Friday drive-by (brought to you by the Stone Age)

I was planning on having a little more substance to today’s post, but right around 3pm a TWC technician was kind enough to disconnect both my cable and internet service when he meant to disconnect someone else in my apartment complex.  I called customer service and the soonest they could schedule someone to come out is 5pm tomorrow.  The guy I usually work with on my service (Kevin — awesome guy, if you live in Durham and plan on getting TWC service make sure to ask for him) is coming out first thing in the morning to get it fixed instead, but I didn’t think to contact him sooner so I’ve been stuck for the afternoon/evening in relative silence.

And, I’ll note, slowly going insane from the lack of connection with the outside world.

So how am I posting this now?  The glories of BlackBerry tethering, which temporarily went kaput after I upgraded my BlackBerry a few weeks ago (from an 8830 to a 9630 Tour), was briefly fixed, then went kaput again when I upgraded to Snow Leopard a few days ago.  I got so desperate for internet I finally went rummaging through my pre-Snow Leopard files.

After using an old Time Machine backup to find a suitable modem script, some CSC-esque “tweaking” to said modem script to work with the 9630, some info in my Keychain to find my username and password, and random guessing on the access number to dial, suddenly I have internet again through the phone.  It’s not blazing fast or anything, but it’s good enough to get the job done and maintain my sanity

Anyhow, given the drive-by nature of this post I’m keeping it short:  I decided to volunteer to brief a case in Professor Torts’s class today.  We’re going over conversion and there was only 1 case to brief (Pearson v. Dodd) so the Professor asked for volunteers.  I knew the case pretty well and hoped I’d be able to buy myself a way out of getting called on at some point in the relatively near future.

It didn’t quite turn out as well as planned.

Rather than read from the briefs I write, starting this past Monday I’ve been trying not to have my laptop running during class and instead go from memory.  1) It helps me remember the material when I can’t read it there in front of me (as weird as that may sound), and 2) it stops me from being on Facebook or reading blawgs when I should be taking notes.  The downside is that reciting information from memory is slightly more verbose than a tightly-worded issue statement in a brief.

And Professor Torts made that point fairly clear in short order, then asking if I wrote anything down (“Yes ma’am”), where it was (“On my laptop”), where the laptop was (“Right here in front of me”) and to pull it up and read what I had written while she went to someone else for a proper issue statement. She then came back to me for an opportunity to recover ever-so-slightly, before noting that she’ll be coming back to me on another day soon.

Clearly no one has ever accused me of being a genius…

That’s all I’ll write tonight in my internet-free world.  Have a great evening everybody!

Tags: #fml, 1L, Prof Torts, Tech Talk