Whether as a victim or not, the news continues to push out a negative image of black men as either victims or oppressors

Before we start this, I thought I’d start by saying that this is more a rant than anything and that I will try to formalize my arguments, which will be primarily without sources and purely opinionated.

Let’s start the show….

You ever hear someone start off saying if I had a nickel for every…? WELL, If I had a nickel for every time I hear on the news about “brutality” against POC(people of color), I could probably give Jeff Bezos a run for his money.

Okay, I admit:

1. That’s an exaggeration on how often I hear this
2. The news is supposed to stir negative emotions since it is a negative feedback loop machine

So why did I write this? I’ve always liked being a devil’s advocate and going against popular opinion. But for many outsiders, they would believe that the United States is oppressing black men in general and that it’s happening from white police officers.

So a bit of a background is that I am from Brooklyn, NY, and have lived and grew up in many of the worst neighborhoods such as Brownsville and East New York. What I can tell you is that my interactions with police have always been just. It’s to say that I don’t think I’ve always been treated very kindly, but neither have I been mistreated.

What I think has been happening is that people have this distorted view of the world where we were all born equal and that prejudices never had never do and never will occur. We have to face that the world is not fair. Now, this does not mean that we have to accept the way we live but we have to also be smart about how we deal with injustices.

One case I would like to talk about right now. Is Ahmaud Arbery as he has been a focal point of injustice against black men in America. As you can see from the footage above, Ahmaud was definitely not treated fairly. However, we cannot use the way we are treated as grounds to also be disrespectful and attempt to also treat others unfairly. I will repeat, I do not think he was treated fairly.

One case I would like to talk about right now is Ahmaud Arbery as he has been a focal point of injustice against black men in America. As you can see from the footage above, Ahmaud was not treated fairly. However, we cannot use the way we are treated as grounds for disrespect and a justification for mistreating others. I will repeat, I do not think he was treated fairly.
Ahmaud firstly should not have been cursing at the police officers. I also want to point out that he does look very suspect as in, I as a black man from a bad neighborhood, would not feel comfortable being near him off the way he is dressed. However, stating something like that from another race comes off as sounding biased or something. We, as a people, need to stop being so offended over everything. Let’s be honest. The man looks suspect! He is wearing a winter jacket with no shirt on, leaning on the trunk of a car in the middle of the day in a park where the officers have said is known for having a lot of drug activity.

I can go on to talk about what I found wrong about him thinking it would be a good idea to fight armed people (who are looking for any excuse to kill you) but I think my point has already been made.

I am not sure how you all feel about this or other topics related but I think that it is insane how quickly we want to point out police brutality and not look at other larger things that are affecting poverty-stricken communities. As Michael Jackson once said,

If we want to make the world a better place we gotta look at ourselves and make a change

We cannot change or force people to look at us differently, but we do have control over our actions and thoughts. I do not know what to make of what happened to Ahmaud, nor am I here to be a political activist. Ahmaud had the choice to curse at the police and had the choice to fight someone armed, and he, unfortunately, lost his life fighting for what he believed was just. Whether or not that was the best way to go about it is opinionated.

My argument, however, is that stories like Ahmaud do not reflect my story. I do not want a race/ethnicity to define who I am or what my likely upbringing was or is. I want to be known firstly as a person and not as a black man. Us correlating themes of oppression to groups based off of looks continues to perpetuate racial stereotypes. When will it stop?

If you enjoyed reading this or have anything to say, please feel free to write in the comments. I am open most to hearing rebuttals!
:v:

TLDR(I understand )

just add an id and move your stylesheet to the bottom

For those that like stories…

So I had a super annoying problem where the drawer button would be overlapped with content

Yep… so I did what any other CS student or programmer would do. Delay everything until I found a solution :)

It only took me 1.5 hours but in the process I learned a few little hacks

Basically, when you are using a CDN, you cannot just simply override the style sheet. The browser will give preference to the style sheet with more specificificy(spelt wrong on purpose).

What the hell is specificity?

official definition and documentation on MDN

my definition:

every selector has its own numerical ‘weight’:

• 100 points for IDs
• 10 points for classes and pseudo-classes
• 1 point for tag selectors and pseudo-elements

If you want to override, you got to hit the boss level and pass señor CDN, and the easiest way to do that is to give yourself a 100 point bonus by throwing in an overrides id.

You will also need to move your stylesheet to the bottom, so it is the last one read.

I tried both of these separately, and they didn’t work that way.

So to summarize…

1. Wrap the area you want to change or the whole document with a custom id to override.

2. Move stylesheet to the bottom.

3. Bask in glory

I hope you guys got a good laugh out of this and learned something. I know I did. Comments questions? Drop em *dabbing out*

I admit. I’m a lazy programmer and if I don’t have to make as many movements to get the same work done, I will take it!

As I start to use VS Code more and more, I want to be as productive as possible. One way of doing this is to minimize having to use the mouse. Here are a few shortcuts and snippets I use when I am coding on Visual Studio Code.

1. Change line numbers:

ctrl + g

This is super handy of course as I no longer have to scroll all the way up with my mouse or my arrow key to a line.

2. Switch to another open file:

ctrl + tab 

3. New Terminal:

ctrl+ shift + `

4. Comment / Uncomment a code block:

ctrl + /

5. Selecting a particular line:

ctrl + i

I really didn’t want to boggle you down with a lot of shortcuts but if you are interested in seeing a ton more, there is a whole site dedicated to it.

I also use a very popular snippet extension on VSC called JS JSX Snippets

I hope that this small article can instantly boost your productivity. I tried to include some shortcuts that I personally use all the time. I also hope that this is useful for both new users of VSC as well as those with experience.

If there are any tips or comments , please feel free to leave them here or message me. Also, follow me on twitter @stephanedmonson I follow back! Happy Coding!!!

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start
su - postgres
psql

update 2/13/2019

I came across a similar article that has implemented an automatic execution of psql on startup of windows (and I believe on reboots of the wsl shell)

I also found that you should be able to use :

service postgresql start

as opposed to the /etc/init.d command I wrote before.

just like in normal PostgreSQL.

WTF!!!!!!!!!!

That was my reaction after spending hours — if not days trying to connect windows subsystem for Linux with PostgreSQL.

Let it be known firstly that I am unfamiliar with how to use PostgreSQL and barely have any knowledge on Linux.

Background: I used to have a Mac and last month after deciding what computer to buy, I decided that Apples ecosystem was not worth spending at least $800 more for a lower spec computer so instead I went with a Dell 9575.

Anyways, I just want to quickly share how you can easily get Postgre 10 running on Ubuntu 18 via WSL(works as of 09/24/18).

1. Open up Ubuntu and download PostgreSQL.

2. HERE is the biggest problem that I have faced while going through this process. The problem is how to connect to the server. So if you get an error like

psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory Is the server running locally and accepting connections on Unix domain socket “/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5433”?

Then you are in the right place my friends :)

To solve this issue you just paste this code in to start the server

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start

3. After getting the server started you should get a confirmation like this

* Starting PostgreSQL 10 database server                                                                                                                   [ OK ]

If that is the case you are ALMOST there. I said almost because you (assuming you are a novice to PSQL ) will more than likely encounter this problem after typing in

psql

psql: FATAL:  role "username" does not exist

No worries at this point we simply need to write

su - postgres
psql

And…boom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Get the martinis ready baby !

A couple of more things…

SO what I did at the end was change the user to postgres. Apparently for security reasons Postgres only works under the user postgres by default. Weirdly enough not even root can access psql.

Also, the susbystem closes the server everytime the shell is closed so you have to run the code unless there is some way to have it run automatically.(as of 2/13/19, I found one look above for reference)

I really hope that this was of value to somebody. If there is something that you thing I could improve on please let me know!!This is my first article and I hope to write many more like it for the community.

I think that WSL is a really great option for W10 users like me who came from a bash environment but don’t like GIT bash.

To any one who has read this far, thanks a lot for taking the time out. OK I will stop writing… for now ! :)

signing out…..