Personal Log 1.14.23

 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

That opening from “A Tale of Two Cities” sums up my week; it started off both good & bad:

My mom was doing well Monday – Wednesday, from then on she had a rough week & I was taking care of her most of the time. I have to admire her though, she keeps believing & confessing her healing & she is getting better, it's just taking the scenic route…

I addressed something from one of the men in the Men's Group & at first, it didn't go so well but it ended better than it began; I'm thankful for that. I never asked for this position but the fact is, I have it & I'm doing the best I can considering all the plates I'm spinning right now…

'Continuing to write the “Men of the Bible” series, I'm on Gideon right now; there's a lot to learn from him. I synced the virtual Men's Group w/ the onsite Men's Group lessons & it went really well. I may do Jonah next but a book would also be nice.

I miss Christmas. I love it so much; this year we had a blizzard on Christmas Eve so the service was canceled & we had it on New Year's Day, which is the 8^th Day of Christmas & my pastor actually preached a little on the 12 Days of Christmas! I loved it as my friend Nathan & I are the only ones I know of who celebrate the 12 Days. What was really cool was that our Week of Prayer ended on Twelfth Night, the last Day of Christmas! It would have been really neat to end the Week of Prayer w/ 2 – 3 acapella Christmas carols & some eggnog.

So it's a new year & I'm revamping/overhauling several things, one of them being my daily driver pc. I've been using Linux Mint 17 Mate on my laptop for what, five years now? The distro was brand new so that sounds about right as I believe it's nearing end of life. The past couple of weeks my laptop was freezing up due to Chrome & occasionally Chromium. It was frustrating, I'm in the middle of something & bam! All locked up. So I spent a little time looking at lighter distros & praying about what to do as there's so many choices.

I've been a Linux Mint fan since forever but I'm really crushing on AV Linux, it's fantastic! It's geared toward audio/video production but can easily be used as a daily driver. Linux Mint 20 looks pretty good to; I installed it on a spare hard drive just to check it out & so far, it's impressive. AV Linux has OBS pre-installed, LM 20 has OBS available in the Software Manager but unlike AV Linux, LM 20 has the following desktop apps available in the Software Manager: Skype, Zoom & guess what? The Jitsi Desktop App!!!!

Why am I excited about this? Several reasons… I've researched & tried installing several video chat apps over several hard drives to no avail. At least nine different Skype versions, several different Zoom versions, Jitsi this & that, etc & none were compatible w/ my architecture(s). I was growing weary but someone on the Linux Mint development team decided to put the current versions of these apps in the manager & now, I don't have to go searching anymore. God bless us everyone!

Like I've said before, I have a dedicated tablet used exclusively for video conferencing: Skype, Zoom & Jitsi. However, I don't always have the tablet on & I don't have documents on it to screen share. So, as a backup, if I install the Skype, Zoom & Jitsi Meet Desktop apps on my laptop, I don't need to have a browser open, I can just open the app(s), start conferencing, screen share from my laptop, etc; all on the fly. It makes things so much easier.

With that being said, I'm open to the idea of developing a respin of MX Linux, similar to AV but focusing on writers, bloggers, vloggers, etc; w/ all the tools/software available to them in one distro. 'Just one more plate to (re)spin! Ha! So, I'll take another week & check out LM 20 on this spare hard drive & if there's no bugs, I'll install it on my laptop & go from there :)

This week was more of a tech week & if I decide to install LM 20 on my laptop, next week will be a tech week also. I'm looking forward to overhauling some things though: tech-wise, ministry-wise, etc. Sometimes you just need to shake things up to add new life to… everything.