It's really rare for me to write lately. In my 20s, I'd share my thoughts with the world via the blog I had previously for TNTSMS. A lot has obviously changed, let's call it 20 additional years. Some posts during that time I ended up not hitting the publish button to make it available to the world because I learnt a hard lesson after I posted one time and then lost my father less than a year later - the post wasn't wrong but some things cannot be said to the world. That's my preable - for context - to get to my real point.

In 20 years, if it's one thing I've learnt is the heart break of having to live up to people I have cared about. In fact, you don't have to have a deep respect for someone to want them to appreciate your value. In both cases at times, I've experienced disappointment. This is context of really trying hard to make people proud of you.

I've learnt now that people will hardly ever live up to encouraging you. Sure your life is different from mine but if you're seeing that truth, then this blog / advice is for you. My advice is this - as long as you are serving God the best of your ability (which will never be perfect, that's just not something we can fix) - then don't even bother asking people what they think. Not every person will tell you something negative - don't get me wrong - God bless them if they speak positivity in your life. But the moment you ask that question to the person who will criticize your ability, skill or calling, especially from someone you either wanted to have a good relationship with or someone you were hoping to gain favour with and they tell you something negative - it can break even 10 years of work.

You will meet people who have not done but they are quite happy breaking your spirit by telling you something negative when you've been working towards your calling, your goals, your dreams. Other than taking that negative opinion and proving them wrong (which could take many years - losing time on something that might not have been a high priority) - it's probably better to just do, work at what you do.

I suppose that in some way, it's giving up - it's giving up wanting to hear anything from anyone, perhaps needing to hearing anything good from anyone and just doing what you have to do in life once you're pleasing God.

So for those of you who don't know what stingy means, well there's probably multiple ways to spell that word - it's not a dictionary word but a word using in Trinidad and Tobago where I'm from in the Caribbean. To be stingy (pronounced stin-jee) is to be pretty much allergic to giving.

The truth is, while I've met a lot of giving people, the ones that I've seen that have been closer to my life in the sense that I've met them and were rich seemed (in my impression) to be the more stingy ones. I've wondered many times why on earth would the universe give them more than others. There's an answer which I don't particular like and I will not share it.

The question is - what do you think? Is a rich person really rich if they're stingy? I feel like it's a rhetorical question...

So in about a week, I'll be 40 years old. It's been quite a ride so far - I remember the days when I was much more vibrant and my site slogan was I AM THE FUTURE. Most of the people who followed my posts know way back when I was running TNTSMS.COM that I was a bit emo. Then when I started this website, things were a little less emo but my posts could have offended some (or maybe many). There was one post that was scary because a little after I wrote that post, my dad died a really agonizing death - the post was written before it but it somehow became true. That's why I stopped posting about my thoughts.

Today, I decided I'd write about something less scary but something that impacted on my life. It was one of the birthdays I was a bit disappointed for and that disappointment led me to the title of this post - why I don't ask for large birthday gatherings on my birthday.

So my family had organized the rest of family to come together to celebrate my birthday when I was younger (probably in my early 20s). There was someone that was fairly close to me in the family that spoke and I was expecting that person to say good things about me but they barely scratched the clear coating of the surface. I was disappointed not because I wanted recognition - it was just one of those personal disappointments. When you realize that it's more important for someone to take the lime light on your birthday - it really shows you what human beings are capable of doing and how large their egos are. The one day it was okay for someone to say something good about me that I can truly accept without feeling guilty about letting it go to my ego is my birthday - that's how I feel about birthdays - that's how I feel about any other day other than my birthday.

Now since then, there was one occassion where I was surprised thanks to my wife and mom and family and that was in church - it was nice to be appreciated but I do remember that in church, it's really supposed to be about God - this is why I don't ask for the church to celebrate my birthday because I don't want to take appreciation for what God should be appreciated for.

So what I'm saying is that it's more of a choice now, yes it would be nice to hear people say good things about me but if that's not going to happen, then it defeats the point of celebrating my birthday with the company of like a whole bunch of people, rather to just celebrate it with the people I'm fairly certain can see something good in me.

If you don't agree with how I think and feel, hey, you do you in this case. If you know what I mean, then you know what I mean otherwise.

Had I known that a product from Oracle would be so inefficient, I would probably have not used it (what tempted me to use the product was really the graphical user interface).

With that being said, these VDIs seem to grow incredibly large even though the data inside of it can be only 25% of what is reported on the host node. We need to try to shrink it so the host node keeps some space.

Two things must be done and most people who have posted about this aren't intelligent. They suggest that you unmounth the drive before zerofilling it - this is a terrible suggestion if you do this to an OS partition! So here's what you can do. Boot your VM up and then zerofill it (but alter this command to suit your needs). What I did was df -h and looked at how much remaining space was in the partition, I then subtracted 10G to ensure zerofill would not take up all the space.

dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofillfile bs=1G count=10

Change the above count=10 to whatever is the remaining size of the partition and make sure to run this on the correct partition. This will create a zerofillfile and it takes a while to do.

Once completed, delete this file and then shutdown the VM.

Next, go to your host machine that is running Oracle VirtualBox, then go to the directory that contains the VDI file and then run the following. Note, this can take hours (in my case since I had a 270GB vdi file). YOU MUST SHUTDOWN THE VM BEFORE DOING THIS! SO BASICALLY DOWNTIME (THIS IS WHY I HATE VIRTUALBOX)!

vboxmanage modifymedium --compact file.vdi

Replace the file.vdi above with the correct vdi file name.

Once this has completed, check to see if your VDI has shrinked and you can restart the VM.

Enjoy!

So I stopped writing blog posts on Drupal because I (as have most other people) browse the internet via our phones more now than we used to before. So writing a post via Drupal interface while on mobile was just not fun. Lately though, I javelin converted back to WordPress and I just realized how mobile friendly the admin interface is to write again - this is simple and easy to do. I plan to post more here now and less on Facebook - that platform is becoming the next Twitter or maybe it's just that 90% of the people on my friends list are just non caring human beings.