Liv's First Poem

Sugar and water
for the rainbow cookies.
And we need a grape with it.
And I think we need a piece of apple with it.
And then we cook it.
But first we need sugar,
before Mommy comes home.

You may find that installing a functional Drupal codebase in your local development environment isn't a straight forward process, especially if you're accustomed to designing directory based sites and uploading your scripts to your server in order to test them.

To start building sites with Drupal your local development environment is going to require Apache, PHP, and MySQL. This means that you're going to have to download and install Apache, PHP and MySQL on your own machine: a pretty daunting task for straight-up designers and weekend technophiles.

Of course, you can always avoid the hoops and headaches of this process by simply installing Wampserver. Wampserver is pre-packaged Windows web development environment that allows you to get Apache, MySQL, and PHP up and running in one installation process.

The following tutorial, produced by Learn by the Drop, is an invaluable resource to everyone in the process of learning how to install Drupal on a local host and set-up a local development environment. 

When watching the video make sure you set your player resolution to 480P.

In this post the terms directory and folder are interchangeable.

There's a big upside to performing an auto install of your preferred CMS: it's easy. The downside is that you probably won't be able to decide which directory your CMS gets installed in. This is a downside because visitors who land on your site will land on whatever default index page resides in the public_html directory (probably a welcome page put there by the hosting company) and not the index page of your CMS, which more than likely exists in a directory contained one level down within the public_html directory.

If you want your visitors to land on your CMS you need to help get them there. Help exists in the form of an .htaccess file. To set-up an .htaccess file here is what you do:

1. Open your favorite text editor and create a new document. If you don't have a favorite text editor and by some freak chance one didn't come pre-installed on your machine, then check out the list of free text editors at http://sixrevisions.com/tools/12-excellent-free-text-editors-for-coders/
2. Type the following in your new document: DirectoryIndex drupaldirectory/index.php
3. Replace "drupaldirectory" with the name of the directory that you created for Drupal during the installation process. If you forgot what the name of this directory/folder is then take a look at your site directory via your FTP client or CPanel. Look inside the public_html directory for your Drupal directory.
4. Save the file as htaccess.htaccess—the saved file will appear on your machine as htaccess.htaccess.txt—this is OK
5. Upload this file to your server and put it in the public_html directory.
6. Rename the file as .htaccess (just an extension is necessary, no file name is used, remove the .txt)
7. Right click on the file and take a look at its File Permissions. Make sure the numeric value is set to 644.

You’re done.

Hey, look, there are some guys camping out over there. ~ Liv, 1/3/2010

There are a lot of small businesses out there that have established themselves through reputation and by word of mouth. This is probably the most effective way to build a business, but it presents marketing hurdles.

There will come a day when someone will ask you for a business card, or ask you where they can find your website and you'll find yourself embarrassed to hand over your free Vistaprint card or steer them towards your free Comcast website; yet, embarrassing as it might be, you may still be inclined to do nothing about improving your brand image. Why? Because who knows where to start, it's probably expensive, and frankly, between work and family, who has the time to do this stuff?

If this sounds like you: if you would like to begin developing a consistent and professional business persona but don't know where to start, you should consider having a business card professionally designed. All you need are some clear expectations and a couple hours of free time. What you get in return is a small scale, broad spectrum marketing solution that can be applied to all of your future marketing projects from print to the web.

In the least, a business card will iron out the following for you:

• Logo
• Mission Statement
• Color Scheme
• Typography

I was driving a large luxury bus—the kind that you’d expect to see a rock band doing a cross country tour in. Anthony Braxton’s “Composition 40 B” was playing on the radio. I was staring into the massive, driver’s side rear view mirror lost in the desert landscape behind me. The sun was setting and the sky was a kaleidoscope of blue, and red, and orange. In front of me the road was straight and immersed in darkness. The blackness of the coming night seemed to swallow light itself—desert and road were indiscernable. The accelerator was pushed to the floor; the bus was flat out.

I blinked my eyes, and in that instant I was no longer driving: I had become a passenger. There was now a cooler between the driver and passenger seats and the person now sitting behind the wheel was reaching into it. His hand came out with two beers and he handed me one. “What the hell do you want,” Charles Bukowski asked me.

“Where are we going,” I asked.

“You tell me.” A smile crept upon his face; he tilted his head back and took a long pull off of his beer.

We hit the rim of the canyon wall at a buck twenty. No longer encumbered by the friction of the road the engine roared with liberation. I looked at Buk in terror. He was laughing with excitement. It was the laughter of a child taking his first ride on a rollercoaster. His grin was big and toothy, and beer dribbled out of the corner of his mouth.

He celebrated the plunge by throwing his arms in the air, but the bottle he held slipped out of his grasp smashing against the roof above his head showering him with beer, “God damn it,” he yelled. Beer droplets glistened like timy diamonds in his hair and beard, Illuminated by the dashboard lights.

By: Cyclops

It's time for a new TEXT book in our school curriculums. It's time to teach a course on texting. It's the new English. I call it Textish. The kids know that it's time. The educators should watch them, listen to them, and react to them. The academic world has toyed with and pondered changing our system to a phonetic one, but no one it appears, has been able to practically advance the concept of it. Aside from the fact that it is an oxymoronic statement to discuss phonetic spelling, and begin a phonetic word that could be spelled with an "f" with a "ph", no one is listening to the kids.

The phonetic concept is dead, but Textish is real. It's a phenomenon that has spread like wild fire through our younger generation and it is being embraced by many areas of our society at an unprecedented rate. Texting wasn't pre-programmed by our educators, it wasn't sponsored by big government, and it was never formally discussed to be a new standard of communication, BUT IT HAS BECOME ONE.

Now is the time to grab onto this truly phenomenal language simplifying miracle. It is time to come to the reality that the English language as it is currently constituted is passé (imagine how hard it must be trying to teach spelling to kids today). It's time to accept what the advocates of texting have shown us: the English language can easily be converted into short bursts and phonetic sounding words, loaded with abbreviated phrases such as "lol"(laugh out loud). Everyone involved quickly picks up the messages and Textish, not English, is how the new generation is communicating.

Pootie Tang Intro

Pootie Tang, aka, Zen Master Pootie

It’s often the case with me that my first impression of a work of art leaves me with a nagging desire to critique it. In this instance, I was inclined to simply experience the work for what it was, and smile. If this were a landscape I think it would be called, “A Wildflower Dances Amongst the Ruins of Civilization”, but it’s not, so “Cheers”!

“Cheers” is the work of Colleen Pearce. It is currently on Display at Dunia, on Nason Street in Maynard, MA.

Rock and Wood Sculptures by Brian Furze

Photographed by Dan Cadoret