I spent last weekend in Wonder Valley in the Mojave as part of the Mapping the Desert symposium organized by UCIRA and the Sweeney Art Gallery. While there, I had the great opportunity to meet with artists from other UC campuses, and to encounter a number of aspects of the desert. These encounters led to early thoughts on themes the desert elicited from me during my stay: salt, the development of journey as a shareable artwork, and the not-so-serious Zombie Christians or doing what you ought not.

Salt

The first thing that struck me in the desert was the salt-tree in front of our campsite. The tree—a tamarisk—had large crystals of salt coating its leaves.

Salt manifests wherever there is water in the desert, and plants growing in oases need to be halophilic to survive. I am interested in systems where halophiles could be operating benevolently on behalf of less salt-tolerant species, and in the exoskeleton that the halophiles produce as they grow under mineral-rich conditions.

Journey

Scrambling from rock to rock in Joshua Tree National Monument cemented the desire Pete Hawkes and I had to make the journey integral to some of our work. Michael Kimmelman’s essay on The Art of the Pilgrimage brings up how travel to see a work shapes your perception of the work; I think the travel itself could become the work. What better way to share a steep mountain climb than to lead someone on it? Naturally, we would like to have some additional payoff, some tangible work that people who engage in the travel ultimately contribute to. We’re working out the details.

Zombichrucians

Let’s not forget the crazies who live out in the desert, or the artists who impersonate crazies in the desert. Christmas-tree-like light-up crosses, keep-out signs, and ringing church bells that don’t belong to you. The bells peal loudly in the desert, trailing off into the open space, never bouncing back. Someone else hears and we all scramble for the car. It doesn’t start for a minute that feels much longer, when we finally drive off into the space, becoming a glowing light on the horizon.

More images from the weekend are available on flickr.

I just started my graduate education in UCLA’s Design|Media Arts program. I’ve been doing lots of things to prepare, including moving from San Francisco. When I first got here, I tried to get a feel for the city around me. In addition to hiking and seeing the friends in the city, I have been visiting locations that are part of Peter Lunenfeld’s Summer 16. The list includes four places ‘unique to southern California.’ Here are some photos.

Schindler House

It took about 45 minutes to bike out to the Schindler House. Along the way, I passed the Modern Institute for Plastic Surgery and Anti-Aging, where I spent a few moments getting my bearings.

Bradbury Building

I rode the bus downtown with Becky. After a quick stop in the lobby of the Bradbury Building—which was packed with people sketching—we grabbed a kimchi taco at Grand Central Market and toured some more of downtown LA’s historic architecture.

Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale

Becky drove us to Glendale, which would otherwise have been incredibly difficult to reach (or get around). The entire cemetery is crossed by wide roads that directly abut the burial plots. Artwork is presented in a bizarrely theatrical fashion. The stained-glass reproduction of The Last Supper stood out, with it’s literal unveiling to a booming narrator and dramatic music.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

The museum is a collection of strangely presented, delightful artifacts. You should go.

I’ve been using git for a few months now, and have found it faster and more enjoyable to deal with than svn. Sure, there’s the headache with remembering git revert is not like svn revert (use reset to go back to a point in time, revert to undo a commit—more like English, actually).

In addition to git, there’s github, a good place to host your public code repositories. I’m keeping an AS3 Konami Code project and my AS3 code library on github. You can clone them to your machine or fork them to create your own project on github.

After three years away, I made it back to China to see a friend and do some exploring in Sichuan. The trip was eventful, logistics were a bit stressful due to my limited Chinese, and I’m not sure how to write about it. For now, I offer a pictorial overview of our itinerary, with some captions:

Shanghai

Our first stop in China was Shanghai. Lyn picked us up from the airport at night and drove us through the steel-sided canyons around highways under construction into the city. We spent about five days in the city before

Bicycles near Moganshan Lu art district

Huangpu River, from the Bund

View from the World Financial Center

Bei Si Ta, Suzhou

Chengdu

Chengdu served as a home-base for travel in Sichuan. Since we had a short schedule, we weren’t able to travel too far, but we went to some pretty awesome locations. For potential travelers, I recommend staying in a hotel near the “Tourism Distribution Center.”

Closed Temple, Leshan

Leshan Dafo

Qingcheng Shang, the birthplace of Taoism

Sanxingdui Museum

Return to Shanghai

We made it back to Shanghai in time to celebrate Lyn’s birthday after a quick stop in Anhui province to climb Huangshan.

Daytrip to Huangshan

Lyn’s Photo Studio

You can see more/larger photos of the trip in my China collection (or Becky’s photostream, if she gets around to it) on flickr.

The Problem

This weekend, I discovered my localhost wasn’t working when I wanted to do a bit of local website development. I got a pretty unfriendly ‘Failed to Connect’ message when trying to hit http://localhost/, http://127.0.0.1/ or the IP my mac was telling me my Sites/ were at in System Preferences. Bummer. I tried pinging my server from Terminal, which gave false-positives that the server was running (I should have used $ ping localhost:80, which properly showed the host was down). $ apachectl configtest returned that my syntax was OK. sudo apachectl start told me the server was already running. Everything looked right, it just wasn’t showing up in the browser.

Searching around the internet, I found that lots of other people had different problems with WebSharing (trying to use .htaccess files, permissions errors preventing pages from showing, and enabling php), but no one was experiencing quite the same thing as me.

The Solution

This ended up being really easy. Chandler McWilliams, via email, suggested I check my apache error logs. They should live in /var/logs/apache2/error_log. My machine lacked even an apache2/ directory. So I made one: $ sudo mkdir apache2, and all of a sudden, it was populated with a new error_log (among other things), and my localhost was working again.

Solutions to other problems:

If you want to enable .htaccess files on your Mac Apache setup: in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf: AllowOverride All in /private/etc/apache2/users/yourname.conf: AllowOverride AuthConfig For extended instructions, check out this blogpost on enabling .htaccess files.

To enable php5 on your Mac, you’ll need to load the module in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf: Uncomment LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so Tyler also made a note of this.

If you get a 500 error on stuff on your Mac server, try changing the permissions from the command line. chmod -R 744 problemdirectory/ should do it.

EDIT: I changed the paths to the locations where you need to get things set up. They seem to be in a different location under 10.5.