Don’t con­cern your­self with St. Patrick’s Day just yet. Today, tonight, you need to cel­e­brate Pi Day. Eat pie, pizza or fruit or even quiche, and con­tem­plate that time when your cal­cu­lus teacher in high school excit­edly cel­e­brated Pi Day with you, hav­ing pre­pared games and treats. Or watch Pi with your friends and have your brain hurt. Or do what you do best and live your life. You are rad. What is your favorite Pi Day mem­ory?

1. Form two loops in rope with the sec­ond over­lap­ping the first.
2. Simul­ta­ne­ously pull bights — the bight for the sec­ond loop goes under through the first loop, the bight for the first loop goes over through the sec­ond loop.
3. Pull loops to tighten.

Chard Rules Every­thing Around Me, son!!!

Com­ing soon probably

Set­ting up and main­tain­ing Exis­ten­tial Media I’ve learned some things that I would like to share. I’m adding my hacks and code that I’ve used for Exis­ten­tial Media to GitHub. This will include some Word­Press themes and altered plu­g­ins ini­tially, but I will be adding more. Trans­parency. Roll your own.

I’ve been pretty sick. It sucks. Today I woke up at 2. I am OK with this because it is Sun­day. I feel like a big glob of snot.

Since set­ting up our new server, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out user/group per­mis­sions. I wanted Word­Press to be able to write to the server (to cre­ate thumb­nails, update plu­g­ins, etc), and at the same time I wanted to be able to write to the server log­ging in as my user in Trans­mit. I had resolved to set­ting the user/group to www-data (the Apache user, so Word­Press could write to the server). Then I added myself to the group www-data and set the per­mis­sions for all the files to 775.

That worked. But it didn’t seem right. On our shared server before this it wasn’t like this. This is when I dis­cov­ered using suexec and mod_fcgid. Using suexec PHP can run as my user. That way I can have the cor­rect file per­mis­sions and be the owner of my files. It took me a while to find infor­ma­tion on how to set this up, and once I did I was def­i­nitely con­fused at points. I based my work on two tutorials.

The first tuto­r­ial I worked with was on Howto­Forge. I skipped the steps on installing Apache and set­ting up vir­tual hosts. I fol­lowed the other instruc­tions pretty closely. But once I had fin­ished, the server was throw­ing up 500 errors.

The sec­ond tuto­r­ial I found to help me with where I hadn’t suc­ceeded. The steps were fairly sim­i­lar. The one dif­fer­ence I noticed that fixed my prob­lem was to make the php-fcgi-starter exe­cutable. Wow. Simple.

chmod a+x

The Book of Nature is an ancient, embed­ded anal­ogy. We lis­ten for nature to speak and read what’s writ­ten in the stars. This type of think­ing is strange, igno­rant of par­tic­u­lars and mul­ti­tudes and the self. True obser­va­tion is a rad­i­cal dis­ci­pline that cul­ti­vates subjectivity.

Last sum­mer, on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend, I read John Stilgoe’s Out­side Lies Magic. The corny title belies the con­tents, which are fresh and heart­felt. Stil­goe is a zeal­ous pedes­trian. As in, devoted to walk­ing. He makes a lion of the every­day explorer; some­one who, sim­ply by notic­ing, scares aware­ness into the “ordi­nary” landscape.

There are fea­tures of the land­scape that are “closed to us,” he puts it. Topogra­phies and his­to­ries we don’t know we’re miss­ing. The per­son who stops to read what’s stamped on a man­hole cover, or fol­lows a power-line to the util­ity man’s fence-hole, real­izes there are whole “sys­tems of closed fea­tures.” This per­son uncloaks the Divine Hand, grounds the meta­phys­i­cal, and sees the tracks we’ve laid. This per­son knows the quiet mus­cle of humans work­ing in blind con­cert. This per­son is sur­prised and invig­o­rated by scale.

What is Stil­goe advo­cat­ing if not a prim­i­tive, unpro­grammed empiri­cism? As it applies to the method, so to our indi­vid­ual selves: the­ory wants obser­va­tion, and obser­va­tion, exper­i­ment. Look­ing makes you curi­ouser and curi­ouser, an end in itself.

It’s true, isn’t it? Over and over again our bod­ies are made sen­si­ble by look­ing. I love cities because the signs are obvi­ous; the settler’s inten­tions recorded in con­crete. The chal­lenge is rec­og­niz­ing the built-in blind­ers. Every object nar­rates, mak­ing sky­lines, parks and neigh­bor­hoods essen­tially unsci­en­tific. But so’s every­thing, from where a per­son stands.

In wilder­ness and rural places it’s even eas­ier to divorce his­tory from mat­ter. Moun­tains are unsolv­able and val­leys seem enclosed. Thoreau looked around and nearly fell apart, writ­ing, “To come in con­tact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The com­mon sense! Con­tact! Con­tact! Who are we? Where are we?”

I like to imag­ine the early explor­ers, nat­u­ral­ists and sci­en­tists look­ing around with at least as much vehe­mence as Thoreau. In an essay titled “Strange­ness,” Lyn Hejin­ian writes that they “sought to dis­cover the tan­gi­bil­ity and sin­gu­lar dis­tinct­ness of the world’s exu­ber­ant details and indi­vid­u­al­i­ties with­out spir­it­ing them away from each other.” In other words, they sought to reveal a thing with­out set­ting it apart. It’s a writer’s wish. But to reveal a thing entire is to reveal the uni­verse entire. So you do your best; you describe.

We left the house at 5:45 this morn­ing, snow falling despite pre­dic­tions of clear skies. The com­muters were already awake, mak­ing their way into Boston. And we headed for an indus­trial cor­ner of the city that surely stays up all night, the New Eng­land Pro­duce Mar­ket. At the entrance, a dunkin donuts serves weary truck­ers who’ve just dri­ven through the night, as does the King Arthur Strip Club. A ven­dor on the side­walk sells t-shirts that read “Fuck A-Rod.”

I pic­tured, at the least, a mar­ket­place; a cor­ri­dor of ven­dors dis­play­ing their pro­duce and restau­ra­teurs brows­ing for the week’s sup­ply. What I found instead were card­board boxes, stacked to the ceil­ing, a high­way of fork­lifts and unmarked semi-trucks. We stayed mostly out­side, search­ing for empty boxes and var­i­ous farm sup­plies. Walk­ing through a potato house, every man looked up as a I passed. “They don’t see many women around here,” Kevin said to me. In the ware­house, men dumped pota­toes from hun­dred pound bags, sorted out the rot­ten, and re-packed them into smaller boxes, so Idaho pota­toes co-mingled with Mexico-grown pota­toes, bound for some New Eng­land gro­cery store. Out­side, pota­toes lit­tered the asphalt, their long jour­neys end­ing in rejection.

I am for­get­ful of scale. But on a morn­ing where I awoke before the sun and trekked into a city of tan­gled streets, I stood between boxes, between trucks, between ware­houses, sup­pos­edly each filled with pro­duce, and was reminded that I am tiny.

Come hang out or whatever.

…in bed?

DIY. Punk. What­ever. DIT. Open source. I have been semi-successful in mov­ing off of shared host­ing to VPS host­ing with Slice­host. I hope you don’t get the impres­sion that this was easy and I could setup a server when­ever with my eyes closed. I put some work into it. And that is why I’m writ­ing this. This post is com­ing to you from Ubuntu 9.10, Apache 2.2.12, MySQL 5.1.37, and PHP 5.2.10. All of which I installed with apt-get. I chose Ubuntu because I had a lit­tle expe­ri­ence with it already, and because since it is pretty pop­u­lar that means a lot of peo­ple are work­ing on it.

I chose to do this project because I thought it impor­tant to know more intri­cately how these kinds of things work. I had a pretty good under­stand­ing of the basics, but I wanted to delve deeper. Opti­mize. It was an art project for me. Roll your own. Also, I’m not going to lie, there was a mon­e­tary aspect to this as well. The price is the same as my old server, but the new server is much more well endowed.

Let’s talk about process. To setup the server, I fol­lowed this tuto­r­ial from the Slice­host wiki. I did some things dif­fer­ently because this tuto­r­ial is a lit­tle out­dated. For exam­ple, they instruct you to build Apache from source, but I so much more eas­ily installed the Ubuntu pack­age. Also, this tuto­r­ial doesn’t really talk about set­ting up Vir­tu­al­Hosts in Apache, which is nec­es­sary for adding domains. Here are my steps for doing this in Ubuntu.

1. cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

2. sudo cp default yourdomain.com

3. sudo nano yourdomain.com

4. Add the line ServerName yourdomain.com and change the DocumentRoot and Directory to where your site resides on your server (i.e. /var/www or your home folder)
5. Ctrl-o to save your changes, then ctrl-x to exit.
6. Run sudo a2ensite yourdomain.com to add your domain to sites-enabled
7. Then reload Apache with sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

This now means more of the respon­si­bil­ity for how things work is in my hands. No more rely­ing on oth­ers. Tak­ing care on my stuff.

Cook­ies. So what?