The funniest thing I've seen all day. I don't know where it came from (my sister sent it to me), but it's ridiculously awesome. Not to mention the fact that this knowledge probably would've gotten me a better grade on my AP Physics exam.
Instead of having six panels over two weeks about some inflammatory (minority-related) comments a professor made during class, shouldn't the students and the administration be more concerned about more important things?
Like the fact that we're losing our best business law professor to friggin' BYU next year?
Or how about the fact that Wisconsin is seriously lacking in the international law, health law, and IP departments?
Maybe, instead of complaining about the professors we have, we should be complaining about those we don't. Otherwise, this place'll become more of a joke than it already is.
It's no secret that I think that "The Office" is one of the five best shows on television. And because I love it so much, I'd like to share that love with those of you that haven't seen this on YouTube already. So, please enjoy a video tribute to Dwight Schrute of "The Office".
The last Friday in February is notable for only one thing: being the day on which Chicago Cubs single-game tickets go on sale. Unfortunately, this also means the return of the Cubs Online Ticketing System, complete with Virtual Waiting Room.
After last year's debacle, which ended with me not getting the tickets I wanted, I was quite a bit more wary this year. Mostly because this year, I actually had games that I planned on going to with people...not just by myself. The great thing about the Cubs is that they tend to sell out every summer weekend for groups of more than 2 by the end of, well, the first weekend on which tickets go on sale, so the VWR is essentially unavoidable for a large group on, say, Labor Day Weekend.
So I dutifully get online around 9:30 this morning to mark my place in the non-existent line, hoping to get in soon enough to get my tickets. As I was browsing the internet to pass the time, I discovered that most people that were getting tickets had, like, 30 browser windows open - so me with the piddly 2 windows I'd had open for about an hour and a half at that point just wasn't going to work. So I decide that, if I couldn't beat the cheaters, I should join them.*
Lo and behold, the "Select Tickets" screen popped up...about 50 minutes later. The problem, unfortunately, was that having so many windows open caused my internet to freeze up. So I have to reboot and re-start the process all over again, this time with fewer windows.
"Select Tickets" screen pops up another 20 minutes later; internet freezes again.
This happens twice more before I decide that just having a wireless connection probably isn't going to help - that maybe having the ethernet cables would keep the wireless from timing out. I reboot once more, and within 10 minutes, I have two "Select Tickets" screens...and 10 minutes later, I have 2 sets of tickets - one for my law school friends in April, and one for my family in September.
Play ball!
*Yep, that's me with 20 browser windows open, all trying to get past the Virtual Bouncer at the door of the Virtual Waiting Room. I'd like to point out that, this year, the Cubs made it so that you couldn't open multiple VWRs in multiple browser windows. What they failed to account for was the fact that you can open multiple pages in different tabs in both Firefox and IE. So, thanks guys. I mean...oops?
bringing joy to the law school, one sad soul at a time
The other night, my sister sent me a link to this website that offers about 600 original Nintendo games, available to play for free whenever you like, and told me that I would never, ever pay attention in class again.* So within minutes, I did the only thing I could think to do: I sent it to a friend that's in my Trusts & Estates class.
The next afternoon, in T&E, my friend told me that she sent it to another friend also in our class, and that they had been playing all afternoon.
Cut to this afternoon, when I see the second friend from T&E, who told me that she had since sent the link to another dozen or so of her friends...and that every time Mario died, the girl behind her in class gasped audibly.
I, surprisingly, have surprisingly avoided playing games in class; rather, I have been waiting until breaks (or, like, now, playing games at home instead of doing my writing assignment for Prosecution). Today, I displayed so much restraint that I waited until the break in Evidence to whip out the Ms. Pac Man (way more awesome than regular Pac Man. Don't ask me to explain why). Five minutes later, the guy behind me was asking for the link. After discovering one of his favorite games on the website, he gave me the following quote (for posing on the blog, of course):
"You just saved my semester."
So for the rest of you out there that hadn't already been sent this link through the law school IM tree...you're welcome. And don't say that I never did anything nice for anyone.
*I give it three months before someone finds this and makes the webmaster take it down because of some sort of copyright issue.
As I said yesterday, the law school is ridiculously cold. This morning, I got to class and my toes never thawed out from the ten minute walk between the bus stop and the law school.
Today, however, in exchange for some delicious chocolate, a friend directed me to the one warm spot in the law school: the Remington Center. Now, instead of freezing in the library, I'm enjoying a cozy seat in the RC, and my toes have finally stopped hurting from the cold.
I'm convinced that this is some sort of Walter Dickey-created conspiracy. The Dickey Disciples on the faculty want everyone to join one of the Remington Center prison-based clinics. So my guess is that they've taken the whole "pimping the clinics in Crim Law classes" thing one step further by cutting off the heat in the rest of the building. So now students have to choose the lesser of two evils: participate in a Remington Center clinic instead of taking actual classes, or take the classes and lose your fingers and toes to frostbite.
I hate the cold weather. It doesn't agree with my constitution. We didn't have much cold weather down south. Unlike the north, we boasted warm(er) weather in winter, edible fried chicken, and an uncanny ability to turn a two-syllable word into a six-syllable word.
Needless to say, I (like many other students) get really cranky when we come in from the frigid cold outside to discover the law school building is also ridiculously cold. Right now, I'm sitting in class with two layers of clothes and a scarf on and still freezing cold. And after five minutes of freezing, I noticed the draft above my head (in a windowless room).
That's right - my law school in the middle of Wisconsin is running the air conditioning. In February. During the coldest spell of the winter.
I don't know about you all, but in my experience, it's way cheaper to use gas to heat a building than to use electricity to run the air conditioner all day. I mean, it's not like this is the Mall of America, and we can use the body heat of all the students to heat the building instead of actual heating systems.
This only makes me wonder how much money is used to pay for the fact that the admininstration can't use energy efficiently.
For the record, I did not plan to get hit with an icky stomach virus today to keep me from venturing outside to class on the coldest day of the year (as in, it's -7 outside right now).
Not even I am that awesome.
(And yes, I really am sick. I'm not using that as an excuse to not go outside and subsequently lose my toes to frostbite.)
So there's this job that I want next summer. The only job I've seen out there that I really, really want. It's a job back east, doing something I potentially want to do for a career, and in a city where I don't have to pay to live, thanks to the large number of extended family members living in this city's metro area.I applied for the job in mid-November, and then heard nothing.
So instead, I applied for (and got) another summer job through the school. I signed my "contract" with the professor, signed up for the class that accompanies the job, and began making arrangements to spend the summer up in a place that I can only describe as Northeast Buttlick, Wisconsin. (It's about 20 miles south of Michigan's U.P.)
Today, I get a call asking if I want to interview for the job I want. Now, I know that interviews don't necessarily mean a job...but the fact that circumstances are such that I can't even interview for the job that I want is really, really depressing.
I know that I haven't been posting (much) of late. That's mostly because I'm bloody exhausted after two weeks of school, and the only thoughts that seem to come to my mind are about how I really, really abhor law school. Since that's pretty much the theme of every post I've posted since I started this blog, I figured that you're all pretty much tired of hearing me ramble on and on about how law school was the biggest mistake of my life.
I also realized that, through not posting, I also didn't tell some of my awesome vacation stories. (For those of you that don't know, I spent a week at Disney World, two weeks in Florida, and a week in Richmond.) (Side note: how obvious is it that I want nothing to do with Madison?)
So now, I give you Volume One of my Tales from the Couch: Me vs. the TSA
So we're at the airport on our way home from Disney World. Mom has all the breakable items in her carry-on bag, mostly because anything you actually want to keep should not be touched by the baggage handlers. (Especially if you're traveling through O'Hare, as I've now learned.)
One of these items is my sister's cup that sort of doubles as a snow globe. (The sides of the cup have little pieces of glitter and plastic stars floating in liquid inside.) I wish I could explain it better than that, but whatever.
TSA Worker lady starts searching my mom's bag, mostly because it's a bunch of large objects wrapped in several layers of paper. The Worker asks Mom if she has any liquid, and Mom mentions the liquid in the sides of the cup. Worker then tells Mom that, if she wanted to keep the cup, she shouldn't have mentioned it - since it's liquid, it can't go through security.
At this point, I'm just stepping through the metal detector and hearing the tail end of this conversation. So I hear the TSA Worker telling my mother that because the sides of the cup could freeze and burst, it can't be taken on a plane. I ask about the 3-ounces-of-liquid rule, but the Worker brushes me off. So then I (not so politely) tell her that, if they're going to pull this crap on tourists, that they need to do a better job of explaining that vacation souvenirs need to be shipped home via the postal service (because baggage handlers suck). She snottily replies that they "tell the theme parks" that, but it obviously didn't work because there's obviously no one at the park who's concerned with anything other than getting their $20 for a sparkly plastic cup. At this point, my mother pretty much drags me away, because she apparently didn't want to have to worry about me getting arrested in Florida.
We take the tram over to the other terminal, still angry at these people (except my sister, who is crying because (a) we're all mad, and (b) it was about the only souvenir she actually wanted). So I mention the 3-ounces rule again, and that basic physics would mean that an 8-ounce cup with barely-quarter-inch sides probably didn't contain over 3 ounces of liquid. So my parents decide to go back to the TSA Worker to get a better explanation of why this cup was problematic.
Fast-forward twenty minutes of my sister and I talking about how we're going to make it home if Mom and Dad end up arrested. Parents come back with the cup. TSA Worker, instead of asking us to wait at the security checkpoint, waited until we left to actually talk to her supervisor about the cup with very little liquid. She then explains to the Parents that, well, if we had put the cup in a plastic bag before running it through security, there would be no problem.
Why they couldn't just re-run the cup through security while we were still there, I don't know. Why people think that terrorists are more likely to put liquid bombs in souvenir cups from Disney World than they are into cell phones, laptops, PSPs, PDAs, or iPods, I don't know. All I know is that I managed to tell off a TSA Worker without getting arrested. I win.
