I’ve been thinking a lot this morning about  so-called “conventional wisdom”.  I know I had New Year’s resolutions (which, I think I’ve failed at again) but there’s something that I have actually been working at for the past year or so, but without verbalizing it.  I realized that there are always going to be things people tell you you should do.  The collective consciousness says you should floss, you should get an education, you should get this job or that job, you should spend more time with your family, you should stop this or that bad habit.  Now, moving on, you can, of course, either agree or disagree with all of them.  I agree that I should probably floss.  I disagree that a high-paying job equals happiness.  And so on.  So, here’s the thing that is new to me.  You can probably throw out the things you disagree with, if you’ve really thought about them and decided you disagree with good reason.  But I realized that of these things people always tell me I should do, there are some that I actually agree with, yet still wasn’t doing them.

So that’s my implicit resolution for the past 6 months or so…forget the fact that other people are making the suggestions:  if there’s things that I personally believe I ought to be doing, yet I’m not, then I have to start doing them.  There’s really only a couple reasons why I wasn’t doing them in the first place, the primary one being laziness, so it’s time to make room for things I want to have happen in my life.

OK:  here’s a few of the funniest cases we’ve read recently at law school:

#1:  We read a case about a breach of contract between Wal-Mart and a company called GTI, in Haiti. The company was contracted to produce 176,217 “vine reindeer” to be sold at Wal-Mart around Christmas-time. (They were reindeer figures made out of sticks/vines, as I understand it). Anyway, I’ll jump right to funny part.  Wal-Mart claimed a breach of warranty because the reindeer were “unsuitable for sale as Christmas merchandise.” In the court proceedings, Wal-Mart claimed the reindeer were “scary-looking.” Later, they said the “reindeer were in shapes that no more resembled a reindeer than they did a rabbit.” haha.

#2:  The Chicken Salad Conundrum.     We read this case in our torts class.  A tort is, at its simplest, non-criminal damage done to a person or property.  Knocking over someone’s mailbox when you park is a tort; so is throwing your couch out the window and it accidentally hits someone.  Anyway, here was a conundrum: at a Church luncheon, the food preparation was spread out so that no one person was doing all the work.  For a large bowl of chicken salad, 9 mothers at a church volunteered to bring in chicken.  Each mother prepared her portion of chicken at home and brought it to church.  At church, the chicken was all thrown into one big bowl, and mixed with other stuff to make a chicken salad.  Then, several people at the church, eating the chicken salad, became sick and the chicken salad was discovered to have bad chicken in it.  Who do the sick people sue?  How can you sue if you don’t know who caused your injury?  Can you sue all 9 mothers, knowing that in all probability only one of them was responsibility?  (The answer was yes, all 9 mothers were sued—but the result was no, none of the 9 mothers had pay any damages.)

#3 – And Perhaps I should save this one, because it’s so good, but I’m going to give it to ya now:

MAYO
v.
SATAN AND HIS STAFF.
Misc. No. 5357.
Dec. 3, 1971.

Civil rights action against Satan and his servants who allegedly placed deliberate obstacles in plaintiff’s path and caused his downfall…

“For the foregoing reasons we must exercise our discretion to refuse the prayer of plaintiff to proceed.”  hehe.

So I was visiting a site that keeps track of the most popular web videos of the week (http://www.avclub.com/content/videocracy) — it’s a good place to see good videos without having to search around a lot.

Adam was talking the other day about how the internet basically gives the world a forum to act like middle-schoolers.  Well, nowhere is that more apparent than in the comments to online content, and perhaps youtube is the best place to look for hilarious comments as well.

Anyway, one of the videos was about this high school girl basketball player.  She’s 6′7″ and this is a video of her doing a bunch of slam dunks.  Besides all the sexist ones like a comment that says, simply, “Gross”, and another that says, “That freeze frame is one of scariest things I’ve ever seen.  [She's so tall it] Reminds me of a giant vampire bat.”  I found this one that made me laugh out loud:

Also, Keith and other futurama fans will appreciate these comments:

• RE: She Lack the Will of the Warrior

  But her fundamentals are really sound.

  11:57 AM Wed February 13, 2008

• 
  

  RE: She Lack the Will of the Warrior

  by Flashman

  And she is good at snu snu.

So I just had this inspiration of one way that would encourage me to make more frequent, smaller posts.

It comes from this: every weekday, I start the morning by doing my law school reading for class that night. Let me describe law school textbooks to you: they’re very different from any other textbook I’ve read before.

They start by giving you a Concept/Rule. Today’s concept is “Res Ipsa Loquitur” (by the way, they’re not typically in latin, it just happens that today’s is). It briefly describes what the concept means:

“Res ipsa loquitur means, essentially, “the facts speak for themselves”. It is a doctrine of negligence law that allows a plaintiff (the person suing) to prove negligence without any evidence besides the accident itself.”

That’s pretty much all you get. What’s strange is that rather than explain this concept, it just goes right into a case. By that, I mean, an actual abridged transcript of a court case opinion, written by an actual judge. Anyway, a great many of these “cases” that you get in your textbooks are chosen either because they’re particularly relevant to the concept of the day, and, often because they’re just flat out interesting. So very often I read a case that is really interesting/funny/controversial, and I think, man, I want to tell people about this weird/special/funny case.

So, here we go. The case I’m going to share today happened in San Francisco in 1948.

LARSON v. ST. FRANCIS HOTEL (California Court of Appeals, 1948)

The accident out of which this action arose was apparently the result of the effervescence and ebullition of San Franciscans in their exuberance of joy on V-J Day, August 14, 1945. Plaintiff (who is not included in the above description), while walking on the sidewalk on Post Street adjoining the St. Francis Hotel, just after stepping out from under the marquee, was struck on the head by a heavy, overstuffed arm chair, knocked unconscious, and received injuries for which she is asking damages from the owners of the hotel. Although there were a number of persons in the immediate vicinity, no one appears to have seen from whence the chair came nor to have seen it before it was within a few feet of plaintiff’s head, nor was there any identification of the chair as belonging to the hotel. However, it is a reasonable inference that the chair came from some portion of the hotel. ….. and so on.

Haha. Anyway, I was so struck when I read that this case was about an armchair falling celabratorily out of a window that I wanted to share it.

(Interested in the outcome? Well, the lady who got hit with the armchair was trying to say that the hotel was negligent in allowing her injury. It is unknown who threw the armchair, and so she was trying to use the doctrine of ipsa-whatever that I talked about above, saying, essentially, “In this case, one does not need evidence of negligence–the fact that a chair fell out of a window is proof itself of negligence, regardless of particularities of evidence or lack thereof.” There are cases where such a thing works: for instance, a flour company dropped a barrell of flour out of their window, and it struck a passerby, and the passerby’s suit succeeded. They said, “A flour barrell falling out of a flour company’s window is proof enough that someone in the flour company was negligent.”

In this case, however, the rule does not apply, and the lady struck by the armchair loses, because “a hotel does not have exclusive control … of its furtniture–instead, they share that control with the guests of the hotel.” In this case, if you want to sue the hotel, extra evidence IS needed to show that it was the hotel, and not one of its guests, which was responsible.   Since no one could provide that extra evidence, the hotel doesn’t get in trouble.  Which is good I think, because it probably was a guest.)

What did Sushi A say to Sushi B?

“Wasssaaaa B??!”

Hey everybody!  Let’s get right down to bidness.

FIRST:

My vote for Drew’s blog name is “DrewAreBeautiful.com”

SECOND:

My favorite news in the past week was joining the YMCA!  It all started when I found out that in the month of January, in order to help people with their new years resolutions, the Indianapolis YMCAs had a deal where you paid the day of the month as your signing fee.  So, instead of the normal $45 signing fee, I paid $9 because I signed up on January 9th!  –Oh, and monthly fees are effected slightly by income, so as a student, my monthly fee is only $24!  Very cheap!  At the time, I thought, though, that I would be getting my money’s worth, and the Ys would be kinda inner-city-ish.

Now: in Indy, when you sign up for a Y, you’re signing up for the “Greater Indianapolis YMCA Assoc.”  So I actually have access to, like 6 YMCAs, two up north, one right downtown (but it’s small), one east side, &c.  So for the next week I started going to each one, just to see what they were like, right?

So, one day I walked into the 86th street and Westfield Blvd (Nora area) YMCA and holy cow!  It was really nice! Immediately a guy named Jim (who impressively still remembers my name every time I see him there!) swept me up into a tour of the place, and you could tell he was really excited about his place, and that was awesome.

Favorite things about the 86th St. YMCA:

    –Hot tub in the locker room

    –Really nice and clean pool

    –Actually the whole place is really nice and clean and new (they just renovated within the year)

    –They have a “family rec center” where you’re supposed to just let your kids play while you watch TV, but you can actually go to the front desk and check out a Nintendo Wii and play on the big screen TVs in that room.  hehe.

    –The locker room stays stocked with shampoo, soap, and shaving cream and disposable razors!  I haven’t used any of them, but dammit I like bragging about them.

   –Finally:  FITLINK.  All the exercise machines and weightlifting machines have little computers on them.  You type in a unique ID number for yourself and it pulls up all your information!  Tells you how much weight you lifted last time, lets you keep track of the amount of exercise you do (you can look back at the past day/week/month/year, and it knows how much stuff you’ve done!) and it can even suggest machines for you based on goals you want to achieve (like if your goal was “enormously muscular thighs”, as mine is.)

A STORY RELATED TO THE YMCA, WHICH IS TITLED “THE DAY THAT WAS REALLY FOUR DAYS”:

So here’s a funny story: in order to get an ID number to use the fitlink system, you have to sign up for an appointment with one of the staff at the YMCA.  I’m all excited because the place is so nice, so I say, “Ok–when’s the next appointment?  Sign me up!”  They say, “Well, we’re always really busy in January, so the next appointment isn’t until 3 weeks….oh…but someone just cancelled if you want to go tomorrow!”

Oh–but it’s tomorrow 7 A.M.!!!  Not quite believing the words coming out of my lips, I say, “Ok, sign me up for tomorrow.”  (This 7 am appointment is 8 hours from the time I made it, and I have been regularly waking up around 10 am at this point.)

Thus began “The Day that was Really Four Days.”

DAY 1:  I woke up around 6, and headed to the Y.  When I arrived I was a little morning-queasy and bleary-eyed, and I was disgusted to see LOTS of people at the Y, doing their brisk 5-7 am workouts–at least 30 people in the exercise room.  As for me, I thought I would basically tell them how much I weighed, and they’d teach me how to use the computers, and it would take 15 minutes tops.

But, to my surprise, I embarked on a long-term exercise regimen with a personal trainer named Melissa.  We established my goals (posture, flexibility, strength) and developed goals and homework assignments, and then, although it was about the last thing I wanted to do that early in the morning, she took me over to the cardio machines and told me to exercise for 20 minutes.  (Interestingly, I think this was part of the diagnostic–I think she was supposed to determine just how in or out of shape I was based on the 20 minutes she asked me to do.)

DAY 2:  I had brought all of my school stuff to the Y with that morning, because I thought perhaps it would be a good place to study.  I was totally right!  They had free wireless, and every time I got restless and needed a break from reading, I just hopped on a cardio machine.  I think studying at a gym is nearly perfect–the only thing they lack was food.  I studied for about 2-3 hours with some short exercising inbetween.

DAY 3:  I showed up for work at 1 and worked for 4 hours.  Then immediately after work, went to my law class for the night.

DAY 4:  Believe it or not, Dave Searle had called me to see if I wanted to play raquetball that night–at the 86th street Y.  I had already spent about 4.5 hours there in the wee hours of morning.   But…I was still so excited about my new world of Y, that I agreed, and spent another 2 hours at the Y that night.

So, that ONE day, I woke up at 6 am, went to bed at 1 am, and had been at the Y for 6.5 hours, and logged actual exercise time of 243 minutes (I know because the FitLink kept track!).

OK:  MOVING ON, THIRD

Third is short: I am currently eating a most delicious pizza.  What’s that you say?  No, actually it’s not delivery, but I assure you that is a common mistake.  No, sir, it is DiGiornio.

FOURTH

I sent the Portland kids a “Year of the Robot” e-mail about a guest lecture taking place at IUPUI called “The Morality of Machines: Teaching Ethics to Robots.”  And yes, I did attend.  Most of the technical stuff was over my head, but the gist of it is that there’s so many ways to determine what’s ethical, right, so do you make your robot Aristotelian or Marxist or Utilitarian or Libertarian or what?  But that’s if you build the robot with “top-down” ethics–meaning, you insert the ethics of your choice and then it just follows the directions.

Another approach is “bottom-up” ethics, where you develop a robot capable of evaluating the decisions it makes to view their outcomes, and seeing the effect of their decisions on the things around them.  In other words, you develop a robot with “child”-ness.  It performs basic actions and then its masters–the humans around him and such–tell him whether it was right or wrong to do what it did.  So, the robot would have to be able to, say, look into a humans eyes and see that it is causing the human pain or discomfort or even just awkwardness.

Another thing I found interesting is that, sure, we don’t have robots walking around us from day to day, carrying our drinks to us, but there are robots operating large-scale decision-making roles in society right now–but they’re “software bots” meaning they don’t have a body, they’re just on a computer somewhere.  The best example this guy made was the computers at the credit card companies.  For every credit card swipe, they have to look at your credit, determine if you are credit-worthy (which is a value-judgment after all, and isn’t that what ethics are?  Value Judgments?), and then either accept or deny your credit card.

He also spent some time talking about robotic AI research going on all over the world, and describing what they’re currently working on.  All in all, it was interesting and I’m glad I went.  Sorry I can’t recount more, but there was a lot of information!

FINALLY, FIFTH

Last weekend, Adam and I attended a neighborhood Progressive Dinner.  You know–that’s where each part of the meal is held at a different person’s house?  Our meal had five part, each at a different location: drinks/appetizers, soup, salad, entree, dessert.  We had gotten a flyer in our mailbox and we thought, oh, I guess maybe they’ll be 8-10 people that show up.  We volunteered to make a soup.

 And let me tell you breifly, Adam had this soup he wanted to make, and it was the weirdest, craziest receipe I think I’ve ever been a part of.  In fact, I confess I was totally skeptical of this soup–I was worried it would be weird, crazy.  It was called “Thai Pumpkin Mango Soup”.  It contained ingredients which I have never conceived or dared to mix: pumpkin puree, mango chunks and mango puree, peanut butter, both garlic and ginger, plus milk, red peppers, and quite a bit more vinegar than I expected.  Can you even imagine a soup with those ingredients??

When we arrived at the first stop of the progressive dinner we were shocked to see upwards of 50-60 people!

We had no idea when we signed up, but apparently this is an annual event in our neighborhood, and there are people who have been to the last 10 years’ progressive dinners.

Well, I’m proud to say that Adam’s soup–of which I was skeptical–was a complete hit!  I was shocked to find that it was really good!  And it seemed, somehow, agreeable good and not even odd-tasting.  It was just a surprisingly pleasant thing to eat, and several people asked who made it and where can they get the recipe.

Anyway, there were two reasons why this progressive dinner was totally awesome and the best Indianapolis social event I’d been to since I lived here.

1.  It was an ideal environment for meeting lots of people and having lots of conversation.  It’s not like the way most people “socialize” which involves going to a smoky bar where you can’t hear each other speak and spending way too much money on light beer.  No–everyone was sitting around eating, and talking, and every time you went to a new house you had a new opportunity to sit with different people and meet them, too.

2.  The food was really, really, freaking good!  I think it’s the best I’ve eaten in a long time.  It’s because the people that brought food only brought one item, like a soup, or a pasta sauce, or a pan of brownies–and so they pulled out all their best, most delicious recipes and holy cow, every stop had new volumes of delectable faire to excite the taste buds. The salad wasn’t just a bowl of lettuce–it was, like, an italian pasta salad, a greek salad with all the fixins (including lots of feta!), oriental salads, and so on.  Each course was soooo tasty.  I ate like a king.

DENOUEMENT

Ok, so I will try to write shorter, and more often, but those were the things I wanted to talk about.  So thanks for stopping in, and be sure to look for my good friend Drew’s first post at his new website, drewarebeautiful.wordpress.com.  At least, if anyone listened to MY brilliant ideas.

6 (almost 7) months in review!!!

July: This month, so long ago and cloudy in my memory, saw me go back to my summer camp for a two week visit. It was awesome as usual. Well…mostly awesome. I did have a lot of trouble with a particular camper. I kept thinking, “Man…I’m only here for two weeks, so why’d I get stuck with THIS kid?!” But in my two weeks I did the best I could to do all my favorite stuff, but instead of having the whole summer to get it done, I stuffed it into two weeks.

August: The big news from this month was having no job and no worthwhile ambition, living in Noblesville and whittling away at my savings. But I did get an acceptance letter to law school, which will become the big news next month.

September: I moved away from Noblesville and into an apartment in Indianapolis. It was a very fortunate circumstance. I had been searching endlessly on the OneStart and Craigslists posts for a good roommate to live with in Indy, without much hope or excitement: in my mind I expected to get some quiet, boring kid who never left his room. In fact, I think the person I imagine when I think of a random roommate is actually Keith’s roommate when he lived in Teter at IU. At the time, Keith was called “Casey”.

So there I was, looking for roommates, when I get an e-mail from a guy I had met in Bloomington and hadn’t seen in over a year: Adam Ploshay. Funny story: the place I met him was that he was the instructor of my LSAT prep class at IU. This is interesting because I don’t think he ever took the LSAT and he’s certainly not in or planning to go to law school. Another funny story: I had already taken the LSAT and gotten literally the national average score of 154. Then, I decided to re-take it, but first to take this prep class. Adam has since said that he feels guilty that after I took his prep course, when I re-took the exam I got the exact same score.

Anyway, I’m looking for a roomate and Adam sends this e-mail, “Hey all my friends from Indiana!  I’m back from Istanbul where I’ve been travelling for a year!”  I write him back, and find out he’s temporarily with his parents and looking for a place to live in Indianapolis.  Geez.  Anyway, now we’re roommates, and Adam’s awesome, and the arrangement is working out very well.  Check out our apartment on Google Maps Street View by typing in our address: 2001 N. Talbott, 46202.  (It’s the brick one with the big columns!)

October: I forget when exactly law classes started, but I’m going to write about them here. Let me start by saying that I highly recommend being an evening student. It’s great! I have ONE class a day, from 5:30 pm -7:30 pm. That’s not bad, people! I would say that, on average, I study two hours for each class, so 4 hours a day are spent on academics. This is perfect for me: I think I understand why people think Law school is so hard–it’s because the full-time students have 2, sometimes 3 classes a day, which means they’re spending 8 or MORE hours just studying law. That’s too much, right?

Law School is different from all prior education I’ve had in my life. For one, there are *no assignments*. Every day you are responsible for about 15-20 pages of *reading only*. You never have to hand in your answer to a study question, never have to give a speech, never have to do a (tremble) group project, never have to design a powerpoint presentation or tri-fold science-fair display presentation. No: all you do is read and show up. There’s one grade in the whole semester–your final exam.

This sounds worse than it is. You might think–you mean it’s all on the line for a single exam? What if I mess up on the exam? They gave us two, almost three weeks without any class and without any new material in order to study, so the only way I can think of to “screw up” on the exam is to not study at all for it.

Also, there’s this weird grading thing that I still don’t fully understand… I think it goes something like this…The number of B+ though A must equal or exceed 20%, the number of C+ through B must equal or exceed 45%, and the number of F through C- must *not* exceed 15%. So, here’s the application: all you have to do is be better than the bottom 15% of the class, and you have succeeded, no matter how poorly you have done. Yeah, maybe you won’t get the $100,000 job right out of law school like those kids that manage to get straight As in law school, but you’ll definitely pass, graduate, and get a job by simply not being the worst 15% of the class. Weird.

By the way, I will get my first semester’s grades now in about one week! I’ll try to post them!

Also in October I happened across Brad Woolems, and together we competed in an IUPUI Cornhole Tournament. We were called the “A-Maize-ing Corn-Holy Rollers”. To get the name I went to punoftheday.com and did a search on all puns having to do with corn. haha. We beat one team, and the second team beat us (but only by a ridiculously lucky turn where one of the opponents inexplicably got like 11 points on his turn). There was a team at the tournament called “The We Hate Tom Bradys”. I was rooting for them after we lost.

November: I don’t really remember anything about this month. I happen to know that my Birthday occurs in November, though. Oh–yeah, I had a “game party” for my birthday, and it was great. We played the drawing game (sentence-fold-picture-fold), catch-phrase, …and other games like that.

Oh yeah! Here’s something else that happened, and it may have happened in November. I got a part-time job. So now I’ve got a part-time job, and part-time school. It works out great because I’m not doing the same thing all day, all week. I’ve got some variety, you know, so I don’t get sick of either thing.

I only work 16 hours a week at the IUPUI Center For Teaching and Learning. This is an office at IUPUI that helps faculty and professors to innovate their teaching methods and strategies. There’s two main services the office provides: Instructional Design (meaning it helps the teachers with course design, keeping their kids engaged, using unique and interesting styles and methods of teaching) and then there’s also Instructional Technology (meaning it helps the teachers use technology in their instruction…like a teacher might say, “I want to make my lecture into a podcast online!” or “I don’t know how to animate my powerpoint presentation!” and we help them do those sorts of things.)

I was hired to the Instructional Technology half, and I was hired as a “video specialist”. Now anytime a faculty member wants to use video in their class, they make appointments with me. It’s a great job!

PLUSSES OF THE JOB:

–I get to work with computers and video–which I like and am good at–but I don’t just sit in front of a computer all day by myself–I work with a faculty-person and teach them face-to-face (much less boring!).

–Also, the other people in the office are totally awesome, and I get along with them really well–much better than the couple of people at my old video job. I’ve already got a group of friends at the office, including my new boss, Tom, who is awesome and totally nice and who plays a really badass bass guitar.

–Because the office is at IUPUI, they’re super-flexible about allowing me time off in order to accommodate my classes. For instance, I just got the whole week off before my CivPro final, and they were totally ok with it.

–Also because the office is at a university, there’s strange things that I’ve never encountered before at any other job. It’s an educational institution, so their goal isn’t to make money! I’ve never worked at a place before that wasn’t trying to earn a profit. Instead, the goal is development and improvement of the faculty at IUPUI! The best part of this works like this: if we don’t have appointments with faculty, we are encouraged and expected to learn something new. I mean, at any other job, if you don’t have a client, that’s when you start doing busy work, like cleaning the place, restocking the whatevers, marketing in order to get more clients, or whatever other unenjoyable stuff you can think of. But at this job, if I don’t have an appointment I can say, “I think I’d like to learn Flash, so that if a faculty member needs help with flash, I’ll be able to know what they’re talking about–and because I’ve always wanted to learn flash anyway.” I have spent some time at my job, for instance, playing on Second Life–that online virtual world you hear about in the news–because you could potentially hold distance education courses online in Second Life spaces (and because I was getting paid to mess around with, essentially, a video game).

–MINUSES OF MY JOB AND MY LAW SCHOOL

–One is that occasionally at the job where I help faculty with computers, well, sometimes you get a faculty person that’s like, “Hey, I don’t know jack crap about computers, but I want to produce a 10-minute video about tips on investing, for my Finance class.” And I’m like, “Wait, so you need explanation about what a ‘double-click’ is, but you expect me to be able to teach you how to do advanced video-editing?” Here’s a good example of what can sometimes be frustrating–there was a teacher who had recorded a speech she gave, and now she wanted to post the video online. She regretted not asking the class to move to the front seats, because in the video it looks like she’s giving her speech to 4 uninterested people. She honestly asked me this, and I am not making it up: “Is there any way [using video editing] that we can make it look like there are more people in the audience?”

No, ma’am, there is not.

–A Minus of my part-time job, part-time school schedule. I really like the shedule I have going now, as I told you, but there is one drawback. I have class EVERY weeknight from 5:30-7:30, and I usually don’t get home until 8. The problem is that I can’t join any clubs or any groups because every club just about meets at 6 or 7 at night. I can’t do any intramural sports, can’t attend any weekly meetings of choirs or caving clubs or evening Ultimate Frisbee games. That’s too bad…

December: The big news in December was the final exams. We did get 2 weeks with no classes in order to study, so there was no shortage of opportunity to study. The exams were kindof intense, I have to admit, because each of my two exams was 4 hours long. They were also both essay exams. What they do is give you a “fact pattern” (a hypothetical client’s problem). Like, for my contracts class, two business people meet at a restaurant to discuss a contract. Business person #2 gets a phone call and says, “I have to go, emergency at the plant! But I don’t want to lose your business, so let me write down what we talked about.” So he grabs a napkin and jots down, “My company to manage your apartment complex next July, the usual services. Tom Jenkins.”

Then, in your essay, you have to discuss whether or not this napkin note is a binding contract, because July comes around, and Tom doesn’t manage the apartment complex. He argues, “What?! That wasn’t a binding contract, I just wrote down a summary of our discussion!” But the first person says, “But you signed it and everything, now I’m going to lose a whole bunch of money because I thought I had a manager but it turns out I don’t! You owe me because I relied on your promise!”

And so on. You write in your essay all about whether the contract is binding or not, and whether either person has to pay the other as a result of breaching the contract.

Also in December I went to Ohio to visit Morgan and had an awesome New Years celebration with her and her friends playing games like Catchphrase, guitar hero, ping pong, and clue. I love group games, now, by the way–that’s a new thing with me that I talk about a lot.

January: So now I’m all caught up, right? It’s mid-January and not much has happened. on January 10 it was Morgan’s birthday, and it was a huge success, if you ask me. She decided to have her party at La Charreada in Bloomington, and, no joke, 30 people showed up! I’ve never had that many people celebrate my birthday! It was also great to have it at the restaurant because she didn’t have to pay for everyone’s food or drinks, and she didn’t have to clean up. High Five, Mo!

Also, last week I joined the Indianapolis YMCA and I think after I write this post, I’m going to go for a swim

So, we’ll see if I keep this blogging thing up, or not. The problem is I spend so much time in front of computers that when I have free time, the last thing I want to do is get in front of a computer again and write a blog post.

But I am glad to finally change my blog, because for the past 7 months, any curious visitors to my site got to read “My Job And How I Lost It” so that they instantly think I’m a bum. Now they can read about how I’m a law school student, so take that! Alright, see ya!

Hiya everybody!

Before I get bloggin’, I’ve got some important news!  Victory Brothers, INC. is now on YOUTUBE!  Visit http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=VictoryBrothersInc  to see for yourself! To get them by youtube search, you have to type “victorybrothersinc”.  I don’t have every video up, but I have got 17 of them.  There’s a few I still need to do, and also a few that are more than 10 minutes long (which is YouTube’s maximum, so I’ll have to edit them down to ten minutes).

Please go to YouTube, make an account for yourself, and then send a request to the VictoryBrothersInc YouTube page to be their “friend” and also to “subscribe” to our page so it doesn’t look so empty and unpopular!  Word!

Now I’ll try to tell some good stories from recently.

–Morgan got back from Ireland last week, and I went to pick her up from the airport and spend the weekend with her. It was fun, and her parents are excellent cooks and when they’re not cooking excellently for me, they’re taking me to excellent restaurants, so one way or another they see to it that my food is excellent.

–I’ve learned Customized DVD Authoring. I can make my own menus in photoshop with ANY graphics I want, and use Adobe Encore to make the buttons go wherever I please, I can make motion backgrounds and video buttons and secret hidden buttons that you have to press a button combination to get to and video transitions between menus and submenus. Today I just finished building a DVD for our company that has 18 videos, 6 video motion menus, maybe 30 buttons, and completely custom-made graphics and button highlighting. Saweet!

–At the big church I go to, I have been on the “Production Team” for almost two years now. Recently I moved away from video camera and into “Video Directing”…which is Live video switching and technical directing. So, two video directors are up in a booth with radios. We say, “Camera 1, go here, and camera two go there” and then we video switch between them, as well as switching between computer graphics, DVDs, and whatnot. But I had only done very little switching myself until last weekend, when I did two of the services, and the other guy did the other two. It was fun! I don’t think I made any blatant errors, to my knowledge, but the other guy (who’s more experienced) helped me out a LOT and reminded me of things when I forgot to switch to ‘em. Totally fun though. In fact, I have come to really, really LOVE that church–not just the production team, but the services are just really, really awesome and enjoyable, and I feel closer to God than I think I’ve ever felt before!

–Ok…I have to go, meeting parents for dinner. They’re taking me out to dinner to congratulate admission to part-time law school, which I’ll start this fall at IUPUI. I’m pretty excited–I’ll tell more about it later. I could just save this as a draft and write more, but since I haven’t had anything in so long, I’ll put this on before I allow myself to prcrastinate any further.

Peace out!

Ok, everybody:

At my video job, one of our clients is a Biopharmaceuticals company. We shot some video for them and put it onto a DVD that they can give to potential clients and play at trade shows.

About 2 months ago, my boss asked me to design the storyboards for a opening animation to precede the main video on the DVD. He said he wanted something based on a very complicated animation from the corporate parent of the company. But, he wanted ours to be faster and include pictures. Once I designed the storyboards, he’d send them to the animator he typically hires to actually animate it.

So, 2 months ago, I began to design those storyboards. It took me perhaps a full week or two weeks in PowerPoint to design them. The PowerPoint included 32 slides, each with text description of the animated events that would be occurring.

Finally, when I had that done, we were all a bit apprehensive about anyone understanding the depth of detail–other than me, since I made it. So, I took what at the time was a huge plunge. I said, “I think I’d like to try to animate it.”

Now, before this project began I knew, practically speaking, nothing about Adobe After Effects. Even as I offered to attempt to do the complex animation myself, I was scared it would prove to be way out of my league–but I wanted to try.

Coming from almost zero knowledge of After Effects it took me about a month and a half to design the completed animation, which was finally, finally finished a few days ago. I don’t know exactly how much time I spent on the project–whose completed run time is a mere 1 minute and 15 seconds–but I’m sure I spent beyond 120 hours, or three weeks of full-time work. Since I was learning, I think this is okay. Next time I have an After Effects project, I’m sure it will take much less time. Because now, ladies and gentlemen, I am allowed to call myself a professional animator. Upon receipt of the completed animation, I was touched to hear the clients approval: “exceeds expectations” and “watching it gave me the chills” were two things the clients actually said.

And that made me extraodinarily happy. Because the goal, really, for anyone who does anything in the arts, is to give the audience chills, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’m both glad to have gotten the opportunity to learn and to finish something that I’m quite proud of. It’s still not fully professional-grade, I think (it wasn’t as good as the Cook corporate one which inspired it, but which is quite different)–but it’s pretty good considering I didn’t know how to animate at all before I began the project.

Without further adieu, here it is: The Overview Animation.  Keep in mind Youtube makes it look a bit more compressed than the real version:

-As for the domain, well, I guess there’s really no need for it, is there? I got it orginally so I wouldn’t have to be elisfanclub.com/andyman, because that would incorrectly imply that I was a fan of Eli.      Now that I can have a free wordpress one, what’s the point?
-As for the “tower” (it’s literally the size of a chess piece). I don’t think I can get one to give to my friends. I wasn’t on the shoot; they gave one to my boss, and he seems to be pretty fond of it.

As for pictures…sadly, no, my little Coolpix has been out of commission since summertime, and I haven’t gotten a new one. That’s why you haven’t seen any pictures for months. About the only time I wish I had a camera these days iswhen my work takes me to cool shoots . Today I went to Baxter BioPharma in Bloomington and shot more crazy biotech machinery. I might start borrowing my dad’s camera on shoots.

–Finally, here’s a funny story: last week at a shoot, I committed the *cardinal* sin. Yes, that’s right: while filming an interview with the President of Purdue University, my cell phone rang. (It was Patrick who was calling me, in case you were wondering. haha.) The President of Purdue actually got annoyed and said, “Why don’t you turn that off now?”–as if I wasn’t obviously doing it without his suggestion. My bosses teased me for being “reprimanded by the President of Purdue”.

But, I can unbiasedly say that I thought the President of Purdue wasn’t very friendly the whole time–not just when he was annoyed by my honest mistake. Maybe he was having a bad day, but he was cold to all of us throughout the shoot.

Ok, that’s all!

Just so you know, everyone, I got an e-mail the other day from Nameboy telling me that   lifeofandyman.com   is going to expire in a couple weeks.

SO…update your bookmarks all 3 or 4 of you!  The address will need to be changed to the wordpress one:

andyman.wordpress.com

Thanks!

And, a quick story so you don’t feel too cheated.  My boss went to a shoot in Kentucky last week without me, and he was filming something for this crazy science research place.  They had this technology that I’ll try to explain to you.

As a little parting gift, something they give clients and people to show off their technology, they give you a chess piece.  A Rook — the “castle” chess piece.  It’s a normal-looking, white, plastic rook that’s about 1.5 inches tall.  But, it’s hollow, and this rook has a tiny little castle door, and a few castle windows.  If you look inside the tiny doors or window, there’s two interesting things: a spiral staircase around the outisde of the inner wall, and a perfect little double helix going straight from the center of the ceiling to the center of the floor.

Now, here’s what’s hard to grasp.  There’s no seams anywhere on this rook.  Think about it:  how could you possibly put something inside the castle without having seams?

It’s some technology where they have a pillar of powder, and then lasers shoot at the plastic, melting it together.  It starts at the bottom, and then individual layer by individual layer it slowly, slowly builds inside and out vertically, and then closes itself off at the top.

It’s hard to be impressed by the description, but when you look at it and realize you can’t possibly have things inside the castle without some trick, it’s pretty darned impressive.  Now they don’t just use it to make chess pieces, of course.  One thing they’re using it for is to make an inside-out accurate model of an archaeological skull so they can study the skull without breaking open the real one (or something).

And, they use the technology for jets and stuff becuase they can somehow make mechanical pieces and parts that in a normal jet would have to have seams, and be weaker because of it; but with this they can have the pieces be seamless and therefore stronger (or something–it’s a bit beyond me!)

Ok.  Remember the new web address!  See ya suckas!

You’re right, of course, Drew. I was going to report more but I had to leave when I was writing. Here’s what I was going to say:

You know, there was a funny thing about the Super Bowl, and the first Indy Colt’s win. The party I attended was exciting, and we were all cheering, yelling, and rooting, but when it came to around the 4th quarter, a unique and surprising emotion came over me: Calm.

I had an intense feeling of rightness with the Colt’s win. Not a “Oh my Gosh, I can’t believe it–we’re the Champs, holy cow!” feeling but a relaxed, “woah…it finally happened; we did it, we deserved it, and now it’s over.” The feeling, excited though I was to have finally been rooting for a team that succeeded was, “Of course!” Maybe a bit of it was also speechlessness; it hadn’t quite set in, and perhaps it still hasn’t, that the season is over, and we’ve no more to prove.

Until next year, where I’ll be right there with them once again.

I believe a commentator at the Super Bowl mentioned a similar effect about the reactions of the fans at the actual stadium in Miami. Although in the stadium Bear’s fans outnumbered Colt’s 3:1, you would have thought the underdog fans at the stadium would have been ecstatic–but the stadium was calm.

Finally, I have to say the person who has impressed me the most, besides the Super Bowl MVP, was our admirable, respectful, and dignified Coach Dungy. I doff my hat to you, Coach.