Stars Portal

What is Star's Portal?

Star's Portal is a personal/public resource website and blog for Starcript (Stars.)

Personal Blog is mostly tech related but will be about general topics including Linux, Photography, Network Security, and a few personal interests (e.g. LSD Dream Emulator.)
Resource section will contain example configuration files for common Linux Applications as well as a large personal collections of Wallpapers, Movies (non-copyrighted), and probably some Music that I like. Although this section is functional and you can view and download files, I don't have anything on there other than a couple configs and dotfiles. Eventually I will get around to organizing all the data that I have.
Photography section contains interesting scenes and landscapes caught throughout daily life. Not sure where this will be going, but everything is a work in progress. Photography is something I don't do often, and is just a passtime, so none of my photos I would consider "professional" quality.

Please check back for updates to the site in the Recent Updates sections for a list of changes. I have been busy with other things lately, so I updates and changes will be sparse.
A feedback address will be posted for reccomendations and changes to the site.

Last Blog Post

Stop to rest, friend.

A lesson learned through dealing with a stressful circumstance.

A while back, I returned to my hometown of Chilliwack, BC, after a very stressful period. For the first time in my adult life, I was genuinely happy—a better, more loving, and compassionate person than the one my old friends remembered.
But there was a problem. To them, I was still the old version of myself.
Growing up, I had been arrogant, difficult, and dealing with a lot of personal issues. In their minds, I was, for all intents and purposes, "Kevin v1.0"—a bit of an asshole. They had built their entire perception of me around that old version. So when "Kevin v2.0" showed up—happy, changed, and seeing the world differently—their systems couldn't process it. They saw the new data as a bug.
Instead of accepting the update, they kept trying to run the old program. "But Kevin, you always said you hated that," they'd say, pointing to old data. "Haven't you done all these things that go against what you are saying now?" It felt like I had to convince them that this new version of me was real, a feeling that was only amplified when their confusion led to four separate wellness checks in the months that followed.
The Wrong Bug Report
My friends' confusion wasn't entirely without cause. During a previous visit, when I really was going through a rough patch, I had shared my own debugging process with them. In trying to understand my emotional state—the cycles of depression followed by days of high energy—I had filed a bug report against the wrong system. I told them I thought I might have Bipolar disorder.
This was based on my own research, where I fell into a classic trap: affirmation bias. I was looking for an explanation and latched onto one that seemed to fit, not realizing that the symptoms of ADHD, Bipolar, and other disorders often overlap. This single, speculative "bug report" became the primary data point in a morbidly ironic game of telephone among my friends, overriding all the new, positive data I was presenting.
As humans, we often look for the easy explanation. It's a shortcut. But shortcuts can lead you down the wrong path. My psychologist, too, seemed to be looking for a quick patch. Instead of helping me analyze the full system—my diet,