From the earthquake in Japan and the resulting nuclear catastrophe to the charlatans setting up fake aid organizations duping sincere folks wanting to help to the impending world contamination with radioactive iodine and cesium, the whole thing is infuriating.  We really can’t find better ways to boil water to turn turbines to spin generators to make electricity…really?

Then there is the unfolding war in Libya that is so unfortunate.   It is very frustrating.  But hey, call it support for the freedom fighters and everyone is on board.  Never mind that the citizens of Libya had free housing and free education and health care for everyone!  Now lets drop depleted uranium munitions there as well.  Argh!  We don’t have enough deformed war babies being born in the world.

But wait there’s more.

Let’s tax the poor and give the rich a tax-free pass so that we can turn our nation in to a dysfunctional third world country governed by an oligarchy rather than a democracy.  I could not believe this when I heard it. The top 1% of the U.S. population control 42% of the financial wealth! Huh?

And lets abolish Medicare and Medicaid so that our elders and children who can’t afford health care just vanish so we don’t have to worry about them anymore. And don’t even get me started on education.

Now I could go on and on venting about all that is wrong in the world but that would be wrong in and of itself because it does not do anything to constructively fix any of it.

So instead, in my longing for peace in our world, I asked myself what do we need to do so that we humans can be at peace with ourselves as well as with the world.

I think we need to foster 7 things in ourselves to see change take place in our world: Truth, Repentance, Resolve, Gratitude, Mortality, and Remembrance.

I expressed my thoughts with this short video.  I hope it will make a difference.

If you like it, please share it with your network of friends.  Maybe, just maybe it can affect a change.

Enjoy and as always, Peace!

©2012 Organic Light Pan. All Rights Reserved.

In my senior year in college I was finishing up all of my general education classes, classes that would have normally been taken in the first couple of years.  I was more interested in math and science so I delayed my general ed classes.  One of the more interesting and challenging classes I attended was Philosophy 101.  It was in this class that we were introduced to deductive logic, reasoning and how to argue and prove a line of thinking.

We had a term paper due at the end of the semester, one of our choosing, with professor approval of course (so much for choice).  I was clueless as to what I would write about and try to prove.  Then one day in class the professor spoke on the topic of free will.  She mentioned that past philosophers argued and proved that humans have free will.  This rubbed me the wrong way, and of course I did not agree.  I approached her after class and debated with her that as humans we do not have free will and that I would like to tackle this topic as the subject of my term paper.  At first she was very reluctant to allow me  to work on this topic, insisting that there was no way I could disprove free will.  After a little cajoling she allowed me to write on that topic, but gave me a caveat that I would not  be successful.  Well, throwing the gauntlet down at my feet only kindled my fervor and I set out on my task.

If you are interested in reading that short paper, I think I could find it stashed away in my notes somewhere.  But the basic premise of my argument was that rather than free will, which implies the ability to do as one wishes, what we truly have is merely the freedom of choice.  We can choose whatever we wish freely, from our actions, decisions, preferences and so on.  However, the outcomes of our choices are not in our control, nor do we have any foreknowledge of what the outcomes of our choices will be.  Of course this premise is not as attractive as that of a free will, where we have the freedom to choose, but also, in addition to that, we would know and have control over the outcome of our choices.  My argument did not find favor with my professor and she had notes in the margins arguing almost every statement I made.

Then I introduced the concept of a being that would have complete and total free will and described how such an entity would literally have control over everything and that there could only be one such entity for otherwise the universe as we know it would fall into complete chaos as the multiple entities would be battling for superiority – willing this and that in to being over each other.  I named this entity, for lack of any better term God.  At this point, her comments seemed to dwindle and then vanish from the page.  My final conclusion was that if we truly had free will there would be nothing to stop us for vying for control and becoming gods ourselves.  And since this has never happened and probably never will, free will for us mere humans is a fallacy.

Which brings me to the reason I post this story today.  Choices.  Four years ago I photographed that stoic valley oak in the local hills surrounding the San Jose, CA area.  It was nice but it never seemed to call out to me to do anything with it.  So I decided to just file it away.  Two weeks ago a client requests an image that can portray informed decision making for a website landing page.  Well this photo comes to mind.

At about the same time, I become ill along with all of my four children.  A terrible hacking cough plagued us, with a very distinct Whooping gasp for air at the end of the paroxysms.  What was going on?  We visit the doctor.  To our astonishment we have contracted Pertussis – yeah whooping cough!  But wait, I was vaccinated… you mean the vaccine does not confer life long immunity?  Well it would have been nice to be told that as an adult.  What!  You mean its only 70% to 97% effective in children?  Well so much for vaccines.  Okay, its not a life threatening illness since we are all above the age of 2 years, but 100 days of coughing is not an attractive proposition, and there is nothing, I mean nothing, to lessen the severity of the cough.  We just have to let it run its course.  Do nothing and after 21 days from onset and we are no longer contagious.  Take a course of antibiotics and the contagious period is reduced to 5 days.

More decisions.  Well I am on quarantine for two more days, my kids another four.  But we still have all summer to look forward to with glorious hacking on a daily basis, great!

This whole episode started me down the path of questioning all the decisions that I have made in the last 13 years of my life with children trying to find the specific decision that lead us down the path that brought us to the situation we now deal with.  Was it 12 years ago when we made a conscience decision to hold off on all vaccines for our oldest son who had a condition that would have been exasperated by the chemicals in the vaccines?  Could the vaccines have stopped this?  Not for me.  And possibly not for my oldest son either, as the childhood vaccine wears off after 10 years.    Was it our decision to enroll our kids this past year in a public charter school rather than continuing to home-school?  My oldest son informs us that many other students in his classroom were coughing around the time he contracted it.  So that might have been it.  Yet there is an outbreak now in the U.S. and adults are the main transmitters of this illness.

I could go on like this forever to no end and to no benefit.  It is easy to pinpoint where things go wrong if we could trace our decisions far back enough to the original decision between choice 1 and 2 – like the two main branches of that oak tree.  But as we continue down our path making turns right and left along the way, sometimes cognizant of what we are doing and sometimes in complete heedlessness, we end up finding ourselves in the canopy of all the possible outcomes and most often than not, the leaf we find ourselves standing on touches many other leaves, bringing several decisive paths to the very same concluding circumstance.

So it leaves me at this conclusion; we are at the mercy of the Most Merciful, the All-Powerful, Free-Willing entity that we call by many names, one of which is God.  We have been given the freedom to choose what we will and good or bad they are our choices and we have to live with the consequences.  The amazing thing for me is this:  We don’t know the outcome of our choices, but God does.  Further, we do not have the luxury of not making choices, we are compelled to choose, and we have no choice in that.  So choose, and choose well, for the path that unfolds before you will be of your own choosing.

Peace

©2012 Organic Light Pan. All Rights Reserved.

However behind all the glitz and glamor of being an international internet star, a website is nothing more than a collection of computer files written in obscure languages that relatively very few of us understand or even know how to “speak”, HTML, ASP, PHP, CSS and the list of acronyms goes on.  Add to that the responsibility of maintaining a website and updating it often with new content for visitors and the job becomes almost monumental.  The last thing a webmaster wants to deal with is a downed website.

Now a website, this collection of computer files, has to sit somewhere on a computer’s hard drive, after all it is their only existence.  In fact they must be in at least two physical places, the computer where the files were initially written and the computer that hosts those files and serves them up when requested.  Now I suppose they could be served up from the same computer that they were written on but more on that later.

Now in order for those files to appear in an internet browser window on your computer, just like this journal entry appears on yours right now, your internet browser had to make a request for those files to be displayed.  The process of how that happens rests on another acronym, the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, also known as the domain name.  The URL is essentially an address, much like the mailing address of your home, only in this case the address is to the location of where the computer files you wish to see are located or “housed”.  The typical example of a URL is http://www.organiclightphoto.com.  Only computers do not do well with written words that we can understand, but rather are much more comfortable with numbers.  So every URL translates into a set of four three digit numbers separated by periods, as in this example, 72.249.5.10 known as the IP address.  Each number can take on a value from 0 to 255.  Every computer that has access to the internet will have this set of four numbers assigned to it.

Computers that house websites and serve them up for viewing when requested are called servers.  Servers come in two varieties, those that run Microsoft Windows as an operating system and those that utilize UNIX as the operating system.  One is based on free open source code and the other is not.  The majority of servers, about 60%, are machines running the UNIX environment.  Each operating system “speaks” and “understands”  a different language and this is where I believe my WHOAs started.

Eight years ago, a friend of mine called me up out of the blue and asked me why I did not have a website showcasing my photography.  I had dabbled a bit in HTML but really did not know what I was doing, and asked him how I should go about getting one.  He then offered to build one for me!  About 6 months later www.organiclightphoto.com was born.  He designed the website to be what is known as dynamic, that is the webpages responded dynamically to the requests made and content was delivered via information stored in a database rather than all statically present in an HTML page.  It was cutting edge stuff at the time and he wrote the pages using ASP, a dynamic coding script developed by Microsoft.  At the time very few servers were able to host such a website and my friend found an outfit that could provide the service we needed.

As the years went on the service of that company went from good to worse to nearly non-existent.  Two years ago I decided to start this web journal, aka blog, and started to download the free code from the WordPress.org site.  My next Whoa was about to turn the corner.  PHP what’s that?  Well it was another scripting language used to deliver up dynamic websites much like ASP did but was built up and around the UNIX operating system and was Open Source and free.  I contact my hosting company and asked if they could help me install WordPress.  They had a very difficult time doing so and had an even harder time maintaining and troubleshooting errors associated with it.  I was naive and the hosting company gave me little in the way of educating me on the trouble.

So I begin the search for a hosting company on my own, without the help of my friend who by now had moved on to medical school and left me with an ASP website and a Sam’s Teach Yourself ASP 3.0 text book to take care of and update the website.  I was doing a pretty good job of keeping the site maintained and even wrote several new pages confidently.  So I find a hosting company, claiming that they could host both ASP and PHP with direct specifications that WordPress was supported.  I sign up with them and upload my website files to their servers and trouble shoot the pages to make sure they work properly on the new servers.  “Whoa!  You mean each server is different?  You mean I have to go through tens of pages to change paths pointing to the files – your kidding right?”  “I use files all through out my pages to bring up photos, and buttons, and graphics.  That’s thousands of lines of coed that I have to re-write just to get them to work on your servers – that’s not right!”  I complained to the technical support for about a week, and finally a straight answer from a top level technician – “no you only need to change the path where you specifically use an ‘include’ statement to bring in code from another file”.  Phew, what a relief that was, but Whoa, was that a shock.  I finally get the website working on the new server and now I have to cancel service with the old host company and have the IP address of my site changed to the new server which can take some time, because as I found out it is not generally the host company who has control over the website URL.

Whoa!  Hold on a minute who owns my website name?  When a website URL is chosen it used to be that when it was registered it had to be done through another company that just registers and maintains URL’s and they may or may not actually host the website.  In my case the first hosting company did not handle domain names.  The problem early on was that domain name registrars sometimes placed the ownership of the domain with them rather than the actual site owner.  Luckily my friend had enough smarts to chose a reputable registrar and it was just a matter of contacting them and having the address to the site changed to the new server.  And not only that, but the domain name has to be registered to you, and you have to pay yearly to keep control of that name.  Let your registration expire and your domain name could be up for grabs.  Whoa!

So now the site is on the new server and the blog postings are rolling out and everyone is happy.  Suddenly May 6th, 2010 rolls around and my new host company sends an email informing me that they are migrating all the websites hosted to new and better equipment, a server upgrade.  Within 24 hours my website starts to act very funny.  The pages don’t load as fast anymore, images take a long time to download, and HEY! why do I keep getting a CGI error when I try to view my blog?  Whoa!  My site is not working!  The host company assures me that once the migration is done, these anomalies will go away.  Four days pass and nothing is any better, no response from tech support other than the issue is under review and a resolution will be found shortly.  This was not acceptable!  For now, the website was not just a place to showcase my photos, but it was how I communicated with my patrons and customers.  I was in the midst of my yearly Open Studio Exhibit and I was running a promotion and needed the site to be functional, for now my livelihood was on the line.

I finally got a sliver of hope when one response from one tech support person sent me a message that highlighted how he had changed a line of my code in the homepage of the site alone and said the issue was now resolved and the support ticket was closed.  Gee! Thanks for fixing the one page of many that I have on your server.  You are just too kind!  I spent the next couple of days going through my multitude of pages fixing paths again.  You would think tech support could have at least told me that was the main problem.  Once I had the website back up and running, I then turned to the problem of the WordPress blog not working.  They kept beating around the bush on this one for about two weeks.

Finally one night I was surfing the internet and happened upon a page ranking website and I was trying to find my website’s ranking.  In the process I discovered that my website was actually housed on servers that belonged to a company with a name other than the host company I thought I was using.  I visited that company’s website and although they did say they provided hosting services, there was no mention of what plans they offered or any way to contact them, other than a page that listed the top managers of the company.  I found the email link to the VP of technical support.  I wrote him a brisk email and that I needed this hosting problem resolved.

The next morning I had an email from him apologizing for all the trouble and he informed me that the company that was hosting my website has gone out of business and they were taking over.

So just to let you all know, that if your hosting company ever tells you they are upgrading to a new server and / or they are migrating your site to new servers, you can be pretty sure they have been bought out and you are now working with a different company.  Yeah, Whoa!

So the VP puts me in direct phone contact with the lead tier 3 technician, who graciously explains to me the problem.  So get this.  This new company is using a new sophisticated hosting architecture where they have several redundant servers working back to back so if for any reason if one server goes down then another will automatically take up serving websites.  This way they can guarantee 99.99% uptime.  In addition, in order to speed up the serving of pages, they are using a new clustered CGI pool which again allows pages to be served up from any available server with out having to wait for a CGI connection to be freed up.  The problem as he explained it is that with my site written in ASP and the blog written in PHP the CGI cluster is having a hard time translating bwtween the two codes, ASP and PHP, being that PHP is native on UNIX systems and ASP on Microsoft systems.  Huh!?  Whoa!  You mean…?  But wait it gets better.  On the old servers before the ‘migration’ each domain name was treated as its own domain.  Now however with this new architecture, the domain is now under the account name and not under the actual www.organiclightphoto.com.  So when trying to resolve the differences between the ASP and PHP under the same “domain” it is getting confused.  His conclusion was that he felt the new servers would never be able to serve up both the ASP site and the PHP blog with any more than about 50% reliability, that is 50% of the time the blog would not load properly and his only real suggestion was to find a different hosting company that still used the old architecture, but warned me that it would probably end up being a small “mom & pop” type shop.  I tried to come up with other solutions for them to try but in the end, decided that it was time to find some other company.  Whoa!

So in the meantime I asked that they return my website to the old servers until I could find a new host.  They gave me about three weeks before the old servers were to be turned off for good.  And so a mad rush started to find a new hosting company that could handle both ASP and PHP on the same server and deliver both my website and the WordPress blog.

I found several, and they all sounded good, the price was right and I finally made a decision on a small company out of the Midwest, that offered dedicated IP addresses for a domain name.  Whoa!  I discovered that most hosting companies when they assign an IP address it is assigned to a server rather than an individual domain, and then software resolves the final calls to serve up a site.  Its called shred hosting.  This is fine, except what if other websites housed on that server using that same IP address deliver X-rated material or has been black listed for spam or malware, then the entire IP address and any website under that IP address will be blacklisted and not show up on search engine pages.  Yeah Whoa!  So I signed up for a free 30 day trial at this one host, only to find out a day or two later that customer complaints were a mile long with complaints about sites being hacked repeatedly, little or no technical support, and lots of server down time!  It really is Caveat Emptor!  Once I discovered these issues I quickly canceled my service and the search went on.  I quickly discovered web hosting company review websites where each company was reviewed but there were conflicting reports until I discovered that some of the review sites were owned by some of the very web hosting companies themselves.  So I turned to the Better Business Bureau website and discovered which companies had the best track records.  The original host from 2002 had a D- rating!  The second host I used had an A+ rating, but with over 135 complaints in the last 36 months.  The new host I found, but quickly canceled, also had an A+ rating but again with over 100 complaints in the last 36 months.  Almost all the hosting companies I found were riddled with customer complaints, except for one, the company I am with now.  They have an A+ rating, and only 1 complaint, that is correct, 1 complaint in the last 36 months.  No matter where I looked I could not find any disfavor with this one company.  The final Whoa!

So here I am now with my website, www.organiclightphoto.com, as well as two more sites that are in development hosted with this new company.  So who are they, you ask?  3Essentials.com.  I have only been with them for about a week or so, but so far so good.  Everything seems to be running smoothly and I hope I will not have to move my site anywhere else for a very long time.  If you are looking to host a website, or a blog either on a Windows server or a Unix server for a resonable price, I would check out www.3essentials.com for your self.

So what am I going to do now?  Well I do plan to slowly switch my website over from the ASP scripting language to the PHP scripting language.  This way my entire site will be written in PHP and I can better choose if I want to host my website on a UNIX or Windows server and allow for better portability if the need ever arises again.  So be careful out there as the woes of maintaining a website and finding a reputable and dependable web hosting company can have you saying ‘Whoa!’ quite a bit.

Peace

©2012 Organic Light Pan. All Rights Reserved.

The open range land where most of the wildflowers bloom is private land.  Some of it is fenced and some of it is just open range land.  Private property is private property and it should be respected, wildflower heaven or not.  For as long as I can remember fellow photographer and workshop leader, Carol Leigh and her wonderful Wildflower Hotsheet has been an Internet resource for wildflower hunters.  It was user driven with reports coming in almost daily once the blooms started.  This year however, due to incredulous bad behavior of photographers in one particular canyon in the south-central part of the state that is private open range land, one of the land owners made a post on the hotsheet asking photographers to stop coming onto their land, to stop tramping all over the place, tearing up flowers, and warning that if the behavior did not stop further legal actions would be taken!  That was last week.  Well all of a sudden Carol takes down the hotsheet and leaves the notice that is there now.  Not only did the bad behavior anger the owners of the land, it has resulted in losing a fabulous resource that was of benefit to so many.  This passed weekend, I heard reports that the county sheriff was patrolling that canyon now, making sure private property rights are observed.

I have photographed in that canyon before, and yes it is a special place, but come on, you don’t have to trespass to photograph there, and you certainly do not have to tear out flowers once you have photographed them or picnic right on top of them, roll around in them or whatever other nonsense people dream up.

Mother Earth has rights as well.  It is always a difficult proposition trying to photograph the wildflowers.  In the process, some flowers are trampled on.  But we must learn how to tread lightly on the earth.  Even though the Earth seems like a resilient rock, its ecosystem is very fragile.  Even more fragile are the flowers themselves.  They rely on pollination to generate the seeds for coming years.  Trample them, or pull them out before they can secure pollination and there will be no more flowers. 

I do my best to stay on trails or on roadside when photographing the flowers.  However I must admit I do love sitting in the middle of them all, sampling their intoxicating spicy fragrance and vibrant over-the-top color.  When I do, I stay put in one place, I follow my own foot steps back out and when at all possible, I step on bare ground where no flower is growing.  And I encourage all my readers to practice the same when you visit the wildflowers this year.  And please do go out and visit them and be grateful for the bounty that Mother Earth and our Creator are giving us this year, just be nice, so that we don’t want to “shoot our selves in the foot” and never get to see the flowers again.  

Bed Of Poppies

Peace.

©2012 Organic Light Pan. All Rights Reserved.