Mnemonic

I don’t think there’s a mnemonic aid for “mnemonic,” but I’m studying for a law exam, and it’s insanely conducive to various visual associations:

  • Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 case that ruled that mandatory school prayer was an Establishment Clause violation. (You think?) Remember angels and that some thought it was vital to pray.
  • A trio of conscientious objector laws:
    • Welsh v. US: you needn’t have organized religious beliefs to object, if your beliefs are held with the strength of organized religion.
    • Gillette v. US: you can’t be a CO if you only object to one war; it has to be war in general
    • Clay v. US: it’s based on individual beliefs, not your whole sect’s beliefs. In particular, you must remember 3 prongs:
      • Oppose war in any form
      • Religious, not political, beliefs
      • There must be evidence that your beliefs are sincere
    • Remember Welsh grape jelly (and eating it individually, not in church), Gillette stadium (and protesters there opposing the Iraq war but supporting the war in Afghanistan), and, well, Clay is easier if you know that it’s Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali). The three items are pretty easy to remember on their own.
  • There was a Pinette case where the KKK wanted to put up a cross. It was for pretty intimidating purposes, but the court “had to live with its own precedent” that it was protected free speech. Imagine that the cross was made of pine.
  • VA v. Black: you can’t ban cross-burning, but if it’s used as intimidation, it’s illegal anyway. Remember that cross-burning was usually done as intimidation against black people.
  • Loving v. VA: essentially struck down anti-miscegenation laws. After all, marriage is about loving, not skin color.
  • Baehr v. Anderson and Brause v. Board of Vital Stats were two cases with a lot in common:
    • They both had the state’s anti-gay-marriage laws ruled violations of the state constitution
    • They both resulted in the state constitution changing to define marriage differently, banning gay marriage and doing it in a way that can’t be unconstitutional (since it’s in the constitution)
    • They both occurred in “Western extremity” states (Alaska and Hawaii)
    • They both involved people with strange B-names

Of course, we’ll see in an hour if this helps, or if I just sit there thinking that I could really go for some Welsh grape jelly having no idea why I’m thinking about it.

Holidays

  • One of my classmates is from England. He was talking the other day about how, incredibly often, people here ask him if they celebrate the 4th of July in England.
  • Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s day of independence. It commemorates the date of a battle. More importantly, it’s just a minor regional holiday in Mexico. It’s nothing like our 4th of July. And Mexicans don’t make a big deal out of it! It’s arguably celebrated primarily in the United States.
  • Another foreign student at school mentioned that her home country (I think it’s Portugal) celebrates Thanksgiving. That’s really pretty strange?

Today’s Deals

This week, Office Depot wins the award for best deals:

  • eMachines desktop and monitor combo. Athlon 3800, 1 GB RAM, 160GB disk, dual-layer CD/DVD-R, Vista Home Premium, and a 21.6″ LCD. Their website seems devoid of information on it, so I can’t figure out what I really want to know–the resolution on that monitor. But at $399.99 after rebates ($649.99 in store), it seems like a good deal any way you spin it.
  • If you’re more of a laptop person, they have a Toshiba laptop with a dual-core Athlon TK-53 (which means nothing to me), 120 GB disk, 17″ “TruBrite” widescreen monitor, and 2 GB (!) RAM. Typical dual-layer CD/DVD burner and Vista Home Premium. Integration 802.11b/g (but not a or N)…. $599.99 after rebates, $749.99 in store.
  • “Becker Traffic Assist GPS” with voice directions and a 3.5″ LCD (touchscreen). I’ve never even heard of Becker, but at $129.99 (after rebates: $199.99 in store), it seems like an incredible value.
  • 2GB CompactFlash card, $19.99 in store. I’ve been watching CF prices for a while now that I have a CF camera, and this is definitely a good deal. The problem is that I’m not sure I need a 2GB card? Same price for a 2GB SD card.
  • Epson all-in-one machine (printer/copier/scanner/fax), $44.99. Includes an LCD so you can print right from digital media. As usual, price is after rebate
  • $649.99 ($799.99 in store) for a quad-core Intel (Q6600), 2GB RAM, 400 GB hard drive.
  • $6.99 for a 1GB USB thumbdrive. Those came down in price awfully quickly!
  • $27.99 for a 4GB (!) thumbdrive.

I really wish I could justify the purchase of a new computer, because that $400 desktop system is very tempting.

Defragging for the OCD

My Windows hard drive is a 60GB drive, and is always full-ish. With 8% free space (really good for this drive!), a defrag doesn’t get a lot accomplished. The small files are reassembled, but none of the big ones.  There’s not enough room to piece together the paging file.

So here’s how I, a definite OCD-sufferer, am cleaning up my Windows machine:

  • Create a desktop folder, “Crap,” and drag everything on the desktop into it, except for things that I know should definitely stay.
  • Plug in external 500GB hard drive.
  • Move the Crap folder to the external drive.
  • Move everything in My Documents to the external drive.
  • Empty the trash bin.
  • Run CCleaner.
  • Fire up your paid version of Diskeeper (it’s worth it, I promise: and I hate paying for software). Set up a boot-time defrag, and have it get the paging file and MFT as well.
  • Move everything back. Or, realize that you don’t need 3/4 of it and don’t move it back.

Warning: I’m somewhat concerned that some things might not take well to being moved around, like my iTunes Library. I’m posting this as I’m finishing up copying everything over, so it’s possible that this isn’t going to work out as I planned. We’ll see…

Jobs

I graduate in May. Here are some jobs that I’d like:

  • Doing soundtracks for movies. Not composing music, just spotting ideal music for songs. I have a whole playlist of songs that are crying out to be part of the soundtrack to a movie. I even resisted the urge to put every Moby song I own into the list. Also, Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” isn’t on the list.
  • Sports photographer. I’d like to go a Sox game some time, and I love taking pictures of things. So I’d basically be getting paid to do something I’d do anyway. And they’d provide me with the equipment. (I hope… Good lenses don’t come cheap.) Maybe just a photojournalist. I already have the press pass. 😉
  • Corporate CEO. It’s unclear where to submit my resume for this position. Maybe they’ll come to me when I get my degree?
  • Doing the soundtrack for Guitar Hero IV or whatever. I already have a list of songs that would be good.
  • President of the United States. No one’s political ideology is as closely aligned with my own as mine. I
  • President of my college. $750K/year. I’ve never even seen ours. I’d do it for half the pay and be twice as visible. And I’d fix the things that need fixing.
  • Police chief on-campus. We’re not solving an awful lot of crimes.

If I Controlled the News…

Things I care 0% about:

  • Norman Miller: No offense to his fans, but I’ve never even heard of him. It’s sad that another human is dead, sure, but if we don’t care when the 997th child of the day dies from malaria, why do we care that Normal Miller died?
  • The TV guild strikes. I don’t watch much TV. The Daily Show is funny… But if Jon Stewart is really funny, he should write his own stuff. Same for The Office. I can just not watch the TV shows. I usually don’t anyway.
  • The Harry Potter lexicon (?) being delayed.
  • Whether or not Michael Jackson will retain ownership of Neverland ranch.
  • Statistics about daylight savings time.

News that I care about >5% that seems to have received <5% of the news’ attention:

vim tricks

If you’re cool like me, you spend a decent amount of time in vi editing files. Despite all the fancy IDEs and the like, nothing beats uploading your PHP script to the webserver and editing in place. I don’t profess to be a vi expert. I’m far from it, in fact. But for those that are like me–comfortable working in it but far from being a master–here are a few tips:

  • Typing “G” (in command mode, but not as a : command!) takes you to the last line of the file.
  • ma, where a is a letter a-z, sets a as a ‘mark’. You can then issue commands reflecting that mark. For example, I wanted to delete about 500 lines from a file. But I didn’t know how many lines there were, so “500dd” wasn’t a viable option. In my case, I marked the last line I wanted to delete with a, went up to the first line I wanted to delete, and then typed d’a to delete from the current line to mark a. Note that, as you’re doing this, there’s no indication of it.
  • . (a single period) runs the last command again. Handy way more often than I’d expect!
  • :wq is probably the most well-known command. But ZZ (not :ZZ) is easier and does the same thing!

This is a handy reference, by the way. So isn’t the O’Reilly book, but you can’t Google your way through that.

Tech Tricks

Here are a few low-tech computer tricks I’ve started doing lately:

  • I’ll periodically bump the wrong keys and find keyboard shortcuts that I didn’t know existed for sending an e-mail mid-sentence. It’s one thing when you’re e-mailing a friend ramblings about cheese (they may even be glad the e-mail got cut short?), but when you start e-mailing important people, it becomes a bigger deal. The last thing you want to do is e-mail the chief of police and say, “I’m working on an article and I’d like to mee”… The simple ‘fix’ is to not let your e-mail program dictate how you compose a message. The “To:” line comes first. Do it last, so you can’t mess up.
  • When attaching files, do it before you write the e-mail. I can’t believe how often people (myself very much included) send e-mails referring to attachments, but forget to add the attachment. If you can get in the habit of making attaching the file first, it’s a lot harder to mess up.
  • When downloading things from the Internet, always, always, always click “Save” instead of “Open.” I tend to do Open instead, because it seems like a needless step to save it to the Desktop and then open it. But in the past week I’ve lost two files because I click “Open” on a draft someone sends me. I spend a long time revising it, and hit Save every minute or so. But it gets saved to a temp directory that’s virtually impossible to find. Today I spent considerable time poking around the directories, and found that what’s stored is VERY limited. If you’ve visited any sites after you last saved the file, it’s practically assured that your file is 100% gone, because the cache will get purged. As I’ve said before, I’d consider this a fatal design flaw, and I can’t believe more people don’t have problems with this. So always, always, always save to your Desktop and then open. And, if you’re working on a file and about to close, don’t close it unless you’re positive you know where the file is being saved.

All of these are things that take some time getting used to. But I think they’re like, say, using a PDA: you have to commit to doing it 100%, or it’s utterly useless. If your calendar doesn’t contain everything you’re doing, it’s worse than having no calendar at all. I need to work on automatically clicking that “Save” box when downloading a file, and I need to work on re-ordering, into a non-intuitive way, the way I write e-mails. But if I can get the habit down right, the first time, in mid-sentence, I get an error that I can’t send an e-mail with no recipient named, it’s paid off. And the first time I don’t lose an hour’s worth of revisions and additions, it’s paid off.

Comic Critic

A review of the Sunday comics…

  • Dilbert: An employee needs to ask his VP a question, but is told he can’t talk directly to them. Rank: something slightly short of a smile.
  • Opus: Too long to read.
  • Get Fuzzy: one animal repeatedly throws rice and blasts the other in the face with an airhorn. Rank: slight grin.
  • Ask Shagg: Facts about squid. With a joke about them playing ping-pong. Rank: less than a smile.
  • Zits: Jeremy has fantasies about his guidance counselor. Because she’s female. Rank: shrug.
  • Monty: Monty shares demotivational sayings with his parrot which has a motivational calendar. Rank: smile.
  • For Better or Worse: The kids set their clocks back. One is shocked that his toy, broken within the hour, is still broken. Rank: eyeroll.
  • Bizarre news story called “What is Innovations?” Not read because it’s not a comic, and because the grammar is abysmal.
  • Curtis: A kid doesn’t do his homework and is honest. He gets sent to the principal’s office. Rank: sigh because it’s boring, and because no one goes to the principal’s office for not doing their homework.
  • Mother Goose & Grimm: Two characters in prison, one remarks to the other, “I’m doing forty years to life. I swiped a $50,000 stapler from the Pentagon.” Rank: smile.
  • Foxtrot: Too lame and complex to summarize. Rank: bleh.
  • The Family Circus: the kid is counting nuts. “I’m making sure less than half of these nuts are peanuts,” he says. Rank: smile, because it’s something I’d do.
  • Non Sequitur: It’s seven paragraphs of text. Skipping. Rank: F, for “Failed to even understand the assignment.”
  • Rose is Rose: Some crazy lady confuses her with someone else. Rank: bleh. Might have been better if it was earlier in the comics.
  • Adam at Home: Two people get each other’s business cards. Rank: Can I have my time back?
  • Rhymes with Orange: Innovations in child care. Rank: Shrug. I’ve seen worse.
  • F Minus: A kid turns 14. His friends gossip that he’s 13 but his parents are superstitious. Rank: It’s not an F minus, but it’s no A, either.
  • Princess of Ai-land: Huh? Way too much to read. Rank: Didn’t even read it.
  • Stone Soup: Someone says she hopes her daughter doesn’t end up in therapy. Lots of people in the bar say they’re in therapy. Rank: I thought comics were supposed to be funny?
  • Arlo & Janis: The second comic about Daylight Savings Time. These ones joke, “I’d rather sleep late than go to bed early.” Rank: shrug. Which is becoming one of the highest compliments for a comic.
  • Doonesbury: Someone asks someone else for $5K for a motorcycle. The other guy rambles about how unsafe motorcycles are. Rank: F, for “Failed to even try to be funny.”
  • Zippy: I don’t even get this one. Rank: F-.

Conclusion: I’ve laughed more watching the Patriots in the first five minutes of the game. And nothing funny has happened. I thought comics were supposed to be funny.