Cathy

Afternoon visitor

Seeing a skunk is not that rare, though I’ve seen more bears. I think this one, that Bonnie spotted wandering around the driveway and yard, was the same we saw while walking a few weeks ago about a mile from the house.

On that day Bonnie got pretty close, but fortunately came when I called her. Another dog wandering the neighborhood was not so lucky. It was interesting to watch. The skunk did not spray right away. The dog, a puppy, taunted it for about a minute before the skunk got fed up with the game.

If I was braver I probably could’ve gotten better photos. I hope it doesn’t take up residence under the deck. I guess I’ll pick up some moth balls next time I’m in town.

Mahalia Jackson

When you hear the voice, you know the woman.

I recognized the voice as soon as the NPR piece began. My sister and I must have been around 7 and 8 years old … 1972-ish. Soon after the fancy new stereo with turntable and 8-track was set up, my dad brought home our first 8-track; Mahalia Jackson.

Mahalia Jackson: Voice Of The Civil Rights Movement

Very little room to work

Obama’s conference at the House Republican Retreat today.

Video
Transcript

A few excerpts:

“Although that’s one of the points that I made earlier. I mean, we’ve got to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes, because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together, because our constituents start believing us. They don’t know sometimes this is just politics what you guys — or folks on my side do sometimes.

“So just a tone of civility instead of slash and burn would be helpful. The problem we have sometimes is a media that responds only to slash-and-burn-style politics. …

“… I’ve just got to take this last question as an example of how it’s very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we’re going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign.

“That’s why I say if we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can’t start off by figuring out, A, who’s to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side. And unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now. …

“And so the question is, at what point can we have a serious conversation about Medicare and its long-term liability, or a serious question about — a serious conversation about Social Security, or a serious conversation about budget and debt in which we’re not simply trying to position ourselves politically. That’s what I’m committed to doing. We won’t agree all the time in getting it done, but I’m committed to doing it.”

His speech and comments reminded me of Stephen Colbert’s interview with Tom Brokaw a few weeks ago in which Brokaw said, “We can’t get through these profound challenges…if everything becomes a food fight.”

Good luck to Obama in convincing Congress to govern instead of spending their time in office planning their next campaign. It will probably only happen if their constituents demand it, and that is unlikely when so many of those constituents are forming their opinions based on polarized and polarizing media.

MAMP and PEAR

I finally added some PEAR packages to my MAMP Pro installation. Theoretically you should be able to use the PEAR installer that comes with MAMP. I’ve used the PEAR installer on other servers, but couldn’t get it to work on the local development environment on my Mac. I’ve found a few posts from MAMP users who recommend using the installer, but if any of those users got it to work on their own systems, they didn’t share the details of how they did it.

Success came by following a manual process similar to that copied from the Neo Geek article below, Setting up MAMP, PEAR, and Headress:

PEAR Installation

After locating the framework you want on pear.php.net, download the latest version (or the version you need for testing) from the "Download" tab on that framework's main page.
Unzip the downloaded file.
Open the folder that was extracted to find another similarly named folder and a file named package.xml.
Copy just the folder to Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/. (I copied just the contents of that folder to the HTML folder in my example below.)

Notes on Step 4: 1) If you are using MAMP Pro, you still install your pear packages in the MAMP path shown. 2) There is a PEAR folder in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ PEAR packages you add manually go in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ not in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/PEAR/

I didn’t want to change include statements in the scripts I was testing. Instead I created a folder in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ for the top level package name, HTML in this case, and copied the files in the extracted package folder into the HTML folder. So for HTML_Common there is a file named Common.php in my Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/HTML/ folder. If this path structure doesn’t work for you, refer to the error messages PHP is generating to help you figure out where to locate packages.