If you think, this is solved, than why not marking this thread as solved.

Sorry, just one portion of the question was solved, which was to not have the error. The second part of my problem still exists. When I open

    localhost:8000 

in the browser, then within the terminal, I can see that it has returned to the blinking cursor

     Tariks-Mac-mini:112214_blog tam3$ php artisan serve --port=8000
     Laravel development server started on http://localhost:8000
     Tariks-Mac-mini:112214_blog tam3$ 

Why would it stop just because I brought up the server in the browser?

I have read some of the posts and I have tried

     chmod -R 777 ./ 

and I have deleted the laravel.log file

But server still stops after I bring it up in the browser

Laravel 4 and I it had to do with everything pointing to MAMP. I did the following to update

- curl -s php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.6 

followed by

export PATH=/usr/local/php5/bin:$PATH

then re-running the

./configure

make

make install

except when I did that within the /php-5.6/ext/mcrypt

make install -prefix /usr/local/php5/bin

now the server is running with no issues - scratch that one issue - had to run

php artisan key:generate 

and place key within my app/config/app.php file - I have arrived :-)