From Pine View Farm

Why This Blog?0

2014-01-15: Every time I think I’ve lost the energy, Republicans do something new to fuel my outrage. Outrage keeps this blog alive.

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Two reasons, I reckon:

I was inspired by Steve Griffin, who has since taken down his site, who told me how he was running his website out of his home, using Linux and WordPress.

I already had a Linux box–I set it up with a long term goal of using it as a file server, but mostly just for fun.

I had already had a website on AOL for almost 10 years; one of the things keeping me from severing my connection with AOL was the labor of moving the website. Other than that, I had pretty much stopped using AOL for anything other than an email address and the AP wire. What I learned from Steve pushed me to bring my website home (and then cancel AOL–that took a month of changing email addresses and notifying friends and stuff like that there; it was like moving out of a house I had lived in for a long time).

And then add this blog, following Steve’s lead, using WordPress. Its feature set was the most attractive of all the software packages I looked at.

So reason one is, I enjoy making things work on computers.

Reason two is this: My mother used to tell me that I didn’t start talking until I was almost three. In fact, my parents were worried enough to take me to the doctor. He counseled patience. I eventually started. And my mother told me it seemed then like I would never stop.

I am quite willing to talk away, even if no one’s listening.

And I will talk about almost anything, but I am especially interested in history, sociology, and the weird quirks of day-to-day human behavior.

Update, 2013-01-12:

This website is now hosted on a commercial hosting service which has served me well.

This website runs on

XAMPP for Linux 1.6.8z, which includes

MySQL 5.0.67, PHP 5.2.6, Apache 2.2.9, and PERL 5.10.0.

WordPress 2.6.2

Slackware Linux 12.1

A secondhand Dell Dimension 4700 with a Pentium IV 3.9 gHz computer with 3.3 GB RAM, an SATA harddrive that’s contains two partitions, one for use and one for backup storage, an internal CD-ROM drive and an internal CD/DVD-RW drive.

This is the third server that has run this site.

For the geekier readers, this website first ran on

An IBM PC 300 (Pentium 300 MGh) PC.

Slackware Linux 10.0

Apache 2.0 Webserver

PHP 4.3

MySQL 4.1

WordPress 1.5

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