UrFix's Blog

A geek without a cause

Designed with WordPress

  • Chicago, You Have My Heart

    by

    you don’t have my heart like a postcard or a poem.
    You got it like a scar—earned, aching, unforgettable.

    Not with chocolate box softness,
    but with grease-stained fingers and Jordan 1s on cracked concrete,
    with trains that sing lullabies in metal and motion.

    You are rhythm and rupture.
    A pulse in every pothole,
    a bassline in every boarded window,
    a sanctuary of hustlers and hood dreams.

    Your lake don’t shimmer—it speaks.
    Tells me about fire and floods,
    about how we build out of dust and dare.

    Burnham once drew a city.
    But we—us—we be drawing breath in it,
    etching murals in sweat,
    raising families in spite of it all.

    You’re not just a melting pot—
    you’re a molotov of memory and hope,
    of brown faces, borrowed tongues,
    barbershop philosophies and porchlight theology.

    You knock people down.
    But you teach ‘em to rise louder.
    To make art out of ache.
    To dance with the weight of the world on their shoulders.

    So yeah,
    Chi-Town,
    you got my heart like a fist raised,
    like a prayer whispered on the Red Line at 2AM.

    Forever Windy.
    Forever mine.

  • The pickaxe

    by

    The Pickaxe


    tear down this house. A hundred thousand new houses
    can be built from the transparent yellow carnelian

    buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that
    is to do the work of demolishing and then

    digging under the foundations. With that value
    in hand all the new construction will be done

    without effort. And anyway, sooner or later this house
    will fall on its own. The jewel treasure will be

    uncovered, but it won’t be yours then. The buried
    wealth is your pay for doing the demolition,

    the pick and shovel work. If you wait and just
    let it happen, you’d bite your hand and say,

    “I didn’t do as I knew I should have.” This
    is a rented house. You don’t own the deed.

    You have a lease, and you’ve set up a little shop,
    where you barely make a living sewing patches

    on torn clothing. Yet only a few feet underneath
    are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian.

    Quick! Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation.
    You’ve got to quit this seamstress work.

    What does the patch-sewing mean, you ask. Eating
    and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body

    is always getting torn. You patch it with food,
    and other restless ego-satisfactions. Rip up

    one board from the shop floor and look into
    the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.

    Rumi

  • i remember jackie

    by

    ,

    i remember jackie’s hair, thick and black, salt-wet from the sea,
    the way it clung to her neck when we’d walk the cracked streets of viejo san juan,
    our chocolate lab’s nails clicking on cobblestone,
    tongue lolling, tail wagging like he understood love better than us.

    i remember the apartment—cheap tile, open windows, no screens,
    just the hum of coqui at night and the heavy air that smelled like rum and rain.
    we’d fall asleep to that sound,
    her breath slow against my shoulder,
    our dog curled at our feet like an old promise.

    i remember the drive down la costa,
    windows down, dog’s head out,
    her arm out too, fingers slicing the air like she could part the wind.
    we were young and broke and sure of everything.
    chicago in the rearview, puerto rico ahead,
    and for a while, that felt like freedom.

    i remember the way she laughed at the gas station man who tried to sell us coconuts,
    how she always knew just enough spanish to charm,
    but not enough to argue,
    and i’d step in, and she’d smile,
    like i was still her hero.

    i remember bringing her back,
    the dog grayer now,
    both of us quieter.
    chicago colder than i remembered.
    she kept looking out windows like the palm trees might still be there.

    i remember when she started talking about him,
    that friend who wasn’t really a friend.
    i’d see the way her eyes softened when his name came up,
    the way she stopped finishing her sentences with me.

    i remember the night she left,
    no fight, just a suitcase by the door,
    the dog watching with those same old loyal eyes
    like he didn’t understand why we weren’t all going together.

    i remember.
    i remember her,
    him,
    the way some promises break without a sound.
    i remember our dog,
    old now,
    still waiting at the door sometimes,
    like maybe she’ll come back,
    like maybe we all will.

  • 5 Linux Commands: timeout, cpulimit,awk,tar and youtube-dl

    by

    I know how much you love random linux commands so here I’ve compiled some cool random linux commands to copy, convert, limit,kill and redirect things.

    Start COMMAND, and kill it if still running after 5 seconds

    timeout 5s COMMAND

    Convert Youtube videos to MP3

    youtube-dl -t --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 YOUTUBE_URL_HERE
    youtube-dl has this functionality built in. If you’re running an older version of youtube-dl, you can update it using `youtube-dl -U` (although if you have an older version, it probably doesn’t download youtube videos anyway.)

    youtube-dl –help will show you other options that may come in useful.

    Limit the cpu usage of a process

    sudo cpulimit -p pid -l 50
    This will limit the average amount of CPU it consumes.

    Target a specific column for pattern substitution

    awk '{gsub("foo","bar",$5)}1' file
    Awk replaces every instance of foo with bar in the 5th column only.

    Redirect tar extract to another directory

    tar xfz filename.tar.gz -C PathToDirectory
    The command extracting the tar contents into particular directory …

Chat

Hi 👋, how can we help?