Blag-o-matic

Hate Mail

mattstocum — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:51:45 +0000

Dear Mailman,

You do realize that your job requires you to deliver mail every day, right? I want my NetFlix.

Love,
Matt

Tokyoflash Rogue Watch

mattstocum — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:56:49 +0000

I am in love with this watch

Jane you ignorant slut…

mattstocum — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:38:58 +0000

Now for a weekend update.

Friday, hung out with J and T after work. It was good to see T after so freaking long, even if she completely stole my “have you lost weight?” line before I got a chance to throw it out. After that went climbing with Mat, Kaori, Mike, and Tina, followed by an hour long quest for sushi that failed. It’s apparently quite hard to find sushi in Philly after 10pm, sad.

Saturday, did about 16 miles on the bike, getting better. Still have a long way to go if I want to hit 30 by the end of the summer. I should try biking to Valley Forge soon, maybe next weekend. Saturday night I finally got around to watching Dr. Strangelove, it’s pretty odd. Also watched Anchorman for the kabillionth time, still funny.

Other than that it’s been a pretty laid back weekend.

And now for something completely different…

mattstocum — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:00:41 +0000

I saw Tropic Thunder with Megan and Jozette last night. I’m not sure what the fuck the movie was about, but I had a blast. Looking forward to getting tanked with Tina, et al. on Friday.

And on the 8th day, He created Death…

mattstocum — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:55:40 +0000

loss is always hard. it’s hard on everyone involved. in times of loss it’s easy to understand why people believe in religion, why they want to believe that they’ll see their loved one again. the notion that we’ll all be reunited in another world has a wonderful appeal. in times of loss being an atheist quite frankly sucks. i lost a friend recently. sadly, he wasn’t my first friend to die. this was years ago, when i was in sixth grade. my friend stepped out from between two parked cars and was hit by a sixteen year old. the school called everyone’s parents that night. i don’t really remember the conversation between my mother and me at all. what stands out most clearly is walking to school the next morning thinking it had all been a horrible dream. i knew i would get to school and see him waiting outside, just as he had been every other morning. when i did get to school he was missing, and with him the normal morning laughter. i remember the viewing, seeing him in the casket, not quite looking real. i remember feeling such sympathy for the kid who was driving the car. no one blamed him, the accident was, quite frankly, my friend’s fault. but how the fuck do you live with that? there was a picture of him, sitting on the curb, with his head in his hands. at least there was closure. i’m not sure anyone is ever going to know the events that lead to vinnie’s death. i can only imagine the pain his family felt. i could barely say a word to his parents at the viewing. what can you say? what can prepare you for that? that’s a pain i would wish on no one. i was always aware of vinnie in high school, but for a long time we never really spoke. our senior year we both were on the same kairos. neither one of us really knew any one else so we spent most of the retreat together. it happened during the columbine shootings, i don’t think that’s relevant to anything, it’s just a detail that sticks out in my mind. ”go ahead, make a wish”. it’s a line from the wish master, and for some reason i never understood, vinnie kept saying it to this other kid. i think it may have been all he said to him the entire trip. all i know is he cracked me the fuck up. i’m not even sure what the point of all of this is. i’ve just had a lot of these thoughts bouncing around in my head since i got that phone call. ”have you heard?” in line for the viewing i heard someone remark that he wished he had brought a xanax with him. i can’t imagine why. i wouldn’t have traded that pain for anything. i owed him that. i think that’s the best consolation an atheist can have. the pain is ours now, his pain is ended. he doesn’t have to miss us, we can take up that burden for him, and take it up proudly.

go ahead, make a wish…

Just remember

mattstocum — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:30:33 +0000

i’m Your friend.

&

mattstocum — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:44:17 +0000

Writing ampersands is really fun.

Thanks

mattstocum — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:49:57 +0000

J, you really helped.

Thank you.

“Go ahead…Make a wish…”

mattstocum — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:55:16 +0000

Tourist death being investigated

You’ll be missed.

I’ll write something fitting later, right now I can’t.

Installing Passenger without gcc

mattstocum — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:06:43 +0000

I ran into a minor issue today while trying to install Phusion Passenger on a web server I’m setting up; I don’t install development tools on my web servers. I have a whole mess of reasons for why I do this, the primary being that it makes keeping several different servers (ie, production and development) in sync a lot easier.

The problem with Passenger is that the gem assumes you have g++ installed so it can build the apache extension. Fortunately, for me, I keep a separate server that is identically configured, except it has build tools installed. My solution was to install passenger on that box, configure it, and then copy the directory over to my production box.

Short version:

gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module
cd /usr && tar -zvcf ~/passenger-2.0.2.tgz `find ./ -name “*passenger*” -print`

Now just copy ~/passenger-2.0.2.tgz over to the production box and untar it into /usr. Normal Passenger setup applies from this point forward.