Not the iPod.

Occasionally annoying but usually insightful pundit Kevin Drum points us to an article in the LA Times by Steven Levy on the glories of the iPod. It’s an excerpt from Levy’s book The Perfect Thing. Now The Girls know this about me already–particularly Lindsey–but I will never get an iPod and there are several reasons why. This was actually a comment from the Kevin Drum post that I edited and enlarged a bit.

1) Apple Product. I can build a computer (it takes me forever and I’m not very good at it but…) and that means that Apple’s emphasis on design is irrelevant to me. I like my compatability and the logical sense I find in PCs. Thus I am biased against Apple to begin with but the real issue is this: like many agnostic or atheists I know, I have been witnessed a few too many times by Mac evangelists and now I have a knee-jerk resistance to Apple.

2) It’s an eggshell player. I drop my mp3 player (Sony’s Walkman) regularly, it’s got some scratches and dents in it after just 5 months. I mostly listen to it while jogging and that means its going to take a pounding in my shirt pocket or shorts pocket or wherever. I am totally honest when I say that if I had an iPod it would crumble to dust inside two weeks with the abuse I put my mp3 player through.

3) The wheel. In most versions of the iPod they use the wheel panel. To me this is completely counter intuitive and despite using it off and on for 4 years, I still cannot get used to it. My fingers and my mind are not made for the wheel. (As a matter of fact Apple OS’s frustrate me to know end with the way their buttons are, same problem!) The Sony Walkman has a twist know left for forward, right for back, pull out and it switches playlists. Very simple at least for me.

4) Batteries. My Sony walkman can run on full volume on the battery for something like 40-50 hours. Say I listen to it about 12-15 hours a week. I only need to charge it every 3-4 and even just plugging it into the computer to add another song to it gives it another few minutes of power.

5) No advantages. The iPod can of course be used as a portable data transfer device, but so can my Sony Walkman. My walkman has 512 MB which while not in the iPod’s upperange models, was a nice buy at about $70 and it serves my needs just fine. For anything else I’ll use USB or CDs or DVDs.

6) I hate the shuffle concept. When I load music onto an mp3 player, because I am jogging or walking somewhere, I need to distract myself. I am a very visual person. If I listen to the radio and hear a song, I’m not thinking about the lyrics very often. Usually I’m getting images in my head that are personal and important to me.

That means the music I load onto my mp3 player and the order I put it in allows me to imagine a story (and indeed the story I imagined while jogging has now become a draft of a novel) and the shuffle breaks that narrative. I like the music I listen to when it’s more than the sum of its parts so the shuffle is something I rarely use except when I have the winamp open on my desktop.

So that’s why I’ll never get an iPod. It’s not a bad device though it is fragile and expensive, but it was not designed for me.

Over at Last

So it’s over. The Oakland A’s have swept the Twins right out of the playoffs. It was a fairytale season and a miracle comeback in the toughest division in baseball. But this is real life, and not all stories end happily. I won’t say they didn’t come up big when it counted because if they had lost 1 more game this year, any game, they would not be in this place, this day. They would be playing the Yankees and for at least a few more hours have life. No, what happened here is that the “piranhas” got shut down, and there was nothing for the middle of the order to bring in. I salute Johan, and Boof, and Radke, and Cuddyer, and Morneau and White. The rest? You should be ashamed of yourself. You played like you should have been contracted. Like you wanted to be contracted.

For now I want the team, every single one of them to remember this:

Brad Radke’s sacrifice and final year? You wasted it. Liriano establishing himself? You wasted it. Kirby Puckett’s year? You wasted it. Ozzie Guillen calling us Piranhas? You wasted it. The Division Crown? You wasted it. The Homefield Advantage? You wasted it. The good Karma from the stadium bill? You wasted it. That 16-2 run in June? You wasted it. That 96-66 record? You wasted it. You wasted it all, pissed it all away.

And you know what? Now you have win 95 more games to try again. Think you can do it? You’d better.

I sure hope you can! See ya next year Twins.

A/N: That’s not me, it’s a random sad girl. You should know I’m a guy by now.

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.

On Law School

Oh my God.

It’s like Highschool…. with consequences.

Snakes on a _______

If I have a blog then I’m no stranger to the internet. On my last night before I leave for Iowa, I had a choice. What to do? Who to do it with. Well since I am on the crew of The Girls, we decided to see Snakes on a Plane (except Kristin, not a scray movie fan). So I saw it, and what did I think? Was it worth it to spend my last night of Freedom that way?

Oh my God.

Now, I am a pretty big Lord of the Rings fan and I did see the Phantom Menace (but not the next two) but I had not experienced that kind of audience reaction since I saw The Ring. During the Ring, everyone was scared which made it great. But Snakes on a Plane was something else.During SoaP, everyone was having a crazy time laughing and clapping and cheering. It was a kind of wild high. It was worth every minute. The greatest movie I have seen all summer bar none. I’ve heard some crazy stories about it already, people throwing rubber snakes during the movie, dressing up in snake costumes, some theaters having live snakes during the premiere. While the internet in particular helps you find a small niche, sometimes mass media helps you connect. For the running time of that movie, everyone in the theater shared a bond and that bond was Snakes on a Plane.

In my theater there were about forty to fifty people for the last show. Now that’s not too bad for a town in the upper midwest. As Lindsey said, there wasn’t anyone in that theater that wasn’t between 18-25. It’s definately a movie for the current youth generation. In fact, I can see it now: Snakes on a Plane is so popular a sequel is DEMANDED. But what to call it? Well fear not, because I have the answer and it is without a doubt, m#$@#!*^$(#)% brilliant. I present to you: Snakes on a Plane 2: More Snakes on Another Plane.

Perfect.

Ground Rules

Now personally I’ve always thought ground rules are boring but for the sake of my own quick tongue I’d better lay down a few or I know I’ll regret.

First, there will be no proclamations of romantic love on my blog. That’s private, personal and what if it were to go to the wrong person? I’d be in big trouble!

Second, there will be personal shout outs to people. But when there are you can contact me on the comments or email me and I’ll use an alias “paranoid girl A” or “chief” or something like that.

Third, if you disagree with my opinions tell me and we can engage in a lively spirited debate about it. Maybe I’ll even post it. But flamers will not be tolerated.

Fourth, if you’re a really cute girl and flame me, you’ll be tolerated for a little while. But you probably need to send me a picture or video to prove it. It might be too much work.

Well now that THAT is out of the way…. uh, I guess I have nothing. Oh wait I do have a little something. I present to you a video of a cat, flushing a toilet. Have a nice day!