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Stuff posted in this site by me.

Never underestimate the power of the chancla.

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Me: BECAUSE I’M THE GROWN-UP AND I SAID SO NOW QUIT ASKING ME AND GO DO SOMETHING ELSE BESIDES TALK TO ME FOR THE LOVE OF GOD OR I WILL LITERALLY BLOW UP FROM SITTING ON MY ANGER AND IMAGINING HOW MUCH TROUBLE I WOULD BE IN IF I PULLED THIS SHIT WITH MY PARENTS IN 1978!!!!

Child: Why are you yelling?

Me: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell, I’m really sorry. I’ll order pizza.

Source: Every conversation between a parent and a child, in four conversations.

Parenthood in the United States is very, very very different than in Mexico.

I just happen to be in the market for a new phone

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Before, buying a Nexus meant you had to deal with a bad camera or poor battery life, but the Nexus 5X and 6P are the first Android devices built with few to no compromises. The one thing you could complain about is the lack of wireless charging, but we can deal with that. The camera on a Nexus is finally good. The 12.3 MP cameras can hang with phones that are nearly twice the price of the 5X.

Source: Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P review: The true flagships of the Android ecosystem | Ars Technica

I broke the screen on my Canon S100 and the camera on my Nexus 5 is not the best. So by all appearances either phone is a worthy upgrade.

Being Poor Is Too Expensive

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Some think that being poor is simple. You don’t have enough money to buy a lot of stuff, so you’re forced to buy less stuff. But that’s not really how it works. When you’re broke, you can’t do all the little things that will improve your budget over the long run. It actually costs more to be poor.

Source: Being Poor Is Too Expensive

It’s been a long, long time for me to dig out of the hole I was in. While it was never that deep, you’re always uncomfortably aware how much you can fall in a really short amount of time.

Raising the minimum wage won’t solve this, no matter how much politicians assure everyone it is the magic silver bullet needed.

Tryna implement a state religion, is all

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Of course, all of this ignores questions that start nagging in young minds, like: Is this really sincere? Is this really what Jesus meant by fellowship? Are these really the biggest problems in my country? What if America just isn’t meant to be that special? Shouldn’t I be feeling more? Shouldn’t my elders set a better example? What if this just isn’t me? Why can’t I be myself here? Do I have to be so smug about this? And then, if a kid dares to speak up, the consequences can be…rather unfriendly as he or

Real words written by Sarah: Sorry I Didn’t See You at the Pole! | Meh, it’s Sarah.

“What if America just isn’t meant to be that special?” is a question that makes a lot of mis/uninformed people in the United States panic.

We have to keep both sides on the line

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Here’s a great read from a chef: Where Are All the Women Chefs? | The Feed

The loving, nurturing side of the trade, the instinctive side—and, I would say, the feminine side—is being forgotten.

Here in Minneapolis a few months ago the Mpls St Paul magazine ran a front page article about the 12 best restaurants in the state and the chefs who run them.

Except all of them were male:

The Best Restaurants
Mpls St. Paul Magazine cover

Obviously, people were not happy. It even brought about a non-apology from the magazine. And these are just the top results from a cursory search.

For cooking to retain its soul, we need both men and women to be in the kitchen. And wh

Malware you willingly decide to put on your devices, for their benefit

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Time passed, Free to Play became a thing. I went from company to company. Each time, every new project became less and less about how we can do cool things, and more about how we can track and target users to get the most whales possible, boost chart position and retain users to shove as many ads on them as possible.

Source: “We Own You” – Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer | TouchArcade

I didn’t know something like this was done

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In the eighteenth century, artists in Mexico (and to a lesser extent in other parts of Latin America) created paintings that depicted the different racial mixtures.

Source: Slavery, Race, and Whiteness in Mexico

I didn’t know it had been so complicated back then. Sure, in history class at school we would delve into this sort of thing, but we’re learning it as kids and you don’t ever revisit it until you have kids of your own — unless you study history in one of it’s myriad forms.

50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration – The Atlantic

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A longform article in The Atlantic.

In Douglass’s time, to stand up for black rights was to condone black criminality. The same was true in King’s time. The same is true today. Appearing on Meet the Press to discuss the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—in the fashion of many others—responded to black critics of law enforcement exactly as his forebears would have: “How about you reduce crime? … The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 to 75 percent of the time.”

The whole article is a very illustrating read on why things need to change.

nginx + hhvm, continued, part three

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It’s starting to sound like a bad Hollywood movie. You think you’re done with it and then BOOM it comes out of nowhere straight to DVD. Back when movies did that.

So after I played around with everything, bloody HHVM kept crashing — I’m starting to think it’s a fucking piece of shit just like facebook, which begat it — and all I could get out of the various things in /var/log were that it kept running out of memory. htop didn’t really say anything, nor ps aux nor netstat

Using systemctl status hhvm.service or journalctl -xn reported only that something was wrong, but didn’t say what. Which is annoying since fucking piece of shit systemd wants everyone to use its own tools for managing the system.

Gods, I dislike systemd. But carrying on…

Checking /var/log/messages manually led me to believe that hhvm was running out of memory and not failing gracefully. So that led me to looking around. Then I got this snippet from this site, which I added to my /etc/hhvm/server.ini:

hhvm.jit = false

Then
# service nginx restart && service hhvm restart

Since I did that I haven’t had to restart hhvm. Sure, I lose performance, but since this is my personal blog and I’ve had issues with php-fpm and hhvm I would much prefer to have reliability.

PS: Yes, I work on root. I’m a real sysadmin, not like y’all wankers who work with sudo.

nginx + hhvm, continued

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So after my last post on this, HHVM stopped working again, making nginx give a 502 as usual.

This time, a comment on a forum (who knows which, I looked at a lot of pages) gave me a little snippet that helped me pinpoint the issue:
# netstat -plunt | grep hhvm

This should have told me that HHVM was listening on a TCP port (since that’s what the default for HHVM is). But netstat reported nothing. After checking my configuration, I had forgotten that I had iptables drop all traffic to 127/8 that doesn’t use loopback. Here’s the snippet I use in my iptables configuration file
-A INPUT -d 127.0.0.0/8 -j REJECT

Commented the line out, imported the new ruleset into iptables and iptables didn’t block traffic sent from nginx to HHVM anymore, letting everything work as is supposed to.

Now I’m hoping it doesn’t die again due to some other reason. This was really annoying.

nginx + hhvm

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I’m not sure what I did, but I finally got it to work. My previous configuration had nginx watch out for a 502 BAD GATEWAY error to switch from HHVM to php-fpm.

Too bad that every single PHP request invoked a 502 error. But my blog worked and I didn’t check the logs cos I happily thought everything was working.

Until it didn’t.

MariaDB bitched. Then php-fpm started using 100% CPU until it killed MariaDB. nginx didn’t care cos it doesn’t use that much memory to begin with. But the end result of all this was that my blog didn’t work.

Ended up reinstalling everything from scratch. Then it somehow works. I should write up about it later so I don’t forget.

But right now I need to shower so I can be at work in a half hour. Yes, at 0630. And now WordPress is bitching about something going wrong. I’ll probably just end up switching back to good ol’ Apache with the standard PHP module in.

More work

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Why oh why do I work so much? It’s not like I truly need the funds.

Part of me thinks I just do it for the company. Otherwise I’d see no one at all, since I do tend to stay at home sleeping or reading.

On the upside, since I have to wake up early there won’t be any more late night drinks after work. Saves more money.

If only I were working in IT instead of food service… then I’d be making real money.

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