Category Archives: Living

Mnemonic

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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.

The Problem with Wikipedia

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No, not that one.

I consider myself a talented writer. And I’m obsessive-compulsive about things being well-written. So giving me access to edit things is a recipe for awesome.

So I was doing some research for class. My research into Lynch v. Donnelly made me realize that the page was pitiful. So I cleaned it up to get it to its current state. (Which still needs a lot of work.) The Nautilus, Inc. page also got some updates after another class project on the subject.

You should get extra credit in class when you become the top contributor to the Wikipedia page on the subject.

The Spare Box

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I don’t blame the OS directly, but life in Windows-land always involves me sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

So I brought back an ancient laptop with me. 512MB RAM (I think–it might be 256), a slow processor, a tiny hard drive, and a battery that doesn’t hold a charge. It’s running Ubuntu, and its two duties are as a web browsing machine and an IM machine.

So now while the system is unusable, I can get stuff done over here.

(Psst: Steam, when your game is so hard to start that I lose interest before it’s launched, you’ve failed miserably. Go get stuck in a lift. A burning lift.)

Mailing Lists

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Mailing lists are dangerous things. Especially when you’re the admin of them.

I run one for a list of about 100 members in one of my clubs. The other is a list of board members for a second club, which has about 10 members. To start, I set Kyle’s Blackberry address up as a “moderator,” intending to whitelist him for sending to the list. In actuality, moderator status means that he receives an e-mail every time a member is added or removed from the list. And I proceeded to do a bulk-addition of all 100 addresses, which resulted in the server simultaneously sending him 100 electronic missives, which apparently caused the phone to “buzz like an angry hornet” before crashing.

Just now, I got the two lists confused. Fortunately, I did it the less dangerous way: sending an announcement meant for the 100 people to the 10-member board of the other club, all of which are good friends of mine who expect me to do dumb things like that. It would have been much worse had I instead sent some sort of sensitive material to a list of 100 people I hardly know, expecting to send it to the list of 10.

The Thing with the Rows?

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After years of not knowing any better, I finally learned the answer to, “Are you good with Excel?”

It’s an emphatic, “No.”

Of course I actually know my way around it really well. But, every single time, I have soon realized that I’d have been better off lying. “Hey Matt, I have this list of numbers and I want to find the standard deviation” would be easy. So wouldn’t, “How can I get this formula to apply to these cells?”

But, “Why isn’t my data importing from Excel to PowerPoint properly?” I don’t have the foggiest clue. Why doesn’t some complex formula you wrote work? I don’t know, you wrote it! Why doesn’t the SQL in your query work? Wait, what? You asked me about Excel.

I’m warning you. When someone asks you, say no, play dumb (“Naw, I don’t get it at all… That’s the thing with them numbers and rows, right?”) And, if there’s any signs that they’re not taking no for an answer, simply turn and run.

Police Logs

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Last night I was in the police station getting data for the police logs. As I sat there in the lobby perusing the logs, some girl came in and approached the dispatch desk.

“Hi, I don’t know what to do… This has never happened before. I think my car was towed.”

A few minutes go by, and the dispatcher concludes, “Ma’am, we didn’t tow your car.”

She told him exactly where she’d parked, so he pulled it up on the camera and zoomed in. (The zoom on those cameras is ridiculous!) “I was right next to that Jeep,” she said. Sure enough, her car wasn’t there.

She called to get information on activating Lo-jack in her car.  The dispatcher called local tow yards to confirm that no one had towed the car without telling him. One  by one, they came back negative.

I was sitting there, intrigued. Part of me didn’t believe that a car had just been stolen on campus. But the other part of me was irritated that the dispatcher was was lallygagging around instead of putting out a BOLO for the recently-stolen car.

Finally, he radioed to one of the officers who was patrolling the parking lot, and asked him to look for the car. About ten seconds later, he radioed back. “I’m sitting right in front of it.” He turned on his lights so they could see where he was on camera.

He was maybe four cars down from where she said she’d parked.

I tried to refrain from cracking up. And as I soon realized that it’s exactly what everyone else in the station was trying to do.

(As an added bonus, she freely admitted that she was illegally parked in a handicapped spot and had no parking permit, although they seemed to distracted with the hunt for her lost car to issue her a citation.)

A Plea to Phone Makers

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Make ringers “polite.” If a phone ‘rings out’ (e.g., rings non-stop until voicemail kicks in), switch to silent mode automatically.

Yes, this has flaws, like missing multiple calls because you missed one call.

But sit here with my as my suitemate’s phone rings time and time again, with a really irritating ringtone while he’s gone, and hold back the tears long enough to tell me that this feature isn’t necessary.

If nothing else, come up with a universal, unobtrusive means of switching a phone to silent. My Treo’s got a slide on the top, and I think all phones should have something like that. Every time I try to use someone else’s phone I end up getting into strange menus or, more often than seems statistically probable, ending up inside a web browser. So I’m pretty averse to opening up people’s phones and changing settings. I could cope with sliding a hard switch on the outside, though.

Seriously, please implement this. I’m begging.

M/S Explorer Crashes Again

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M/S Explorer has crashed.

For added irony, they were in penguin territory at the time.

(One wonders the view out the Windows now that the ship is on its side–they’re most likely blue screens! No Word on whether that is the case, of course, but I will say that the ship’s Outlook isn’t so good. Fortunately, because the rescuers Excel at what they do, passengers were able to Exchange their rooms for ones on a stable ship. Because there were no fatalities, this was not FrontPage news, except on Digg.)