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.

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

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.

In a twist of fate, nothing really important. Different lifetimes. Oakhurst. San Diego. Los Angeles. Jet-setting. Whatever.

Another fact I need to disclose is the method which I consume music. Although I honestly try to change it up, I usually enjoy listen to one album or song at a time over and over. Most recently that has been the album Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell, but in the past has been Blackblack, The Brothers Bloom soundtrack, or these songs.

Sometimes these facts unexpectedly coexist. When a book series and an album intersect I cannot divorce the two. They are forever deeply connected in my mind. So much so that I feel like crying when I hear a song. It reminds me so vividly of the story that has a permanent place in my heart. It is the longing for that moment. The happy memory of your weekend on a Sunday afternoon. Or the lull after the high of summer.

The first time this happened to me was when I read the first four Harry Potter books during high school at our apartment in Clairemont, San Diego. I was really into dub at the time especially Scratch Attack by Lee Perry. I listened to that collection on repeat for the entire duration of the first four. Whenever I hear the song Scratch Walking I think of Harry saving Ginny in the Chamber of Secrets, of the despair of fighting against so much darkness, of having family in your close friends, of the mysteries of Hogwarts.

I later felt compelled to turn Scratch Attack on while I was reading the rest because I could not separate Harry Potter from Lee Perry.

This recently happened to me again. I saw the movie The Brothers Bloom and became obsessed with its soundtrack. I started listening to it on repeat all day. I also was persuaded to see the first Twilight movie. I can’t explain why, but seeing the movie gave me the want to read all of the Twilight books. And now, forever connected to the Department of Safety, the Northwest, the town of Forks, the beach at La Push, the Cullens’ House, missing Edward, the Volturi… is Penelope’s Theme by Nathan Johnson. A kind of “Bella’s Lullaby” if you will.

I had an Engish teacher in Jr. High who would play different music for each book we were reading to help us to remember it for the tests. Although that was more deliberate, the conclusion is similar. I believe the connection between the melody and the narrative enables me to remember the stories so much more intensely. It is an inadvertent psychological experiment. Have you had any experience like this? Have you had an unbreakable connection between certain melodies and narratives?

Drop City is a legendary microcommunity, it is a model, and, ultimately, an abandoned project. Drop City fascinates me and endearingly it reminds me of where I live. It started in a frenzy, it attracted famous artists and musicians, but after its height slowly fell into decay. After five years, it was abandoned, but many of the original structures remain today.

Fueled by thoughts of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, Drop City flourished. Domes were built for domestic purposes – a kitchen, living quarters, a theater – out of recycled products (for which they won the Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion award). Ideas thrived – reuse and solar power, drone and early electronic music, creative community. Many “happenings” happened.

Located in Southern Colorado, early in its history this “intentional community” was a close relation to utopia. Anyone and everyone was welcome, forever free and open. It was naive, but worked for a time.

“How do they survive?”
“They just do. Go live there a while and see for yourself.”
“Anybody can just go live there?”
“Anybody. Drop City is Utopia.”
“Don’t believe it,” Frinki said.
“I don’t believe it. Nobody believes in Utopia any more. At least not in Colorado.”
“Okay, it isn’t Utopia,” Kugo said. “Utopia’s got rules. Drop City doesn’t have any rules.”
“Up is down and down is up. Isn’t that right, Kugo? And the tooth fairy leaves Thai sticks under everybody’s pillow.”

—Memories of DROP CITY

But with notoriety comes problems. The founders, the original artists, eventually got burned out and moved onto other projects. People eventually began coming to Drop City not to contribute, but to take away, looking for fulfillment. The land was sold, most of the domes dismantled, but the model continues.

These structures – community, openness, cultural cannibalism – persist into our present. Can projects or ideas persist beyond its founding generation? Should they?

I think about it, more often than you would think. Not for revenge or with a sense of indignity, but with curiosity and discontentment. Did they know or care? Would it still make a profit? Did they think they would be able to work it out somehow?

When I lived in San Diego with my parents I had a problem holding onto my car stereos. In fact, I had three stolen car stereos during a short time. It was rough. I looked into different expensive products including an alarm system for my car that would notify a keychain dongle if anything was amiss.

I started taking the faceplate into my room at night. It seemed like this would be the proper deterrent to further theft. I thought that if someone were thinking about taking my car stereo, they would look inside and see the faceplate missing and move on. Or they would still break in and look in the usual spots that they knew their victims would put the faceplate – in the glove compartment, under the seat, in the center console – and not finding it they would leave the stereo and move on to the next car.

But this did not work. One night, despite my logic that a faceplateless car stereo would be worthless, someone stole my car stereo. I think about this a lot. Did they go through all the effort of taking the stereo out and then realize that the faceplate wasn’t even in the car? Were they pissed? But why did they take it still?

I feel bad about this. I’m not even upset about the stereo being stolen anymore. I’m upset that forever the faceplate and stereo will be separated. It depresses me. I held onto the faceplate for a long time. It seemed too valuable of an object to just throw away. I wanted to somehow connect them again. No questions asked. It wasn’t even necessary for it to be returned to me.

Eventually, I think the faceplate was thrown out or was taken to a thrift store to sit and be useless. I’m not even sure. But I hope that wherever the worthless faceplate and the empty stereo went that they were destroyed and don’t continue to exist.

It was right after these. I’m told they were good for the city. Those stars are indicative of the eras passing and forming.

It was before these stars came around, but it feels like they were present and helped.

I’m sure that there are more and that these are only the beginning.

The 21st century: mankind has colonized the last unexplored region on Earth; the ocean. As captain of the seaQuest and its crew, we are its guardians. For beneath the surface lies the future.