I can't go to a concert with a ticket that costs $250. It's just not right. It's counter to everything I stand for about music. Here at particleman.org, we stand for things, and one of those things is not price-gouging music fans. I saw Fugazi for $5. I can't possibly see a show with a $250 ticket.

So instead, I think the My Chemical Romance/Muse show in two weeks is more reasonable. It's $30. I think I can handle that. The only thing that bothers me is that Muse isn't the headliner, they're the opener, so their set will be short.

Particleman.org therefore says, "F**k The Police." They charge too much.

It's called the "Where Should Particleman Go After The Bar" game. I encourage your suggestion to be different and daring. Do not take cost into account, since I will most likely be borrowing (yet more!) money to pay for the trip. Do, however, take safety and digestive issues into account. With exception to Israel, I do not want to go any country I have already visited:

Canada
Costa Rica
Ecuador
England
Holland
Belgium
Germany
Austria
Italy
France
Czech Republic
Israel
Russia
Lithuania

It's the holiday when Jews typically spend a week remembering how the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt and escaped Pharaoh's grasp by the hand of God. Part of that remembering involves giving up all foods resembling bread, which includes anything with yeast. Passover is also the holiday when Particleman drinks a lot of beer, eats a lot of pasta, and enjoys many sandwiches. With bread. Thankfully, Judaism contains no concept of Hell, and neither does Particlemanism.

The eighth installment of the series.

1. You are forced to steal your own car because the alarm has malfunctioned and locked the ignition
2. Your alarm goes off while driving, so you rip out the lead wire to the siren
3. Once in Dallas, the alarm drains your battery while you’re out partying at bars
4. You wake up at 6:30 on Saturday morning to attend a 5K run your law firm is sponsoring
5. It’s 35 degrees. You don’t run . Instead, you get the best 20-minute massage of your life.
6. It snows.
7. Later that day, you and your boss’ brother manage to jump your car and bypass the alarm by ripping apart the rest of the alarm assembly. Wires dangle from under your steering wheel.
8. You play your friend’s Nintendo Wii. You want a Wii too.
9. You almost bust a lung laughing at all the rabbits you’re shooting with plungers. Rabbits don’t like plungers and you have a plunger gun. Life is good.
10. You eat Mediterranean food with friends on Saturday night. One of the guests just happens to be the law student from whom you sublet an apartment last summer.
11. You can’t remember how well you cleaned the apartment when you moved out but you hope it was good enough, because she’s sitting right there.
12. Hennessey mixed with Grand Marnier becomes your new favorite drink when your friend insists you try it later that night.
13. You nickname one of your friends "Roshanda Bangkok Nigeria Horowitz."
14. You and your friends eat lunch the next morning in the part of town affectionately termed “The Gayborhood.” You might have been checked out, but you’re not sure. Your waiter is wearing bunny ears and a bunny tail (hello, it’s Easter).
15. You play more Nintendo and take the record for fastest rabbit runner, but running in Nintendo has nothing to do with feet.

Remember that ethics test I took last semester? Well, I flunked it. You need to get a "scaled" score of at least 85 (out of 150) to pass, and I only got a 75. Pretty bad, I know. I retook the test last month and my score came back today. I got a 120. I kicked the crap out of that test. I am truly an ethical person. So what am I gonna do now? Drink. There's a happy hour down the street with my name on it.

I don’t post about recent cases I find interesting because most of you probably won’t find them any more interesting than a plate of okra. But this case is interesting. I promise.

Some high school kids (the nerds) are suing a company called Turnitin that archives student papers in a database and compares them against recently submitted papers to check for plagiarism. The idea is to keep kids from cheating off of other kids’ work. While this is a worthy cause, Turnitin apparently archived some papers without the authors’ consent. Viola – copyright infringement. They are profiting off of the nerds and the nerds are suing for $150,000 per infringed paper for a total of $900,000.

It pays to be a nerd.

Story via Patry.

addendum: in response to a comment i got in the hall today, if this happens to get the nerds laid, more power to them.

I messed up my neck pretty good this morning in the shower. It's happened to me before. I think I pinched or pulled something and its preventing me from moving my head up, and most any other way i turn it hurts. I end up having to turn my entire body to talk to people and I have to keep my head pointed sort of down, which, as you can imagine, kind of puts me in an awkward position when talking to women. Yeah, I've become "that guy."

I made my first ever appointment with a massage therapist for tomorrow morning and I can't wait. It's an hour. I hope she can knead this pinch or knot or whatever it is out of my neck so I can walk around like a normal person again. Chances are I'll be really sore when she's done. I'll probably need more sessions. Don't people get hooked on this stuff? And just so you know, I've already gotten one joke about happy endings. Don't think you're all clever and witty, someone beat you to the punch.

You pervs. Get your minds out of the gutter.

The massage was nice but it didn't relieve the pain. It did give me some more mobility though. I guess it will just take a few days for my muscles to heal. I can tell you one thing - at one hour and three minutes, Massive Attack's album Mezzanine makes for a great soundtrack to a one-hour massage appointment.

Bike geek socks. Thank You Google Checkout.

I should have decided to move EAST.

WTF.

[ click for larger version ]

Mexico won the contest. It's close, it's cheap, and I've never been. I am going to Riviera Maya with two of my Dallas friends for seven days. The itinerary will go something like this:

1. Locate beach with white sand and crystal blue water
2. Secure alcoholic beverage
3. Claim easy chair or hammock
4. Decompress

Repeat repeatedly. Other activities may include:

1. Snorkeling, sailing, etc.
2. Visiting ancient ruins
3. Hopping to nearby islands for day-trips
4. Renting a moped and riding around
5. See four items above

Thanks everyone for playing. One day, I will visit all of the other places. One day...

I know it kind of makes me seem like an alchie to be posting about a "new favorite drink," but this is too good to keep to myself. I'm not much of a liqour guy - I like me some beer. But one of my friends in Dallas introduced me to a wonderful concoction called a French Connection. It's cognac (Hennessey, in my case) mixed with amaretto (Grand Marnier), with a couple ice cubes to cool it off. It's kind of a fru-fru drink, I know. But it's really good, and a couple of them will give you a nice buzz for the rest of the night.

I am cursed to have bad laptop luck. The laptop my dad fixed a couple months ago done broke again, and this time, the breakage was permanent. Fed up with buying laptops that consistently fail right when I need them, I resolved to never again spend a lot of money on a new laptop, which is convenient because I don't really have any.

I hopped on Craigslist while I was in Dallas over Spring Break and found an IBM X30 for $450. It's a tad low on RAM (256 MB) and it doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, but it's well-built and very, very light. At least i thought it was well-built until i cracked the edge of the case. I put it in my backpack after one class, walked to my next class, and there was a crack in the case waiting for me when I pulled out the laptop.

No matter. It still works. As for the RAM, I sucked it up and bought 512 more MB. It's a little quicker now.

I had a free ticket to see Kofi Annan speak last night. I gave it up so I could see a ska show instead. I think it was the right choice.

Via onotob. Sorry, but you kind of have to be a nerd to know what this means. Non-nerds will have to do the best they can.

var particleman = everyone.getPerson['Particleman'];
var myPerspective = {evil:'Having to take the Bar exam',good:'Riding bikes, drinking beer, reading books, and traveling'};
for (var personId in everyone)
{
var p = everyone[personId];
p.desiresNoBarExam = true;
p.proactive = true;
p.perspective = myPerspective;
p.send (particleman,p.assets.getAssetType('cash').getAmount(1,'dollar'));
}

Thanks Lee.

I've been in a little bit of a funk lately. It's a combination of stress from finals, worries about the upcoming bar exam, and a lack of good shows. I haven't seen a good show in a while. But this Thursday a band called Vedera is playing and I'm really excited. I randomly found this band on myspace and I liked what I heard. Imagine a slightly harder and new-for-2000s-era-hipsters version of The Sundays.

Most of what I like about this band is the vocalist. So many vocalists in young bands pretend to sing but are unable to control what talent they may have. The vocalist for Vedera really knows what she's doing. Her voice is pure and clear, and it doesn't sound like it's been tweaked by studio equipment. She does seem to rely on some common emo-vocalist gimmicks, but hey, they're a young band. I'm willing to cut them some slack. The music is a little mediocre, so I'm expecting her to carry the show.

If you wanna go, it's $9 in advance/$11 at the door at Walter's on Washington. Show starts at 9. Get tickets here.

You can (legally) download two cd-quality songs here. Their old name was Veda, so I think Veda shows up in the file name.

The coolest thing happened today. I plugged my ipod in, loaded iTunes, and iTunes said:

So I said: "Huh. That's funny." I unplugged the iPod and performed a 'reset.' Then just to be on the safe side, I made sure all my music was still there. Lo an behold - it was all gone! Every last song! No where to be found! After spending weeks - no, months - honing the perfect playlist so that it had just the songs I wanted and none of the ones I didn't, it all went bye-bye. Now I get to compile the list for a second time.

*grumble*. apple, i shake my fists at you.

Contents of my fridge:

• salsa
• milk
• juice
• shredded cheese
• tortillas
• ketchup
• old root beer
• one bottle of sam adams
• strawberry jam
• eggs
• mayo
• butter
• parmesan cheese
• old phili cream cheese, possibly now rock-solid

And that's more than it usually has. I wonder what I can make using only those items.

I don’t feel good about giving a negative review, but every Vedera song sounded the same. I was expecting a little more variety. And when a band uses lyrics that include “I see that sparkle in your eye,” (or anything close to it) I know it’s time for me to bail. Vedera are a great pop-rock band… if you’re in high school. The vocalist did steal the show as I excepted, and she was phenomenal, but the rest of the band did not impress me enough to get passed the general boringness of it all. I felt bad for them since only 40 or 50 people showed up and many of them were sitting at the bar. I figure that if I’m going to watch a band, I will show them enough respect to at least stand up. I guess I needed more rock and less pop. Twenty-five minutes of their set was all I could handle.

The other surprise Vedera’s opener. They were better than I expected. Though the singer looked about 16, This Is Me Smiling put on a solid show of piano-laced rock. Imagine a younger Ben Folds Five with electric guitar, but not quite that good yet. Give them a few more years (at least until they stop claiming “dependent” on their tax returns).

Vedera didn’t cure my music funk. I think what I really need is a Flogging Molly show.

Two neighbor stories for you.

1. I live in a garage apartment behind a duplex, which means my apartment is right next to someone else's backyard. They have fence, but it's not wooden, so you can see through it. They also have a patio where they tend to hang out. My washing machine and dryer are outside my apartment, which means I have to walk outside to do laundry (I share the washer and dryer with the tenants in the duplex). See Exhibit A below.

Exhibit A

There is normally no one in the backyard when I am doing laundry, so I tend to walk outside without a shirt. I figure hey, it's my place, it's not very far, and I'm basically in the privacy of my own backyard.

Well, I was doing laundry yesterday afternoon. On the way back from starting a new load, I notice that my neighbors are in their backyard, that their parents are there, and that their granddaughter (maybe 5 years old) is also there. I also noticed I'm not wearing a shirt. Oops.

2. I play bass a little loud every now and then. How loud? Loud enough to shake my walls, and probably let the neighbors know how much soul I have (I'm like James Brown - I got soul to spare). Around the same time I was doing laundry, I was also jamming out to some older Lenny Kravitz, a song called "Come On And Love Me." It has a really great drum beat and a simple, funky bass line. It's perfect jam-out fodder. So there I was, jamming away in my apartment, when I get a Gmail chat message from one of the guys in the duplex:

"play that funky music white boy"

I figured I was too loud. He heard me. Then he said:

"Just got back from some GREAT margaritas (very surprised for Pittsburgh)"

HE WAS IN PITTSBURGH. How did he know I was playing that funky music?

Today was my last day of school, forever. Of course I still have finals and the bar to look forward to, so I'm no where near "done." And to make things more fun, my school decides to start the spring semester later than other Texas schools, thus making the semester end later. Pretty much everyone takes a course to prepare us for the bar. While students from other schools have a week off between graduation and the prep course which I shall not name, we get a whopping 36 hours to relax before we're plunged right back into class. A day and a half. Did we really need a five-week winter break? Four would have been plenty.

But wait - there's more!! There's a supplemental prep course that focuses on a certain area of the bar that some people - including me - opt to take. That course is one week and runs concurrently with the first week of the normal prep course. So the week after finals and graduation, I will be in class for seven hours a day.

I know you're thinking. It's one of two things:

1. Dude, that sucks.
2. Stop your bitching. You did it to yourself, remember? You're the one that went to law school.

I respond:

1. No kidding. Tell me about it.
2. Go to hell. When I'm defending your sorry ass for copyright infringement you'll change your tune.*

*note: i spent all afternoon studying for finals. i'm feeling a little punchy. i need a beer.