Playoff Bound!

So it finally happened.

The Minnesota Twins have tonight assured themselves a spot in the 2006 MLB playoffs. I never would have believed it at the start of the season. To refresh your memory let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and travel to the lowpoint of the season, April 28, 29 and 30 at Comerica Park…

“The Craziest Goddamn Thing I’ve Ever Heard”

Or so says Matt Yglesias. I think I have to agree with him even if it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s in the top 5 though. Here’s the money graph:

“At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I’ve Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes — in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran — and then simply deny that we’d done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we’d just hit.”

Such a comforting thought…. and you know that at least 25% of the people would support it. You need to think about getting out when you’re hoping your country doesn’t launch a nuclear surprise attack.

Musings and the threat of Blogging

Does this automatically cross post at The Girls? Weird. Well anyhow I took a nap all evening so I’m up most of the night whee, start the day at 2am!. Ahem.

So did you know the first life lesson they gave us in Law School? The first that didn’t have to do with actually studying and so forth? Facebook. Either ditch it, or scrub it clean because if you don’t think firms look at sites like Facebook or MySpace then you are living in a dream world. Take the Armando Saga for instance. Aramando was a popular front page poster at DailyKos, and if you click on the Armando link you’ll go to Aramando’s goodbye post. In his own words a right wing site supported a campaign by one of the DKos commentors (the troll in his post) to find out his actual name. As a result, Armando’s job as an attorney (that’s no secret) was affected. Who is Armando? What does he do? What does he look like? Well you can find that out for yourself, I did it only took about 20 minutes on Google but then again, I knew what to look for. Let me just say this: I would be in my dream job if I share his areas of expertise when I become an attorney.

A Form of Meta Critique

This title is a bit of a misnomer but to the few select people I’ve explained it to, I think they’ll get the joke. The rest of you are out of luck (sorry). This post is also for Mikan to explain a bit about what law school is like in case I don’t get a chance to speak with her further. I majored in Legal Studies for my undergraduate degree. This first year of law school is a lot like taking all the legal studies classes (Crimanl Justice, Procedure classes, etc.) on steroids. My classes are Criminal Law, Torts, Civil Procedure, Contracts. They are more labor intensive definitely–about 20-30 pages a night for each class–and the cases usually require you to do a quick brief to understand them but if you keep up and take notes in class you should be able to keep up. It does average out depending on your own personal style and study habits to something between 3-5 hours a night. I mean it. That doesn’t even take into account the Legal Research and Legal Writing Classes. The Legal Writing assignments take hours just as in undergrad but they are even more intensive. Plan on at least 3 hours and in a few cases up to 6-7 for each week. The Legal Writing Assignments are generally easier, taking about an hour except for the really big ones. These are the only classes that are graded throughout the semester–the others only grade on finals. You can keep up the whole semester but if you blow the test you are in trouble. That’s going to be an interesting entry when we get there! One thing I can’t emphasize enough: you cannot miss class. If you miss 10 classes you fail the course automatically. If you miss something between 6-9 good luck on getting anything above a C on the final, even if you’re sick as a dog you need to dose yourself in Sudafed and struggle through it.

!

Wow. So Microsoft finally sent out a cease and desist letter to the Halogen RTS team. I’ve been watching and waiting for this mod for literally 2 years. It’s a nasty body blow and to think, I just bought Zero Hour and Generals three days ago specifically for the mod. We all know what happens now, Microsoft sits on the idea for a few years and never does anything with it. Their goal was just to make sure the rest of us couldn’t enjoy it. They are totally within their rights to do that (though I think the horrendous copyright laws we have in this country should allow this kind of thing to go on when A. The makes derive no profit and B. When the parent company knows and has known for years and has done nothing) but it hurts, it hurts as bad as when the Chrono Trigger PSX fan project was shut down.

I know I’m with them on Net Neutrality but as soon as that’s over it’s back in the Firefox/Some-Other-Operating-System trenches.

You know, if there were any justice in this world Microsoft would hire the Halogen team and they would simply switch to working on the Halogen game for Microsoft. They clearly had the skills and the love to do it and being young they’d work cheap. But no, good will means nothing.