The day, of course, is ubiquitous as a unit of organization, regulated by our cycles of waking and sleep. But when we think about work, the dominant fact of our lives, we think about the week. Just consider the feelings the words arouse. Day: nothing much, except a little bit of hopefulness, maybe. Week: dread, languor, tedium, woe. Yes, we sometimes speak about making it through the day, if we’re having a bad one, but as Erma Bombeck knew, we always speak about making it through the week. Despite the etymology of the word, it is the week, and not the day, that has become the repository of the quotidian: of triviality, of drudgery, of routine. Days differ; weeks are always the same. Days begin with dawn; weeks begin with Monday. “Thousands of petty annoyances and grievances”: that’s the week all over.
The Weak - William Deresiewicz against the week (via explore-blog)

(via explore-blog)

Without a future for growth and development, romantic love can extend only so far. Its distinction from, say, a friendship with benefits begins to become effaced.

There is, of course, in all romantic love the initial infatuation, which rarely lasts. But if the love is to remain romantic, that infatuation must evolve into a longer-term intensity, even if a quiet one, that nourishes and is nourished by the common engagements and projects undertaken over time.

…

[There] is not merely the necessity of time itself for love’s intensity but the necessity of a specific kind of time: time for development.

The New York Times’ philosophy blog tackles the interplay of love and death. See also: 5 essential books on the psychology of love. (via explore-blog)

(via explore-blog)

Monitor your Router with Cacti

Devices attached to your router in some way — whether wired or wireless, use bandwidth on your network. Most homes have plenty of devices that are always connected and some of which connect periodically (Xbox, Wireless printer, etc.) 

Cacti is a tool for monitoring, amongst other things, network usage. There are other tools for the job (mrtg, AirPort Utility, etc.,) however, Cacti feels the best overall to me.

Just starting out with the app, so I only have a couple of hours of data. Here is what you can expect to see after completing this tutorial:

Cacti traffic graph

The steps below are for OS X using Homebrew, follow this link for instructions to install it.

  1. brew install mysql
  2. brew install rrdtool
  3. brew install net-snmp
  4. Download Cacti

Next, copy the folder above to your /Library/WebServer/Documents folder. If you’d like to be able to see the site at /cacti, just create a symlink:

cd /Library/WebServer/Documents && ln -s cacti-0.8.7i cacti

Open up the default cacti config and update your database connection information. The file is found here: /Library/WebServer/Documents/cacti/include/config.php.

Truc Using ‘localhost’ for $database_hostname did not work for me. Use ‘127.0.0.1’ if you are having trouble connecting.

Browse to http://localhost/cacti and you should be well on your way. The first thing to do is setting up devices. Click the “Devices” link on the left after going through the file locations.

Notes: