What About This Crime Bothers Me

First is the loss the child suffered.

Second is the loss the family continues to suffer.

This crime occupies my mind, my heart and my entire being.

A child is at school, after school, in Science Club is what is in my mind.  He leaves the care of the school and moves to the care of the community.  A community I love.  A community like the one I grew up in.  The community my wife did grow up in.  One of the schools she went to.  Homes here are still often referred to by the names of the people who built the homes almost a century ago or those who came to live in them around World War II.  Homes occupied by people who built and continue to build our city.  Homes occupied by people who do not miss anything that goes on in our neighborhood.  So my mind says what happened was not missed but the link that makes the knowledge of what happened known to the Houston Police Department is missing.

The police were called and many law enforcement agencies have put a lot of hours into working on solving this crime.  This was a horrific crime where the bad person had a lot of contact with the child.  Yet there is not enough DNA evidence to make a case.  Where did it go?  Did people seeking to help the child, neighbors, Houston Fire Department, Houston Police Department, other Law Enforcement officers, crime scene investigators, the lab it was sent to, the lab they sent it to manage not to preserve it?

Was the bad person capable of doing this horrendous and very physical crime without leaving any DNA or getting any DNA on them?

Why have our local law enforcement and District Attorney's office not answered these questions?

Who will answer these questions?

Specialty Shopping Just West of Near Northside

This Facebook post began to look like a blog:

The Post

Boneless wings, pickle chips and local mozzarella

Then:

Wings and chips from Walgreens. The Mozz from Houston Dairymaids. I have been going to the farmer's market in the back of Canino's early in the am for more than a few decades but this shop is a nice find. People have been asking me for a few years if I had been to it when I mentioned Bolillo's. It is not across from Bolillo's as they all said but a few blocks south on the west side of Airline. The spice shop that is across the street is a place you should pay a visit to as well.

Canino's 

Cheese Shop

Spice Shop

Bread Shop and Bakery

And of course I have to include my fav meat market.

Bad Actors

When I was 16 I had a job sacking groceries at Trahan's Lucky Seven on Lyon's Avenue. After 12 hours of work, with a pocket heavy with tips I stopped at the Venus Theatre for a movie. The movie was Coogan's Bluff.  My '58 Dodge was parked behind the theatre. Leaving the theatre and going East to Gazin and my mind going to the Easter animals that were seasonally sold at the shop on that corner I watched another teen step off the bus and three men coming the other way stopped and began ro beat him. He handed over his pay packet and then one of the men stuck him three times in the chest. There was a large man standing next to me on the corner and I said "Let's get them". In the middle of the street as the man who had stabbed the teen swung the same knife at me I realized I was there alone and decided the better plan was to run. I was wearing new shoes with leather soles and as I ran they slipped on the gravel and in my mind I prayed "Lord, don't fail me now." As I turned the corner into the parking lot I saw the red and blue light bar and turned to see him tossing the knife down and another red and blue light bar was coming north on Gazin The were caught right there and arrested. The teen went by ambulance to Memorial Hospital downtown which it turned out is where he worked and where the pay packet was from. A Sargent came and took me there as well. The teen had a collapsed lung and was in surgery when we got there. He lived. I was told that at trial when the man was asked why he had tried to cut me he said it was because he was afraid of me.

Real Tech when Your Realtek Card Fails You

OK so far a while now when I go some places my new Asus machine with xubuntu on it either failed to connect to wifi or connected at 4 to 6 Mb/sec and then did not connect to the Internet.  This most often happened at places using what I call a concierge Internet.  Likely I call it that because I first encountered it in hotels.  When logging in one encounters a page of legalese and must accept the terms before proceeding to the Internet.

The first solution suggested by Evan Carroll of Houston Linux Users Group which will now be called here Awesome person 3 was that since I was running xubuntu 14.04 in the year of 2017 that I upgrade to the currently supported version.  That took a while and version support is a subject for another blog post.

OK so I was updated to 16.04 and many things were a bit visually different but the connection problems persisted.  It should be noted that the wifi "worked" as did the Internet access at greater than ninety percent of the places I go.  Some with the concierge, some not password protected and some password protected "worked" and connected to the Internet including my three wifi networks at home.  I am a strong believer in redundancy.

So maybe a word for wifi and/or Internet not working at all locations will be wifiN.

So, next was an upgrade to my driver by compiling it from source to the newest version at a HLUG Wednesday night meeting after downloading it from Github by Awesome person 3.  Likely I updated xubuntu again after that or maybe just because I am me I was still again in a wifiN state.

Next I moved from a well established group that promotes civic minded technology in Houston to focusing on my own startup for promoting strictly Open, Open, Open, civic technologies in the Greater Houston area.  I took a membership at Station Houston because it is an Awesome space with Awesome leadership and Awesome members.  I knew this was a wifiN location and budgeted a month to concentrated time slicing to make it a not wifiN location aka wifiNN.

So awesome person five connected me with awesome person seven who spent about an hour determining this was a known issue, updating my driver while connected via LAN and leaving a breadcrumb trail in my terminal.

Next time I updated xubuntu I was wifiN.  I love it when things do not work and give me an opportunity to learn.  There was a quick break room conversation with awesome person seven where I gleaned some keywords to search on but if I was to do that in my Awesome new space I had to log in on the dark side.  Slack post ensued and here are some excerpts:

randy777

6:48 PM

No need to spend time on it right now.  make clean and sudo make clean both tried to tell me something about target clean not being there.  I did update my Windows side Firefox so I sort of have slack.  Thanks for the help.  I will work on reading up on what make is trying to tell me and the header and kernal stuff as well as that github repo.

randy777

8:19 PM

Still no need for you to spend time on it.  I woke up to a boken water pipe at home this morning so did not get to station

8:20

I did read a bit of docs though and then did:

8:22

sudo /etc/pm/power.d/rtl8821ae_power_save_off
cd rtlwifi_new/
make
make clean

8:24

restarted my computer and maybe the power of suggestion but it feels like I did something good.

8:29

that leaves the header, kernel and repo stuff to read even if the wifi works next time I get to station.  I will let you know either way.

8:30

broken pipe that was

randy777

4:24 PM

Thank you for the help and the words.  You have helped me more than you could know.

randy777

4:31 PM

I did all that stuff above and a bit more reading as well which allowed me to send Google a set of words that returned more reading and eventually got me to https://medium.com/@elmaxx/ubuntu-16-10-rtl8821ae-drivers-part-2-electric-boogaloo-2a27261658eb which does a lot of the same commands you did so I did them at home then when I came here did not work but after disabling networking and wifi then doing the install, restarting, doing the modprobes, enabling and restarting or something like that I am up on the xubuntu side again.  Hurrah.
 In short there was that Medium blog post above that solves the main part of the problem and continues to work after the next update so for now I will say I am in a wifiNNt state.

Biggio's Brisket Trifecta

OK so their pictures are likely better than mine:

Biggio's Sports Bar

But here are some pictures of the food we had:

Chopped Brisket

 Brisket Sausage Hot Dog

Salad, say what ?

Brisket Tacos

And it was all great.  The only negative for me is that everything has an aire of sophistication.

A Convoluted Post On Our Convoluted Task

But before all of that here is this:

I was posting in another thread when I heard what sounded like knocking on my house. My neighbor sometimes will do that but not usually at eleven at night. Usually because she has something nice to eat she wants to share. At this time of night I thought maybe she was in trouble so I went out and slipped on my sandals to go see. Down the street in front of a neighbors house a woman was beating on the back window of a car in front of a neighbors house. Her son lives across the way and I could see he was out walking his dog so I clapped to get his attention. He waved because often at this time of night I will just make a noise like a squirrel to get his attention and say hello. I motioned him to the front and he came out and saw what was going on and took a triple take so I motioned him down that way thinking perhaps a child had locked Mom out of the car. It turned out it was a woman who thought that was her husbands car and who knows what else was in her mind. He told her to leave that that was not her husbands car but she went at it again and he repeated then started to to call as if the police but actually the cars owner. Last we saw she headed off to the next block, barefooted. It is currently 50 degrees. I put the other text in a blog post about our housing and homeless New Hope thing.

I am not a fan of the SRO idea at all.  There needs to be a place for people who are single and will make the right decision to move into a monthly low rent situation. Those situations change though to couples in a one bedroom then possibly a family in a two bedroom and then to home ownership possibly with Avenue CDC but also any of these various stages can be permanent.  I know, I am being idealistic.  There is nothing at any of these stages to stop a person that needs mental health treatment or is just plain bad from being in any of those situations.

Some will remember that the Salvation Army ended up in our midst because the situations we now face were not wanted in the block north of Market Square.  Star of Hope was also convinced to move out of downtown as it developed.  The YMCA downtown had nightly and weekly rentals.  The DeGeorge did as well as did the building just west of the old post office at the base of Washington.  There were also two what were then called transient hotels politely.  It was illegal not to have a few dollars and a drivers license and before any major event there was a police sweep to arrest those who did not have those two things.  After the event they were processed back out.  I managed to have all of those as I lived in my car working day labor until I made enough to afford the DeGeorge then the one by the post office then the Y but I injured my back muscles.  I was a vet so I was treated at the VA and not being a drunk as only drunks were taken by the SOH and the Sally.  I was at the Y and decide on Sunday to walk to First Methodist even though I could not bend to put on my shoes.  I somehow missed FMC and went to First Baptist Church where a young man recognized me as having been at Mainstream, a Christian night club over Club Bojangles.  He said I should come to Mainstream so I met Merle Shade who ran it and I lived there sleeping on the floor and returning to work as driver for Peakload then returning to TAMU the next semester.

We are faced with a monumental task and even though the Sally has blown it big time and this facility is not right for us and may not be right at all I hope we can find ways to be kind and loving of all ages and all economic situations and to treat those who need physical ot mental help.  As individuals, faith based orgs, other ords, businesses and governments this is the task before us.  Poorly stated but I hope I got a little bit of it across and that also these three pieces of history will be considered and that we will get to know folks around us so less of this type of thing happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_Mossler

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Grisly-Ice-Box-Murders-7251178.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Corll

Now That Is An Empanada

In my late teen years in Montrose I loved Marini's Empanadas on Westheimer close to Utter Delight.  They moved out to Hillcroft and somehow the magic was just not there for me even though the empanadas were still great.  This new place at The Carrilion way out Westheimer brings back the magic and more as the little rotunda room has the feel of the original place yet there is so much more.

This little red room is about the same size as the original dining area and has the same feel.

Not the guessing game of old.

Had to get plenty for the weekend.

 These two are half gone but someone taught me to use a pen for perspective.

The Fugazetta was always my favorite with an espresso. Onions and gooey dripping cheese.

 Maaaarrrrrvin
                 Zindler

                            And a special extra for people named Leslie.