The last few months I have lost lots of sleep trying to find the answers, but I still haven't figured out what the questions are.

It's frustrating and I am tired and I felt like venting to my particlefamily (or molecule? ).

Coolest shirt, ever.

I installed OpenOffice. Hooray for free software! It's not as slick as MS Office 2007 (or 2003), but it gets the job done.

If you have no idea what I'm talking, go here.

But i finally added a new post category: geek. See the previous three posts. I probably should have done this when I started the blog way back when. Call it laziness. All geeks are lazy by nature.

In other news, happy weekend! I have to go outside now. It's 76 degrees outside. I think Fall just got here.

I was checking email on my blackberry this week while walking and I saw an open elevator door. I went for it, expecting the guy in the elevator to hold the doors for me. He didn't. I smacked my shoulder straight into the door and it almost knocked me to the ground (I guess I walk fast?) You know how sometimes door frames jump out and hit you in the shoulder? It was a little like that, except the door frame was moving. And the best part was that I hit my right shoulder, which nicely complimented the strain on the right side of my neck. Pretty soon I'll need to wrap myself in bubble wrap. I'll become the bubble boy. As long as my blackberry gets service in the bubble, that's ok with me.

Does blogging from a blackberry on public transportation in Guanajuato make me a douche?

I played a prank on one of the women in the Accounting department last summer when I was an intern at the law firm. It was harmless and fun. I replaced her chair with an identical-looking reject I found at the office that happened to have a broken hydraulic lift resulting in the chair's sinking to the bottom of its height adjustment as soon as it was sat on. I also switched everything around on her desk so that anything that was on the right side was in its corresponding place on the left side. As a result of this move, I gained a reputation as something of a prankster in the office. This was not my intention, though I am not necessarily surprised.

For Christmas, one of the gifts my managing attorney gave me was rather peculiar. She gave me a prank kit of 12 pranks. I can't decide if she's condoning my prankish behavior or challenging me to apply it, perhaps on her. At either rate, she already blew my cover by giving me a box of pranks in front of the entire firm. Of course our firm's gift exchange was done with the entire firm present (there are only about 15 of us) so everyone knows that I am now in possession of a prank kit.

At either rate, I might use the boxed pranks as diversions for more sinister pranks. No one is safe.

Since I don't like Microsoft, and I don't want to pay stupid sums of money for Office, I downloaded OpenOffice, free of charge, from their webite and have been running it for about six months. I'm happy to report it doesn't suck. It's actually pretty good, especially considering how much I paid for it. No, it's not a flashy as Office 2007, or even Office 2003, but it gets the job done. Its version of Excel handles formulas just the same as Microsoft's version, and the documents are all cross-compatible. Just be sure you save your "Word" doc as .doc so Microsoft can open it on someone else's computer.

In other news, I'm buying a plane ticket to NYC to my friend over the July 4th weekend. I'm psyched. I'm also pondering a trip to London or Israel, depending entirely on scheduling and flight prices. What was once an $1100 ticket to Israel is now $1700. Bummer. Even England is over a grand now. I remember when flights to London could be had for under $500, and I'm not talking about the "Go to London for Three Days, Starting Tomorrow" deals.

One of my favorite movies growing up was Short Circuit. Imagine my surprise when I saw a preview for Pixar's new movie Wall-E.

Meet Wall-E.

Now, meet (not for the first time, I can only hope), Johnny #5.

I rest my case.

That said, I still want to see the movie, I still think it's a great idea for Pixar's next film, and I'm sure Wall-E's creator is tired of people asking if he's seen Short Circuit.

Addendum: Actually, it looks like Short Circuit got its inspiration from another non-human sentient being. Eventually, I will find the first movie to feature an alien or robot with a head shaped like binoculars on top of a long neck and squarish body.

If you don't play an instrument, or you don't care about key changes and music composition, you may want to skip this one...

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs released a song called Kiss Kiss that I immediately liked. I couldn't figure out exactly why, but the progression in the verse section sounded like something else I knew, but I couldn't place where it came from.

I had Nirvana's Nevermind playing in the car for a couple of days. I'll sometimes listen to a song four or five times in a row because I focus on different parts of the song. On the way home from a friend's house last night, I listened to Drain You for the entire duration of a 20 minute drive.

Then this morning, something occurred to me. The reason Kiss Kiss sounded familiar and the reason I couldn't figure out where it came from is because the verse progression is a carbon copy of the verse section of Drain You, but in a different key. I recognized the intervals, but because the key was different, I didn't immediately pick up that it was essentially the same riff.

I verified this by checking the Kiss Kiss tab. There it was. Drain You is in A. Kiss Kiss is in D. But the progression is the same.

The Drain You verse section isn't exactly the most unique or ingenuitive progression, but it's strange to see it show up again.

See? This post is really not that interesting for people who aren't music nerds.

Hey particlefans. Guess what. I moved. Again. In case you had forgotten, moving sucks. The owner of the duplex in which I lived sold the house and the owners have two sons who decided to occupy the duplex. After looking around for a suitable place to live, I finally signed a lease a whole five days before I had to be out of the duplex. Yes, I like to live on the edge. I spent Saturday and Sunday frantically packing and moving.

Because renting a moving truck would have been really expensive with that short of a notice, I ended up making 48 trips to and from the new place with my car filling it up as much as I could. Ok, maybe not 48 trips. But it was a lot. At least the new place was a whole two blocks away, so it wasn't so bad. And my friend with a pickup truck came to help too. And so did his fiance. Well, she mostly rode in the love seat in the truck bed talking on the phone, but, you know. That's how it goes. (She's from Oklahoma so she knows what she's doing) (Her words, not mine).

Oh, and did I tell you? I'm blogging from my new Macbook, which I got a while ago. It's sleek and black and awesome. And totally not Windows.

I bought Apple iWork a while ago out of spite for Microsoft and I'm starting to miss Excel. There is no equivalent of Excel's "Freeze Pane" in iWork's Numbers. This makes working in large spreadsheets much more difficult. I also don't see the use in moving the "Worksheets" bar to the side of the application, where it takes horizontal space away from the spreadsheet itself.

Apple, please give me Freeze Pane, and please nix the side-mounted Worksheet tab.

Thanks.

particleman

My parents and friends are without power. I spent most of my life in Houston and I don't remember any hurricane causing this much damage, and Ike wasn't even that severe of a hurricane. If all goes according to plan, I will be in Houston this weekend helping my parents clean up and get things back in order. Thankfully, their house wasn't damaged.

In other news, um, I have no real other news. Except for that the summer is over and it's officially been one year since I started working full-time as a lawyer. It's been a great year. Challenging, but great, and I'm looking forward to the next year. A lot of interesting stuff is happening with copyright law and music law, stuff that no one except copyright law geeks like me care about, but here's one thing that you guys might appreciate: Lars Ulrich Fine with Metallica Album Leak.

Potter, Stars Trek and Wars, Matrix all the same movie

I've felt this way for a while. I think Lord of the Rings can be thrown in there too. Modified version:

Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry | Frodo was living a miserable/uneventful life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid | Gandalf and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy | birth* he was meant for something greater.

* Whether through his family connection to Bilbo or some other unexplained power that allows him to resist the ring.

I'm happy to admit I don't really know what this Twitter thing is all about. For someone who was supposedly once employed in and involved heavily with technology, I'm remarkably behind the times. I remember when Twitter came out. I thought it was the same thing as text messaging, except free. I also thought it was yet another way people can get around having to actually use a phone and call someone to tell them what they're up to. I also thought it was just more data to firehose at people who are likely already getting firehosed with too much data.

At either rate, I'm glad to see this Twitter thing has caught on and found a market niche for itself. Not that I'm using it. Oh, no. I'm much too lazy for that. I only know for sure that it's taken off because I've finally seen it show up in my legal work. One of my clients wants to use Twitter to advertise. And we all know, once a communication medium is considered by businesses as a viable advertising tool, it's officially hit the bigtime.

Congrats, Twitter. Business want to use you to hawk their wares. You've made it.

I also think the political use of Twitter with the Iran election situation is impressive. I'm glad a culture is able to circumvent their oppressive political systems and use technology to communicate with the world. If Twitter has ever had to demonstrate its usefulness to the world and prove its meaning in life, this was it.

As you may or may not know, I maintain a list of every concert or music show I've ever seen (see link on right side of this page). I thought it would be cool to look at one day when I'm old cranky. You know, as opposed to 29 and cranky.

I decided to see who else keeps such lists. I found a few:

Sit. Stay. Good Blog.
Notthatanyonecares.com
Rock-revival.com

I'm thinking I should move my concert list from a Word document linked on the this page to this page itself. Or maybe create a separate page for it.

Yeah, it's a slow Monday morning.

Our shredder wants to make sure you don't try to stick your hand, or tie, into it. Nice.

Unless you've been living under a media rock the past month, you may have heard of the new uber-epic semi-sci-fi extravaganza movie called Avatar. It's from James Cameron, that guy who gave us all kinds of sci-fi and grand-scale saga type movies of the 90s.

I'm here to tell you it's worth your two and a half hours and $15 (if you spring for the IMAX). And spring for the IMAX you should. It's worth every penny. You get the true scale Cameron had in mind for the film and the 3D isn't the kind of 3D that makes you want to throw up, it's a 3D that adds the just enough depth to put you in the scene - not up close, but viewing from a safe distance.

For those who don't care for sci-fi and would rather get a root canal than sit through Star Trek, or even The Matrix, fear not. Avatar actually has a story, and a love plot, and socio-political commentary. It's a blockbuster with brains. An action film with a conscience. If I don't sound like a nerdy movie critic way into cliches to you yet, keep reading.

Even at two and a half hours, the movie does not drag. Pay even the slightest attention and the story will keep you moving. It has momentum. Several story threads progress concurrently, you know, just in case one of them bore you. You've got a love story. You've got a species survival story. You've got a war machine story. You've got an internal conflict story. And so on.

Case in point: my mom, a 59-year-old woman who goes to sci-fi flics with my dad only because he has no one else to take, genuinely liked Avatar. I think that speaks for itself.