BARBRI at home today

Two factors I considered:

(1) The BARBRI lady currently lecturing sucks.

(2) I had to install Nealon's car seat in the nanny's car, which took much longer than I expected. (I already get to BARBRI late without having to deal with that)

Now I'm just listening to lectures on Rob's big screen. Taiiiight.

Dear BARBRI lady:

You are not allowed to chastise us and snarkily tell us that you're speaking incomprehensibly fast to get us out in time, will not guarantee that we get out in time if we ask you to slow down, and then spend 20 minutes to give us a stupid pep talk about bar exam statistics, which will now make us 20 minutes late in getting out.

BARBRI. . .know your enemies.

If the people who are teaching BARBRI thus far are representative of the type of person I may become as a lawyer, I am seriously afraid of passing the bar. This lady I'm listening to sounds like she's on crack and she uses all these buzz words like "know your enemies" and "hit the target." I think she also said not to "Charlie out" (I think?) which she says is picking Bs and Cs on the multiple choice for long stretches. Also, you can tell that she is not thinking when she is talking and is just streaming all the words out of her mouth as she thinks of them.

I am definitely not pumped.

Nope.

Edit: She just said, "Come on guys, this isn't a social workers' exam. You guys are trying to be lawyers. You're not hippies."

Obviously, she doesn't realize that she is teaching at the equivalent of a hippie law school. Everyone laughed. I felt awkward, lol.

Edit 2: As a point of comparison, here are a few choice gems (almost verbatim) from my Business Associations 1 professor, who also was similarly oblivious to her audience:

"Where are my bleeding heart liberals at?" (she's a firm believer of the Chicago school of law)

"Who has family members with drug or substance problems?" (trying to relate a case to our lives, apparently).

Edit 3: "Keep your stamina, keep your focus."

This is the pen tablet device I've been looking for. . .

http://www.slashgear.com/hantech-siso-tablo-review-finally-2644675/

You can mount it on any laptop up to a screen size 15.4 inches, use it with a piece of paper and a pen, rather than the standard pen they give you, and pay only $99, which is the same price I paid for my Wacom tablets a few years back. Just add this to my wish list when I get a job.

PS: Thanks to Eva for her graduation gifts. I finished them both immediately, and will now be waiting for my Amazon.com purchase of Predictably Irrational which is expected to come to my door tomorrow.

Bad First Impression of Portland?

Yesterday morning, my dad remarked to my brother as they were flying in that he could see why I liked living in Portland.  Then, when they were waiting for their rent-a-car, my dad and brother observed the following exchange between the counter person (Counter) and another person (Person), both white males:

Person:  No ticky?  No ticky?

Counter:  No ticky, no washy!

*facepalm*  

Thank god my dad took it well (he gave a small laugh when telling me this story).  He usually has a tendency not to let stupid BS like that go.  Rachel didn't understand the reference, which I see as a fortunate sign of the times we live in, but this SF Gate article sums it up:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/07/04/DD125975.DTL

I really think I'm lucky that I've mostly avoided being the party in stories like that.  Maybe its a lame superpower of mine?

The Family's in Portland

So, it's been a while since a post, but with all the finals hectic over and a few days of relative ease under my belt, I figure it's time to start up once again.  Graduation, as many of you know, is this Saturday, and so my family is in town today.  Unfortunately, Rachel and I overslept due to a combination of (1) late cleaning and (2) late Nealon crankiness.  Nealon and I are just hanging out right now as Rachel is doing some last-minute errands before my dad and brother get to the house.  Now I just need to figure out how to entertain them while they're here. I'm really bad at that sort of thing. . .

Jon loves Dropbox, so we both get 250MB extra.

As I mentioned before, I have a referral link to Dropbox, an awesome service that allows you to automatically upload files (and changes to files) to an online server, as well as any computers that you install a program onto.  In addition, you can collaborate files between users.  Rachel and I share files between our two accounts for home-related files.

You get 2GB for free, and every referral you get gives you an additional 250MB.  In addition, if you signed up through a referral link (like mine), you start out with an extra 250MB as well.  These referrals can cap your free storage to 5GB permanently.

It's really awesome.  Jon just signed up, and I quickly got a notice saying that my space has increasd to 2.25 GB.  He loves it.  Maybe it's because he's a tech nerd, but let me break it down for you:  No effort on your part to back up your important files on a server, AND any extra computers you may have.

Do it, do it, do it!  Referral link:  Dropbox

So you're telling me they're getting paychecks. . . AND THEY'RE GOING BACK TO THE APPLICANT POOL?

So Rob sent me this link:  http://abovethelaw.com/2009/05/stroock_offers_75000_in_stay_a.php

For those of you too lazy to read, it's another story of how another firm that gave offers to hotshot 3Ls are buying out their offers cause they can't afford new associates.  Now this isn't some chump change, but $75,000, half this year, half the next.

At first, I thought it was a nice gesture by a law firm to try to cover its ass while not entirely dumping on the fresh graduates it bagged.  Then I realized that these guys are coming back into MY applicant pool, WITH a financial cushion, while I'm stuck here with no real income, a bucketful of loans, and no top 1%, 5%, 15%, 20% or 25% to my CV.

To illustrate how utterly screwed us regular folk our, let's examine how 3Ls get jobs.  Obviously, the graduates in the T14 will not have to worry about getting jobs in fall on campus interviews at hot firms.  In a school like LC, which is in the bottom quartile of the Top 100, we probably get the top 5% hired (ignoring connections, nepotism, contracts with the devil, etc.) through this process.  I mean, I know really smart dudes hovering around the top 15% who have no job secured, so they're basically in the same boat as me when the rest of the firms and other places that need attorneys finally lock down how many associates they'll need in the spring.  So here's the factors I have to face when trying to shoot for a public interest or government job:

(1) Top school (don't got that)

(2) Top 1-30% (don't got that)

(3) Top Environmental nerds (don't got that, except for one year in NEDC)

(4) Law Review (don't got that)

(5) Public Interest experience (don't got that)

(6) Government experience (got that)

(7) Connections (barely got anything related to that)

(8) Community service (got that)

(9) Leadership (got that)

(10) Sex appeal/charisma/nice teeth/"it" factor (we don't even have to go there)

Now, this isn't an exact list, but the major point I want to make is that schools matter, and grades matter.  The rest of us mere mortals rely on the guys who hit home-runs on the top two of my list to get quickly scooped up so that we don't have to deal with them in the spring.  Now because of the economy, we get screwed in two ways.  Overqualified attorneys are now taking up our applicant pool space, as well as the cream of the crop (who also have money).  This means that I am going to be screwed for the next 2 years of applications.  Maybe by then I'll have hit a high enough GRE to go back to school.

Nealon Watch, Day 3 (much better!)

I'm feeding him some veggie pasta, and he is rocking the water right now.  I think he's gonna be alright.  And he just laid out a big man-belch.

I love my son.