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.

While walking with Rebecca earlier today, I began thinking about how online art should be funded. Only some models of funding the material arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) can effectively translate to work that exists online. Websites can’t really be sold to patrons in the way a painting can; there is no value added in owning the domain name, and limiting access to the domain defeats the point of it being online. Grants for the creation of new work can obviously be applied to work that exists online. Corporate sponsorship is another option, although I find it generally unfit for funding personal work (since you have to promote the company’s agenda). What struck me as the most obvious and probably far-fetched method of funding online art is by designating it as public art.

Online art is inherently public art. It exists on the internet, that virtual space is where many people spend the majority of their time (Dangerous words in there; this ain’t journalism). Just as we beautify the public spaces we walk past on our way to work, we should beautify the virtual space that we visit in between trips to productive/useful web sites and applications. It’s not that we always notice the park or sculpture on our way to the office, but that we have the option to stop and appreciate it.

The obvious challenge in all of this is knowing who should fund public works in a space so public it operates largely without regulation. Internet service providers could fund unique works. 2% of their expenses could go enhancing the quality of the content they provide access to. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that AT&T or Comcast actually cares about the things they’re bringing in to your home (not in an anti-net-neutrality way)? Maybe cities should promote the online work of their residents. Physical-world tie-ins bind the content of the online works to a specific place, making the work more meaningful when you visit the city. I would be happier to run across more engaging personal content online that encourages me to visit a new city than to see a Mark Di Suvero sculpture when I get there. Or perhaps an independent entity should be formed, a branch of the NEA (miserably underfunded as it is) or UNESCO.

Yeah, making the work is not about money. However, if making artwork for the internet (or anywhere) began to at least fund itself, it would make thinking about money less critical. Right now, everything is decidedly about indirect revenue streams. I have a day-job making commercial stuff for the internet as a result of spending my free time making my own work. The money I make allows me to pay to keep my personal sites up. Just imagine the quality of work people could produce if they didn’t need to hold down a day-job.