As I’ve noted before Florida’s claim to “The Sunshine State” is spurious at best.  The past couple of weeks has been a roller coaster of mid-70’s to low 20’s that has been anything less then comfortable.  Also quite windy, which I thought I had left behind in the Heartland.  You can tell, however, who is a native Floridian when you have a cold snap like that.  My boss referred to my scarf and coat as “You and your Northerner bullshit.", which I think to all native Oklahomans is probably the funniest thing that has been said. Ever.

The climate appears to righted itself to a comfortable 60’s, and the ‘Arthritis Warning’ has disappeared from the local news for now.  I finally got around to buying a bike pump the other day, and even figured out how to to pump the tire correctly (Bear with me folks, Presta valves can be kinda tricky).  Thus, today was perfect weather for a little bike ride up to the library, to read the NY Times and pick up some tax forms.

Speaking of taxes, anybody notice how everyone in the Democratic party can’t do their flippin’ taxes?  Now, I’m sensitive to this issue, since there was a year that my taxes were a little…late (*ahem*).   And true, the tax system is quite wonky in this country.  I’ve never really understood why there are so many credits, deductions, and general divvying of wealth into separate categories besides the simple fact that it provides loopholes.  Of the Annoying Things Everyone Has To Deal With, it seems like we should have pulled together enough political will in this country to make a simple and fair tax system. And no, I don’t mean THE FairTax plan that was touted in the last election.  While in principle it seems to have some advantages the whole issue of taxing people based on consumption undermines the entire point that the US economy (used to?) spins on.  And also, I understand the European VAT tax (which is essentially what the FairTax folks propose) has a list of exceptions on things such as groceries so that it alleviates some of the burden on the poor.  If we can’t do an income tax system that doesn’t overly burden the bottom 50-75% of wage earners in this country I doubt we would get a fair head tax.  Further, the proposal seems to cost an exorbitant amount of money, with a overly complicated rebates system that would likely be abused similarly to our current systems loopholes.

The point being, I think we could at least take a little bit more care into trying to reform the system.  I’m a big fan of taxing the hell out of people who make bunches of money.  Now, some people will call this socialist, but I think it’s really more of a realist standpoint.  Because realistically, the number of people you’ve crushed and ruined to get to the top of your huge stack of money is proportionately greater then someone whose pile of money is much smaller.  Thus, you are responsible for a greater amount of destruction to the citizens of this country.  So, yes, you should pay for college educations, roads, schools, national defense etc.  Especially national defense, considering how much the wealthy appear to benefit from the Defense Department’s particular brand of services

Interestingly, at the park in front of the library, there was a group of young black men who were espousing some sort of black Judeo-Rastafarianism.  The details were a little hazy, but there were awesome poster boards showing some sort of African geneology of Jewish tribes, as well as some depictions of Barack Obama as satan.  Not sure what that’s about…I took pictures, but my usb cable for my camera appears to be MIA at the moment.  I’d also like to give a shout to Matt Steenson, who has begun his second tour in the desert.  Hopefully Obama can put aside his apparently satanic qualities for the moment and bring him home sooner rather then later

So I’m the proud owner (tenant?) of an old house in the Historic Springfield neighborhood.  The Springfield neighborhood is known for its nice historic homes, urban blight, and proximity to downtown (also known for urban blight).  While this might deter other buyers, I am both an armchair socialist and swayed by the opinions of my girlfriend.  Really, it was mostly the girlfriend.  In Jacksonville, there’s a saying that ‘Springfield is just around the corner…still’.  This is mostly owed to the lack of development in the area since 1950, and preference for other historical neighborhoods such as Riverside, San Marco, and Avondale.  To couch it in OKC terms, it’s like Heritage Hills houses, with the NE OKC neighborhood.  However, there is genuine interest in restoring the neighborhood and making it a decent place to live.  And honestly my experiences thus far reinforce that.

Jacksonville, is a weird city, much like OKC.  It has termendous amounts of sprawl, and deurbanization levels that probably compare with Pittsburgh and Detroit.  In doing a little research I found this to be a good aid in understanding the history of Jacksonville.  It appears like most cities, it fell victim to the infernal machine known as the Automobile, with the crushing weight of racism and segregation thrown on top.  For example, the city borders before consolidation of Jacksonville and Duval County, circa 1932:

With a population of roughly 130,000, Jacksonville was the largest city in Florida at the time.  The peak population of this area was over 200,000 in the 1950 census.  In stark contrast, the current population of this same area is less then 1930, with a 2000 census of 112,753.  After the consolidation of the county and city in 1968 here is a map of the current borders, population 778,879 in 2000.  Take note, the cities of Jax Beach, Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and Baldwin are not incorporated into the city.  Probably makes sense, since it takes a good 30 minutes to get from my neighborhood to the beaches (Baldwin isn’t listed because it’s a terrible place that no one should ever visit).

What are the consequences of the county-city consolidation and the decline of the urban center?

• Homes are cheap, and at least 20 minutes away from Applebee’s (A significant Quality of Life Indicator)
• Jerks in the ‘burbs pay for my safety and infrastructure
• Jerks in the ‘burbs do anything they can to keep money out of the city center

When James Madison wrote about “Spheres of Interests”, I don’t think he meant city governance.  More on Springfield later.

As some of you may already know, I found myself involved in a somewhat consensual relationship with a boat.  I used ’somewhat consensual’ there, because everyone understands sexual innuendo, truly making it the lowest form of wit; also, it seems to aptly describe a situation in which I owned a boat that utterly refused to go into the water.  It’s like going to a harem and ending up hanging curtains and fixing plumbing; it’s not like you can ask for the money back (Or can you? I’m only halfway through this.  I’ll let you know what I find out).

So anyways the boat.  It was a 27ft Bayliner US Yachts, from ‘81 I believe.  It had been blown up in a cove by a tropical storm, but was apparently fine.  It was here that I made a critical misjudgment.  See, the Florida Wildlife Commission had a problem with this boat being all beached up in the woods as such, and was real specific about getting it the hell outta there before they did and sent you the bill.  So, I’ve got this guy telling me:
a) he’s got a boat
b) it needs a little work (But it sails!)
c) it’s free.
d) It’s in the woods, but it can be gotten out

Do you see what I missed?  It’s the part where I ask myself “Why isn’t the boat out already if it’s so easy to get out?" 

Answer: It’s not easy at all.

What followed was an exercise in futility and madness; the fellow who had ‘given’ me the boat was apparently a fine connoisseur of cursed, godforsaken watercraft of all sorts.  I honestly believe on the three attempts to move the boat, more time was spent fixing the boat we were using than getting the other boat out of the woods.

And that’s nothing to say of the locals

So, the boat, with all of the good intentions, was cut like the loss that it was.  It’s a shame really, but it was in no shape to be salvaged by me.  Perhaps it has found itself a better home in fairer seas.

I, however, think it’s still stuck up in that Goddammed cove.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years everyone, I’ll be here all night. Drink specials between 5-8

Okay, so the new B2Evo looks totally different then the old one.  They’ve implemented a new fangled ‘widget’ system, and it’s going to take a little bit to get it back to the way it was

Stupid upgrade

SRSLY GUYS!

Man, I’m terrible with the blogging.  Basically I’ve been working, dealing with boats (more on that later), and other nonsense.  But for now we have a wonderful how-to guide for something that took me FOREVER to work right on my box.  Oracle doesn’t officially support Ubuntu, and there’s quite a bit of half working solutions out there, and virtually none for making sure your mod-php-apache scripts will run correctly.  This will hopefully fix that.

My setup involved a rather plain Intrepid box, VPN into my work to access Oracle databases and SVN, and a local Apache webserver to use the SVN checkout.  I won’t cover VPN, as the new Network Manager for Intrepid makes using pptp VPN a lot easier to setup.  Also this is NOT a guide about how to install oracle on your Ubuntu box.  I don’t have any requirement for that at the moment and there seems to be several good guides out there that will likely apply to Intrepid.

Also, this guide is no more then a combination of several guides plus my own contributions. Credit will be given here:

First login as a root user using sudo

user@sonic:~$ sudo -i

Install a few necessary packages.  The OCI module will have to be built from sources in PECL so we’ll need a couple of build packages:

root@sonic:~# apt-get install apache2
root@sonic:~# apt-get install php5-common php5 php5-dev libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli
root@sonic:~# apt-get install build-essential php-pear libaio1

Some guides say you need to install libaio-dev.  If you have problems, then do it.
Next we’re going to download some stuff from Oracle.  I use Intrepid x64, so I went here.  You’ll want to grab at least the basic_client and the SDK.  I grabbed the sql plus libraries as well; seriously, you don’t use sqldeveloper for your db scripting do you?

The latest version of the client as of this writing is 11.1.0.7.0. Create a directory /opt/oracle and move all the zip files there and then run this command:

root@sonic:/opt/oracle# unzip \*.zip

You’ll get a fancy directory called instantclient_11_1 and you’ll rename it to instantclient.  Go into that directory and make some symbolic links:

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/instantclient# ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so
root@sonic:/opt/oracle/instantclient# ln -s libocci.so.11.1 libocci.so

So we’re down to the business of compiling the php oci module.  Run mkdir /opt/oracle/src, cd to the directory you just created, and then:

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src# pecl download oci8
root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src# tar xvf oci8-1.3.4.tgz

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src# cd oci8-1.3.4

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src/oci8-1.3.4# phpize


That’s pretty good for now.  The next installment we’ll make the oci8 extension, set environment variables, and test that everything works