I am sooooo going fishing.

My life as a copyfighter and more
I am sooooo going fishing.
by Marcia Kaoru Wilbur
for my little sister, Sue who claims to have enjoyed my writing and said, “I don’t know why you do that technical stuff!”
Mexico was fucking amazing!
I touched the ground in Mexico City, single mixed Greek Yankee Japanese woman from the US… a “cheena”. Immediately, upon exiting customs area, I was met by a man who spoke English. He approached, I thought he was a taxi service worker.
I sat in the back of the car, knowing this was a scam. The locking of the doors echoed clickkkkkkkkkk! Thud. This guy drove like a maniac. They could have at least blindfolded me! The way this guy drove… Was supposed to be a 2 minute ride. Supposedly, taking a cab was safer than walking to the bus depot. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…. right!
I was ferociously texting my point of contact, Adam. This was the worst driver in all of Mexico! What company would let this guy drive! Reality sunk in. I may be in a little bit of trouble…
Escape plan mode: on
Defcon: 4
The reason for the trip was to set up and maintain a few school labs, check out the college lab, meet with college staff in Oaxaca. All those years in Arizona and never once did I go to Mexico.
Dad told us not to go there, especially Tijuana. So, I avoided it…until this GNU Linux crusade. See, I didn’t need the internet. I didn’t need electricity… When you can rock offline… it’s life changing.
Life. Changing.
All those years in poverty, all those cold and hungry nights… rigging my equipment with paperclips and old storage… cleaning out the dust bunnies so I wouldn’t overheat and get shutdown during a chat in irc. Oh, I had experience with old, slow and broken equipment… it was called… my boxen. Not like the EdgeLord I recently designed.
All those missed opportunities, taking work as a technical writer just to get my foot in the door. Someday, someone will recognize my talent – I tried to convince myself. I was learning while there, anyway. I ended up going off on my own terms, being flown for migration and programming contracts, put up in 5 star hotels, wined and dined. Right out of the gate, I was sent to San Francisco in 2003 for LinuxWorld. 15 years later, and now that I had every financial luxury… now, I landed here – in this 3rd world country because of the story I heard about the last trip which indicated they really needed someone with tech. They did.
I mean I could list all the issues… starting with their inability to resize/truncate an image to trusting someone who knew Ubuntu to bring a repo. He showed up… without dependencies, with old vulnerable versions as well. Servers were missing at one site. At another, simply connecting the computers to the server and adding a link solved some of this lab’s issues. An earthquake had hit one lab. There was a need.
Here I was…by choice! Granted I was a little disappointed this was nowhere near sea turtles or fishing…
But there I was in the back of the car, the 2 men in front, knowing they were trying to get me somehow. You know, I’m a survivor. I’ve been beaten for less. I lived on MLK and Bonanza in Las Vegas back in the 90s, as an Asian in the ghetto during the Rodney King riots – I wasn’t scared of these 2 Mexicans. I knew I was there for a purpose and I would fulfill this purpose. These fools just wanted my cash… One was the confidence man, the other the wheel man. Classic scam.
“Ok Miss we are here. He is calculating the price.”
The car was locked.
We were in front of the bus depot in Mexico City. I just needed to get out of the car. All I had was a backpack and laptop bag so … I considered the window… as a last resort.
“55 dollars”
“55 dollars! pesos?”
“US dollars.” He was trying to fast talk me about why.
“Listen, I was told this was a 2 dollar ride. Clearly, you took the long route and no. I don’t have 55 dollars cash.”
Bitch, I’m a Connecticunt. I don’t keep cash in one place when I travel. Duh.
He didn’t believe me, I pulled out some pesos and 2 american dollars. Far too large a tip for this heist. He kept insisting. So…
“I have a credit card. Do you have square? Square? Venmo?”
They looked at each other and pointed to the ATM outside and I was like… whoa, they have this racket planned out well… but I insisted.
“No ATM! Square!”
They just gave up and unlocked the car. Well, it was their fault for not taking venmo or having square!
Episode 2: Bus Depot – no habla
It’s not that I am so frustrated with my work.
It’s that someone asked me if I could use PuTTy today.
I suppose, my response could have been more polite.
“I don’t use PuTTy”
The truth is, this is an ethical thing… not using PuTTy…that’s not going to happen.
It’s the project. I can’t talk about it… but I suspect it would be beneficial to people using lame winblows.
Of course, remember, you have a choice… ok. Although.. learning about their remote management could be useful. Bleh. Come on. I’m not asking for 200+/hr… just let me play with GNU Linux toys.
Some may look at the scar on her lower lip as a flaw in her beauty but if you were to hear the story of the day she received that scar, that scar she wears with pride, you would see, the scar is what makes her more beautiful.
I left millions for college. Who does that? Noel Lee’s son didn’t.
My life, is an adventure… on a shoestring.
My dad taught me to solder… as a youth. I was managing the soldering department by 16.
While other girls were at the beach, I was knee deep in sawdust and never far from flux…
Happy Father’s day dad…
He pretty much sealed the deal by encouraging me to be myself, giving me such skills and being straight. Yea… what man wouldn’t want that… Pretty much…every single one.
Why don’t we have better screensavers. Raspbian has NO screensaver.
xscreensaver
The drama behind xscreensaver was so amusing to me, I want to me Jaime.
What I learned from jmz
jmz is the awesome. I mean wtf. Because of his code/error messages, I realized the following:
1. no bc in Raspbian
2. Debian is bug driven and won’t update packages without bugs even if there is a more current version.
3. Jaime is a fucking rock star!
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop-shipping-xscreensaver/
The whole wayland thing has me concerned about the state of my own software, respin.
That’s just extraneous software – easily done by rsync or …meh dd.
xscreensaver saves the day
However, I was informed by an evangelist who does hackathons that at one point an image locked up and there was no way to get past the screen lock. Installing xscreensaver then disabling lock did the trick. I’m sure there are more refined ways of doing things, but being able to hack past a problem using xscreensaver was … delicious.
Fuck Debian.
It still isn’t in stable. Years later. I did compile the newer version from source. For some reason there were C++ comments… just 2 that held up my compile. – No worries if you run into an error, that was the only error.
So, solid code.
But lets talk about images now.
We can customize … use free culture or public domain images. Let’s do this thing!
They are getting worse and worse. I continue to speculate that Ian died on the cusp of leaving Linux Foundation.
OT
P.S. Linux foundation fired all writers last month. Roy was the only one who noticed and wrote about it.
Ported to the pi – Circus Linux.
On pi compiled… not cross but could do that too most likely.
Imagine – walking away from a multi-million dollar business – you were groomed to run since childhood – for an education and – within a few months – it was all gone and you were 3000 miles away – 20, no more money, no “real” family (just a bunch of greedy vultures), nothing.
Then imagine someone taking you for labor – and taking 5 years to escape – alive. At that point, you can’t leave those little people with those monsters. I had them, but the courts let him have them – he paid the mediator off, met with the commissioner outside court before the court date. First, you have to find them. Then, you have to extract them, legally where possible. While you work F/T with no car and hotel moteling it on Freakmont street. By the time I found them, the 1 year old had bruises behind his knees from being beaten. The head monster gave me the 3 children, whom I raised – the best I could being a single mom alone. We lived on the college campus for many years. Truthfully, I rarely slept. I would be lucky to get 3 hours of sleep in a row. The Head monster found us. I was working graveyard shift, it was daytime – and my mother was at work. I was sleeping when I shot right up out of bed. I had seen him parked on the street and the children were out front in my dream. I could hear them, they were out front – and there he was, exactly as I had seen him in my dream, my mind… That week I put the kids in a car and headed to Connecticut. I was tired of being scared. Tired of being afraid. Even after he died, I still had fear because I had been living in fear for so long.
Nothing… Nothing! that can happen at work – can really affect my life. It just hurts these people aren’t better. I still have nothing – but as my fortune stated… It’s not what you have, but what you are.