Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood… Afresh dawns the morn of life…
- Sir Richard F. Burton, Journal entry, December 2, 1856
Departure
Tomorrow, I will be in Spain. I fly into Madrid, from where I’ll make a quick jump over the border to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France. There, my pilgrimage begins. I walk west, over the Pyrenees, and reenter Spain. After my feet carry me roughly 500 miles from the Basque lands to Galicia, the journey culminates at Finis Terrae, the End of the World.
As usual, I don’t speak the language and am embarking alone with limited funds. Internet access will be sparse, if it all.
Catch you on the other side.
“The road is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divinity.”
- Mircea Eliada
Hyper-Innocence
The Christian story of Genesis is a creation myth central to the Western construction of the self. It involves, as its central theme, a fall from grace. As Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, they gain knowledge. The first flaw they perceive is their own body – the shame of nakedness. The couple is then booted from paradise, their imperfect bodies more suited to imperfect surroundings. In the East, Hinduism sets as a central doctrine a strict caste system of cleanliness, reminding followers daily of their imperfection in relation to each other and the gods. Today, technologists such as the Venturists seek to improve the human condition by achieving immortality. Whether through a fall from grace, our very creation, or simply in our own mortality, humans perceive themselves as imperfect. As a life progresses, these flaws build in both number and import. Children, with innocence not yet lost to the count of years, are seen as closer to perfection. But adults: both in the flesh and in the mind, we are flawed. We seek to perfect these flaws by augmenting our reality. It is a yearning for innocence, not as naivete or lack of guilt, but as a kind of amoral, infinite perfection: the innocence of a god. This quest for innocence is achieved through perfected representations of our selves and through a perfection of our surroundings. At its highest level, our augmented reality reaches a state of hyperreality: the nonreal – its borders blurred – inside the unbounded real.
Beautifying
Another redesign! This one only 6 months from the last. How remarkable is that?
An Ubuntu VPS on Slicehost: Wordpress
As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part Four of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
I prefer to install Wordpress via Subversion, which makes updating easier. We’ll have to install Subversion on the server first:
$ sudo aptitude install subversion
An Ubuntu VPS on Slicehost: Mail
As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part Three of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Four.
Last week I moved this domain’s email to Google Apps. Slicehost has a guide to creating MX records for Google Apps. I have a couple other domains with Google Apps, along with a couple domains hosted locally with addresses that simply forward to my primary, Google hosted, email. I also need to send mail from the server. To accomplish all of this, I use Postfix.
An Ubuntu VPS on Slicehost: Web Server
As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part Two of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part One, Part Three, Part Four.
Now we’ve got a properly configured, but idle, box. Let’s do something with it.
Nginx is a small, lightweight web server that’s all the rage on some small corners of the Net. Apache is extremely overkill for a small personal web server like this and, since we’re limited to 256MB of RAM on this VPS, it quickly becomes a resource hog. Lighttpd is another small, lightweight web server, but I’m a fan of Nginx. Try it out.
An Ubuntu VPS on Slicehost: Basic Setup
As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part One of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.
Slicehost has an excellent article repository, containing guides on a number of subjects. After building a fresh Slice, you should first follow Part 1 and Part 2 of Slicehost’s basic setup articles.
I use slightly different coloring in my bash prompt, so, rather than what Slicehost suggests in their article, I add the following to ~/.bashrc: