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Yesterday I was sleeveless and today it is snowing. Sweet, cruel, and unpredictable; the weather here is like life. How easy it is to soar and fall, succeed and fail, taste joy and pain.
I recommend you keep a journal. Not online of course (how gauche!), but with pen and paper. You need not write every day, but once in a while, especially during your highs and lows. When you look back, it will lend you strength when you are down and sweeten your delight when you are up. Besides, you need something sensational to read on the train.
The little snowflakes drift down past the window, silent and ineffectual, they melt upon contact with the ground, the houses, the trees. Little white meaningless words that sting and dampen without permanency.
What would you like to be doing today? What do you want to say you have done? What will people say when you are gone?
A million lives drifting in silence to the ground and melting.
The fragility of human communication is severe enough without the interference of a capricious, ubiquitous, expensive and unreliable telecommunication device: the mobile phone. For the past half a week my phone, possibly in partnership with the service provider, has been injesting, withholding, and misplacing text messages both to and from my friends and acquaintances.
The efficacy of this technique cannot be underestimated. There is no better way to meddle in one's life than to cut off one's tongue and plug one's ears. Textually silent and textually mute. Few things are as insulting as an unanswered plea and few things as offensive as a plea unsent.
Your heart will deceive you where the silicon does not. An active imagination paints details for which reality herself has not the wit. The truth, amusing as it should be, acerbic in its sting and relieving in its brevity, arrives days behind schedule and as fashionable as overdue.
There is no lesson to life but this: regret is a derivative of one thing, and that thing is not action.
I have been trying to help my friend Paige recover her Mac that died after an attempted upgrade to OS X version 10.4.6. In Linux, I often boot to single user mode to troubleshoot hairy problems. In OS X, this can be achieved by holding down Apple-S. (The "Apple" key is really called the "command" key, so the shortcut is usually abbreviated to cmd-s). Magical Macintosh Key Sequences is a good reference for keyboard shortcuts.
Unfortunately, the system would still hang (apparently at launchd) when booting to single user mode with the message:
Load of /sbin/launchd, errno 88, trying /sbin/mach_init
Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88
It seems perhaps an important part of the filesystem is screwed up. I ran the disk repair utility included on a borrowed OS X installation CD. Well, we would have tried a re-install but unfortunately the installer only applies to a couple of Powerbook models and not the one Paige has. It refuses to install, but still boots and lets you run the utilities.
The repair utility fixed some errors, but will not fix the error it describes as:
Invalid leaf record count
(It should be 9 instead of 2923)
If I were using Linux, I would boot to a command shell using the (kernel image on the) install CD to explore further options. However, the OS X install CD in all its glorious user friendliness would not dare suggest the user venture to the dark territories of the fearsome OS X Shell. There is no "boot to command prompt" option in the menu and google would not tell me how to acheive this either.
So extensive research on the boot process and Open Firmware led me to this idea to boot to a command prompt from the CD:
If you follow those directions, you should get to a shell prompt and be able to muck around. Enjoy! Whether or not I can use it to solve the main problem remains to be seen. =/
Moving to a new apartment today. Maybe offline for a while. [shudder]
The soft, Swedish voice on the other end of the SAS line tells me she cannot, without seeing the ticket, make any changes. A call to arms. I must embark upon a journey, a perilous voyage by land, to one of Milano's two heaven-bound ports of calling. Only there can I guarantee salvation.
The path to Malpensa, though oft travelled and well known, is costly both in time and dollar. With little of either currency to spare, the behest of circumstance made my decision for me. I would venture forth to that kabbalistic temple of the skies: Linate.
The first leg of my journey would take me through the very bowels of the Earth. The foul smells, grating, rasping noise and strange creatures were all to familiar. This was a journey to which I was accustomed. It was the second leg, the longer portion, at rest and bathed in the intoxicating glow of the sun that was strange; an irony of uncertainty, patience, and doubt.
"What? These codes forbid your assistance? What can I do?" My pleas fell on sympathetic, ineffectual ears. I must contact the very entity that put me to this task. Another smaller, equally futile mission. I exchange a few of my dwindling notes for the chance to speak once more to SAS. At this depraved hour, the lost fulcrum of light and dark, depraved not by situation but man himself, no one will answer my call.
I wait to board the same vessel that brought me here. As the sun lingers, recessed on the horizon, a painful realization dawns antithetically. Milano: this could be my end; trapped in the grave of civilization.
Sullied seaside, frog-suit females and a floral faux pas initial signs of 'your' Japan
I came third place in the first photo contest in which I participated. I sumbitted my very popular gyaru (or more specifically "yamanba") pic to the Mainichi Daily News "My Japan" contest.
Here is a snapshot of the article in case the above link ever stops working. You can also see a larger version of the photo in this post.
