A major environmental schism in philosophy

“Six out of ten Math teachers are getting their pink slip”. That’s what I heard at my favorite wifi coffee shop as I was trying to do something other than write this blog. It was a conversation I overheard passing by some students from the local high school, Eureka High. When after five minutes and I still couldn’t drop it from my thoughts, I had to go over to their table and ask them if I overheard correctly. They didn’t think I was too rude because they acknowledged me and confirmed what I heard. I know our state is having budget short falls but I really didn’t think our fine elected officials would decimate our school system so readily.

This is why the scary future movies have it all wrong. The holocaust that ends civilization won’t be a nuclear strike or rampaging robots. It will be the rampant meddling of conservative ideologues.

You may wonder why I’m not using the latest version of Wordpress for this blog. Then again it may be the farthest thing from your mind. But I’ll tell you anyway: it’s because my host operating system won’t let me. More specifically my host version of mysql won’t let me.

Installing the latest version of Wordpress (2.3.2) requires a more recent version of Mysql than is available with Centos4. This is significant because Centos has become very popular with ISP’s and Linux hosting companies. They like it because it is the community (free) version of Enterprise Redhat.

Fortunately, the Wordpress folks makes a legacy version (2.0.1) available which allows me to write this blog.

The word to the wise here is that if an updated version of Wordpress doesn’t install, roll back to an earlier version untill Mysql can be updated.

I’ll be either trying to find a recent Mysql package that will install in Centos or learning how to compile and install from it source code.

Stay tuned for updates on my progress with this and another project where I’m installing Ubuntu server on my home desk box.