.

And his final follow up was just resignation, that he’d tried but that I didn’t give him a chance and wasn’t interested in giving him a chance, so what was the point? It came across sincerely sad, and that’s how it ended.

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In all honesty, I’m not very happy with how that turned out. Contrary to what he thought, I figured him to be a very nice fellow and I was looking forward to getting to know him better! But the way that I look at it, he just became… off putting. When I have a conversation with folks, often times I just kinda drop out of the conversation. My friends do it to me, I do it to them. It’s an understanding of internet etiquette among the people I keep for company that internet conversations can and do drop off. And then they can be picked up hours later, depending on the ebb and flow of inspiration. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not really a good thing either, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’d be conversing with this fellow, and then I’d drop off cuz my mind is elsewhere, or I’m reading something, or I’m doing something, and so that was that. But I get the sense now that this was not something he really expected, nor was that the way that he managed his conversations. I guess his was a more traditional way of communicating that didn’t really fit in with mine. So the conversation would drop off, and eventually he would come along with a comment such as “o-o” or “Um.. ok.” Dragging me uncomfortably back to the conversation while I was doing something else, I guess.

And all I wanted him to do was relax. And all he wanted me to do was relax. We both got the impression from one another that we were hyperventilating at each other across the interwebs. But I’ve already talked a lot about that.

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I guess the thing that has really been sticking in my mind about this guy is how he felt I wasn’t interested in what he was doing, that I wasn’t expressing interest despite all his attempts to express interest in me and what I was doing, and also his attempts to be friendly in general that I was apparently rejecting for no reason.

See, this sounds very familiar to a feeling that I feel often enough to be disturbed by it. I’ll meet someone, and I’ll develop a “friend crush” on them. Don’t know what a friend crush is? It’s when you meet someone, develop a strong affinity for them rather quickly, and then you want to be friends really badly.

I’ve had friend crushes and real crushes on a fair few number of people. Even folks on twitter! And those folks probably already know, even if I haven’t told them. Some of the more astute ones have had to confront me about it, actually, particularly when I start leveling bitterness at them. What sort of bitterness? That bitterness that my attempts at friendship aren’t being returned with the same level of passion and feeling that they’re being given. Sound familiar?

Man, that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother blog, to be honest. But needless to say that I’ve had friend crushes on a lot of people that didn’t turn out, and that I ended up being really bitter and upset about it afterwards for a very long time. And although I was aware of it, I stewed in my bitterness. My internal monologues complained about how unfair it was that such a neat fellow like me could be rejected for friendship by such neat fellows as them, and I glared in jealousy at their friendly interactions with their circle of friends that I apparently wasn’t privileged to be a part of.

And, here I am, facing the same sort of situation, only this time I’m on the other end. This time, I’m the “villain.” I’m the one doing the rejecting, and I’m the one basically not giving a neat fellow a chance to be my friend, despite his best efforts. In all the hindsight, in all the readings of our conversations, this bit of bitterness does appear to play a role.

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So, what’s the point of all this rambling? I guess the point is that we all go through this cycle with loads and loads of people in our lives. We meet neat people who don’t want to be friends with us quite as much as we want to be friends with them. We all deal with folks who aren’t quite as into the friendship as we are, who aren’t following up on our energy and who aren’t returning our excitement.

At the same time that I am resenting Person A for ignoring my attempts to be a good friend, Person A is complaining about this same behavior from Person B, and meanwhile Person C is resenting me for neglecting their attempts at friendliness. And in the end, all seem to completely ignore their own complicity in treating in the exact same way that they do not want to be treated.

No one likes being ignored by someone they like. This is a fact. Everyone will ignore someone who likes them in their life for one reason or another. This is also a fact. People off put one another, some folks fall out. Some folks move on to other scenes and leave old scenes behind. We all do this, and we all do it equally on all sides of the spectrum. We ignore, and we off put. We neglect, and we resent.

So if everyone does this, and if we’re all equally guilty of neglecting and resenting and bittering at everyone else at one point or another in our lives… well then what?

Here, I find some acceptance, and I define a new truth… I guess? I suppose that the truth to remember is that we all have folks that we don’t get along with, and we all have folks that we do get along with! It’s like that like-level concept I talked about some blog posts back. Sometimes, you like someone at level 10 and they will only like you back at level 5, and you just have to live and let live.

Except in this case it’s more like “Some folks don’t get on with you. Let it go. And you won’t get on with some others. Tell them directly when you know.”

I dunno. This is all rambling nonsense at this point, mostly therapeutic for me, but nonsense all the same. Writing is an excellent venting form for me, and having all this space to write in does me really good in the end. I appreciate it. Hopefully some of you guys will too.

 

Hello all! It’s been a while since I last updated this blog, eh? Well, it’s high time that I gave a little update regarding what I’ve been up to and how the server has been handling.

The last time I posted an update, it was about how I spilled water all over the server. Well, thankfully, since then there haven’t been any issues with the way things have been running, so that’s a blessing. In the intervening time, I’ve kept busy with work and with acquiring various things. Those who follow me on twitter and facebook probably have seen the various pictures of the things I’ve gotten, but I’ll go ahead and put them here too. 🙂

Sailboat!

I got a sailboat! It’s not a very big boat, only about 11 feet long. More specifically, it’s a dinghy style Super Snark boat.

“Why did you get a sailboat Jesse?”

Several reasons, really. A friend of mine last summer invited me to go sailing with him on his much larger boat, which he kept out at Lake Travis before he gave it away. I took him up on it, and it was one of the more enjoyable and relaxing things I’d done in recent times. It also reminded me of the fun times I had in Boy Scouts, earning my sailing merit badge on Snark boats.

Sadly, being able to organize sailing trips with my friend was difficult, and it grew even more difficult after he gave the boat away to a coworker, so I settled on getting myself my own boat and just going to the lake whenever I damn well pleased! It just so happened that there was an outfit in downtown Austin that rented – and sold – various models of Snark boat. They were HostGator customers for their website as well, so it turned out to be a match made in heaven as far as being a customer is concerned. And so, I bought a brand, spanking new Super Snark sailboat for just a little more than $1,100.

 

Interesting storage solution, huh? I think it adds character to my apartment’s living room. 🙂 It makes for a good, short conversation piece, and it’s hella fun to sail around!

 

Nginx!

Now for some more technical type stuff. For those unfamiliar, most servers that serve websites these days are powered by a program called “Apache.” This is the program that takes files and data on the server’s hard drive and sends it to you when you enter a URL for a website. Apache has been around for a long time and it’s pretty much the standard bearer.

Lately at my job I’ve been hearing more and more about a new server program that is growing very popular. This program is called Nginx (pronounced Engine-X).

Why is it getting popular? Well, it has some features that Apache doesn’t, basically. What are these features?

1) It’s lightweight. It doesn’t consume many server resources, which generally means you can get better performance with large volumes of traffic.

2) Proxying. Nginx is capable of serving as a reverse proxy for another server. That means, it can act as a front end for something else. In my case, I switched my front end web server from Apache to Nginx, letting Nginx handle all the basic front end requests while Apache runs in the background.

Why is this good? Well, I’ll explain more below.

3) Caching. Nginx has a built in caching function, which is enormously handy! For those who don’t know, caching basically improves server performance. How? Normally, when a user requests a web page, the server has to do a lot of work to build the web page and then send it out over the internet. A cache is basically a pre-built, saved copy of the web page. The server does less work to build the page, and all it has to do is send the copy.

Apache is capable of building a server side cache of web pages and media, but it involves a great deal of hassle and it’s not very user friendly for an administrator to set up. Not so for nginx. Nginx actually makes the process of setting up server side caching fairly simple and straightforward.

So, here is the trick then. If you combine nginx’s proxy ability with its caching ability, you can save your Apache server some effort in building web pages and you can generally get better performance than you otherwise might. My configuration is probably a bad one, but it’s neat to set it up from scratch, see it work.

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I have more things that I could continue to write, but I’ve run out of time for now. I’ll probably write another update soon!