wednesday, july 27, 2005
Things that are good habits
Some of which are mine and some which aren’t.
- Brushing teeth twice a day
- Putting on sunscreen every morning
- Going to bed at a consistent time
- Drinking 1.5 liters of water a day
- Depositing dirty dishes in the dishwasher
- Not biting fingernails
- Incremental plucking of eyebrows
- Drinking soymilk with breakfast and dinner
- Taking compliments graciously
- Jogging/walking two miles three times a week
- Backing up the hard drive once a month
- Logging books directly after finishing them
- Posting to the weblog more than once a week
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thursday, july 21, 2005
Neon green and purple
One of those scary pages I made back when I had iron eyeballs: “ikonoklasm”, my 2002-era collection of AIM icons. The little yellow birdie is still the cutest thing I’ve ever seen on the Internet. This kitten is close, though.
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tuesday, july 19, 2005
Bad OS X and good Los Angeles
Mac OS X 10.4.2 messed up my iMac, and now I have to reinstall Tiger. This isn’t supposed to happen! After installing the update, I restarted the computer — but it hung at the spinning-cyclone stage. I shut it off. Now it just hangs at the spinning-cyclone stage of booting up. When I hold down cmd-S, it says:
load of /sbin/launchd, errno 88, trying /sbin/mach_init
load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88
The closest thing I can find in Google is one person’s similar problem with OS X 10.3.3. The nasty thing is that my Tiger discs (OK, they’re Mister Kyle’s) are fifty miles away in his apartment, but he’s in San Jose until September. Aaah!
At least I’ll read more now. I recently finished How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand, and I loved it. This morning, I went on a walking tour of Spring Street (downtown LA’s old Wall Street, sort of) and all the pages about adaptive-reuse and preservation just jumped out of historic Beaux-Arts facades on lofts, residential low-income hotels, and office space.
The best part might have been inside the Alexandria Hotel. We saw two giant old ballrooms: dusty linoleum floors, stained-glass skylights, very empty. The second floor was dark and weird, with the original ceiling of the 40-foot lobby, which was divided after the hotel lost its rich guests to the Biltmore and other hotels. The now-low ceiling is densely ornate and pretty strange to see from 5 feet instead of 35.
I want to go on some more of these Los Angeles Conservancy tours. It’s very cool to see nice old buildings up close.
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monday, july 18, 2005
A native plant for once
My newest little plant and its pot came from the 99 Cents Store (part of the pantheon of godly stores, next to Trader Joe’s and Gap outlets). It fits right in with the assortment of junky antiques on my windowsill.
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saturday, july 09, 2005
The upside-down GPA
I got straight A’s my second semester of senior year, just to prove a point to myself. Hah! It didn’t take tremendous effort, but still.
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tuesday, july 05, 2005
mark jones and james hetfield
i’m plundering my sleeping wiki for a post because i can’t think of anything interesting to write.
mark jones is not the lead singer of metallica, but he was for a while. when i was eleven or so, sarah (my older sister) went through a rock music phase. i had to join in with the coolest thing i could think of, so i decided i liked metallica. naturally, lizzy (our younger sister) grew curious about this metallica thing, and we made up stories for her.
over the years, lizzy has discovered that more and more of what she knows about the world is stuff i invented on the spot.
story #1: the toothpick
the spike in the chin of metallica’s guitarist (drummer? i don’t remember) is actually a petrified toothpick he acquired in a car accident. the sudden expansion of his air bag jammed the toothpick in his hand into his chin and he decided to leave it there.
story #2: the wolf head
the little metal wolf head necklace that james hetfield sometimes wore is actually a real, shrunken, petrified wolf head. he had it silver-plated.
story #3: mark jones
this was our greatest story: metallica’s lead singer is named mark jones. lizzy almost wouldn’t believe us because we kept laughing.
one day in sixth grade, my friends and i were talking about metallica and i mentioned “mark jones”. i couldn’t remember his real name.
