Yesterday I moved this domain over to Slicehost.

Ian first told me about Slicehost when we were both looking to move away from Dreamhost last November. Initially, we both intended to find another shared host, but that proved far too difficult — it seems most hosting companies have something against shared hosting with decent limits and ssh access (that last part is the kicker).

I signed up with Slicehost at the end of last year and tinkered around with it for a month or so, experimenting with setting up the server in different ways. Eventually, I found an Ubuntu-Nginx-PHP-MySQL-Postfix-Dovecot setup that I enjoyed, and one which I was comfortable administering. In the beginning of the year, I moved a couple of my domains over to the Slice. It’s been a great experience. I’m not sure why it took me 6 months to finally move this domain — my primary one — over. Running a VPS is deceivingly simple* and well worth the effort. If you’re currently running on a shared host and have some basic competency in a UNIX environment, I’d recommend giving it a shot.

In a bit I’ll post a series of guides, compiled from my notes, on how I setup the server.

* It’s deceivingly simple if you’re not running a full mail server with virtual users running around everywhere. That part was a pain. Hence, the move to Google.

Last week I outsourced my email to Google Apps.

For years, my paranoia has prevented me from moving my mail. I never liked the idea of Google parsing through each message for keywords to generate ads. In fact, I usually don’t even allow Google to cookie me. But now most of my regular email contacts have started using GPG. Enough of my mail is now encrypted that I’m comfortable with Google.

I haven’t decided yet if I prefer the Gmail interface or Thunderbird. In the web interface, I use FireGPG for signing and d/encrypting, which of courses places signatures inline. Since I’m jumping back and forth between that and Thunderbird/Enigmail, in order to maintain some measure of consistency, I’ve told Enigmail to sign inline instead of using PGP/Mime. It is a bit annoying, and will probably frighten the sheeple, but that’s the way it is for now.

So, please encrypt all email. And if you don’t, be aware that Google is reading it.

Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
… [T]he mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost on our thoughts.
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

Last March, I used part of my REI dividend on a pair of Sole Ed Viesturs Ultra Cushion footbeds. Prior to this, I’d been using Green Superfeet in my Lowa Renegade boots.

Read more…

I’ve been wet shaving now for 6 months. Earlier today, I decided to clean my badger hair brush.

The brush is soaked with soap and water during every use, and there doesn’t seem to much of a consensus online whether that is enough or if a dedicated cleaning is warranted. For those who say the badger hair brush should be occasionally cleaned, the period I most often see is 2-3 months. Performing my first cleaning at 6 months, then, is a little off.

To clean, I mixed a solution of baking soda and lukewarm water into a thick paste. Covering the brush with the paste, I attempted to rub it into the hairs as best I could. This, I let sit for about 3 hours. Then, I thoroughly rinsed the brush with water, drying it as usual.

No animal funk is radiating from the bristles (I actually liked the smell of it new) and the hairs appear to the eye as both fluffy and dark. During the rinse, the brush held as much water as usual.

It seems to have worked.

3-6-08 Update:

I hadn’t really noticed anything to warrant the cleaning — no caked soap, and the brush seemed to hold as much water as ever. Was I ever wrong. During my first use after cleaning, there was a very noticeable difference. The brush held much more water, providing for a better lather. It’s one of those things where the degradation is so slow and gradual that you don’t notice it.

The BBC reports that “Gordon Brown has called for the age that teenagers are prosecuted for carrying knives to be lowered from 18 to 16 in the wake of a rise in attacks.”

I don’t understand. This implies that the way the laws are currently setup, a person can legally carry a knife till they turn 18. At 18 and onward, carrying a knife is illegal. That makes no sense. Shouldn’t it be the inverse?

The whole notion of outlawing knifes seems absurd. It is our species’ first substantial technology. For better or worse, it may be argued, the knife set us down this evolutionary and cultural path. And today, the knife remains a valid tool. It is something that I use regularly in my daily life and is critical to my survival should this hyperreal, simulacra of an existence fall apart.

When I first started carrying a knife, I researched the laws in my area regarding them. The laws, collectively, are so varied and convoluted as to make them irrelevant. Today, I simply ignore them.

Why is that I can earn a license to carry a concealed gun, but cannot, under any circumstance, carry a concealed blade of a certain type or length? I would much rather someone with the intent to kill me be armed with a knife than a gun.

These violent deaths that the PM is attempting to prevent will not be mitigated by prosecuting the youth for carrying a tool. A pre-meditated murderer will not curtail his action because knives are frowned upon. A murder committed without prior thought may be executed with a pen. Or hands! Does Gordon plan to outlaw these? Perhaps his intent is to turn the UK into a population of sedate amputees?

Better they should focus on the cause of this high rate of youth crime. Perhaps it has something to do with the massive surveillance, the elimination of privacy?

Wajahat Ali has a well worth reading review of “Sex and the City” Through a Man’s Eyes.

I’ve never seen the show, but always assumed it was simply about sex (and maybe a city). Apparently, I was wrong. The tv show and film, according to this review, are at best a regurgitation of every harmful female stereotype, and at worse nothing but an advertisement for mass-consumerism. I can’t understand the appeal in shoes, bags, and dresses individually worth thousands of dollars, much less the appeal in watching fantasized characters discuss and prance about in said items for any extended period of time.

Despite their professed independence, pride, ego-centricism and hedonism, the women were still unhappy and discontent without the acknowledgment of some form of a fulfilling male relationship.

It’s as if feminism never happened! As a male who hasn’t even seen the film, I’m insulted by its portrayal of women. Where does its audience come from, I wonder?

In Femininity and the Electric Car, Virginia Scharff discusses the automobile industry at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. She analyzes the marketing of electric cars to women and gasoline cars to men as a form of control of female mobility. The electric cars of the day had top speeds of around 25 mph. They had trouble making it up hills and were limited to a circumscribed range of 60-80 miles. This was seen as conforming to the “sphere” of women’s activities. In the end, this absurd notion lost to the reality of gender. In my mind, high heels — repulsive manifestations of some primordial Evil — are but another instance of patriarchal oppression of women’s mobility. Yet, unlike the electric car, women seem to accept them.

Sex and the City, according to the reviewer, has its women strutting proudly down the street in their torture devices as if proclaiming to everyone in the vicinity “I am an oppressed, ignorant creature! Use my body for what pleasures you will, but please don’t allow my genes to reproduce. Think of the children!”