jeweled platypus

 

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.

comments (1)

usually why i wet myself during a etc-update..
Kyle on 7/28/2005 00:18:15

comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.

*

I’m Britta Gustafson.


Popular posts

Fold a paper icosahedron

My handmade map of California

How the internet feels like a city

Blade Runner in San Francisco

Learning to see telephone poles

How UCSB joined ARPAnet

What is a book?


a little pixelly man, upside-down