Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Optimus Prime's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 3rd, 2009
11:54 pm	How to stop being "the cute girl he met at the bus stop" in three seconds Explain repeatedly how you hate "those gangster niggers." (Of course, she got her degree at Western, so that explains a lot.) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
4:38 pm	fuck, redux Despite my criminal procedure professor writing a two-page letter explaining why she marked my final exam improperly, my grade appeal was turned down. Thus I have, now and presumably period, a C+ in criminal procedure, as I have just finished a round of articling applications to firms that primarily deal in criminal law, because it's what I'm best at doing (that and social justice litigation, but most of the firms that do that tend to be criminal firms or union-side labour firms that do a little extra stuff on the side). My winter-term grades were straight Bs. This is not quite disastrous because at least there are no Cs, but not getting the B+ in Tax (where I busted ass, wrote the optional paper, and still came out one mark too low to get the B+) or Innocence Project (where I pretty much singlehandedly turned a client we were about to drop into the IP's first application to the federal government for innocence review in two years) is disappointing, to say the least. It's the least-worst (or best-worst, whichever) possible result when I really needed at least a little better to counterbalance out everything else. Applying to 38 legal offices, which is about the upper limit of reasonable considering I have to write 38 cover letters, each of which will have to explain away the poor grades and be able to articulate about specific cases the firm has undertaken recently that have supposedly piqued my interest, and because if you apply to any more firms than that, people realize that you're desperate and applying everywhere. Only about 60 percent of law students applying for articling jobs this year are expected to get one. The rest will either have to article for free (which I can't do) or work at a temp agency as a legal assistant until they can get an articling job (or can afford to article for free). Even with three glowing letters of reference, one from my criminal procedure professor (who feels terrible about what happened and actually tried to get me a job this summer, although it didn't pan out because it turned out the lawyers couldn't afford any more students), the odds are not on my side. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
3:57 pm	apropos of nothing Vaguely considering the logistics and issues of moving to Australia once my article is done. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
5:38 pm	What I want to do Friday night Ricky Jay, motherfuckers! Anybody else in? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
4:02 am	to do this summer 1.) Find final two roommates 2.) Find articling position 3.) Finish novel 4.) Learn reasonable amount of conversational French 5.) Lose last twenty pounds 6.) Win lotto (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
1:03 am	WTF LAST MONTH: Roommate A announces he is moving out to live with girlfriend for May 1. TWO WEEKS AGO: Replacement for Roommate A found. LAST WEEK: Roommate B announces he is moving out to live with girlfriend for June 1. TODAY: Replacement emails to say "I am fucking you guys over because I found a place I like better and am cancelling my cheque I gave you." JUST NOW: Roommate C announces his parents have bought him a condo and he is moving out for June 1. AND SO: I need to find three roommates in five weeks or move. Assuming the landlord wants to keep me on. MORE IMPORTANT: Why does nobody ever buy me a condo? (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
12:37 am	Intaxication Have been studying nothing but tax law for two straight weeks, on account of A) it is complex B) the professor hired me to be her RA for the summer on account of professors generally liking me and she is no exception You know what? Tax law is fucking complex. Like, "worse than GURPS" complex. Like "makes old Avalon Hill bookshelf wargames look like Candyland" complex. Like "makes less sense than a Decipher CCG" complex. You can quite understand why tax lawyers make insane amounts of money. (I do not want to be a tax lawyer. She hired me for research on tax policy, which is more akin to "this is how the government SHOULD collect money and then spend it.") On the bright side, though, the professor has very kindly posted all her old exams from the last ten years, along with - for reasons I cannot quite understand - all the answer keys. Am currently compiling all the questions-and-answer-keys into tables by question area, seeing as how the exam is open book and I like being able to copy answers more or less directly into the exam booklet. Thankfully, tax exam is on Tuesday. Then I can start studying administrative law, which is also fucking complex and a lot less fun than tax law, which should tell you something. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
5:18 pm	argh I'm taking Administrative Law this term, and it is so boring. Now, administrative law - IE, the law of tribunals and agencies, which is about ninety percent of the law that actually interacts everyday life in most modern countries - is boring all on its own. But on top of that, learning about Canadian administrative law in particular is especially boring right now. This is because last year, the Supreme Court decided a case called Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, and you don't need to know the particulars, but suffice it to say that Dunsmuir changed the entire standard of judicial review for administrative decisions practically overnight. Decades' worth of jurisprudence, suddenly obsolete. But law school profs can't just teach Dunsmuir all semester, so instead we get class after class focusing on the jurisprudence and standards that have all been overturned, for "historical perspective." Which would be valuable if you planned a career in administrative law, but if you don't and you just want to know the necessary standards of review and how administrative tribunals operate, that can be covered in two or three classes. So about half of the course or more is completely pointless. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
3:37 pm	Squeaky wheel, etc. C+ in Criminal Procedure now a B+, thanks to discussion with professor. Second-to-last question was a discussion of principles in sentencing, which was intended to get students to discuss the statutory sentencing principles in the Criminal Code, but I instead wrote about the three basic principles of criminal justice (punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation) and the professor agreed that the question was worded vaguely enough that my answers should be graded on par. I also got a couple of extra marks on the essay question. The eight mark difference knocked me to an above-average grade. The professor also offered to contact some smaller criminal firms she knows personally to see if there was any chance of a summer job for me, even part-time. It's not quite what I wanted, but it's experience. Moral: make sure your professors like you during the term. It goes a long way. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 13th, 2009
10:48 am	fuck. Evidence B+ Criminal Procedure C+ Freedom of Expression And The Law B Climate Change Law B Much worse than it looks, both because the latter two courses are seminars and therefore have an average grade of B+ and because Criminal Procedure was a course where, going into the exam, I already had 40/50 on the course so that represents a complete exam collapse in the area of law where theoretically I am supposed to be good at. (As for Evidence: I put the extra work in to do the case comment, which traditionally puts one up to an A. Not so much.) I can pretty much forget about actually doing anything I wanted to do with this fucking degree now. Crown attorney's office? Not with a B- average. Good firm? Forget it. These are "shitty loser lawyer with an office in a strip mall" grades. I fucking killed myself studying last term because I wanted As this term to boost my (crappy) law school GPA. This is the result: mediocrity-to-failure. Just like whenever I seem to try really hard at anything else other than dicking around on the internet, the result is mediocrity-to-failure - personal fitness, relationships, anything. The temptation to just drop all my shit on the floor and just go - anywhere, fuck, I don't care any more - is immensely strong. I'm not going to do it, of course, because I know there are people who care about me and who would be scared. But that's pretty much the only reason right now, because I am honest to god tired of my life. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
9:18 am	FYI Torontovolk: be aware that a New Year's party is being planned at my place. Beer, booze, good food (cooked by my professional chef roommate), et cetera. Also, one of my other roommates is trying to get the other members of his championship cheerleading team to attend. This may be additional incentive. It may not. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
11:23 pm	question Is this acceptable? Initially this schmuck was direct-leeching the images off my server. Now she's removed attribution because she's deemed me pissy for complaining. It's really very minor in the scheme of things, but I was brought up in days of Ye Olde Internet that bandwidth leeching was rude, you know? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
5:37 pm	down again down again jiggity-jig Hostpapa -> over, as the link today from BoingBoing (and Cory Doctorow adding me to his RSS, woot) flooded Hostpapa and basically shut them down entirely. So now it's a rush to find a new (Canadian-based, that is not negotiable) hosting provider and transfer the whole shebang there. as soon as possible. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
10:15 am	me on the radio again Going to be on Q on the CBC Thursday, from 12:30-1 or so, talking about the new teevee season. Those not getting CBC in their areas should be able to get it on Sirius (channel 137) if you have the satellite radio. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
4:37 am	HALTON! Does anybody want to go see Stephane Dion's townhall in Halton on the 20th? My curiosity is piqued, and I'd like the chance to ask him about potential plans for supplementing his carbon tax proposals with energy infrastructure spending. Yes, I'm a policy nerd. Why? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 14th, 2008
4:42 pm	for those interested FALL 08 Criminal Procedure Evidence Climate Change Law Freedom of Expression and the Law WINTER 09 Taxation Law Taxation As An Instrument Of Social And Economic Policy ALL YEAR Innocence Project (which includes taking Forensics and the Law as an ungraded pass/fail course in winter) Right now, that's 30 credits (per year should be 30-34). I'll probably end up adding credits in winter term later on depending on whether I get accepted into the international climate change moot in Copenhagen (as part of the Climate Change Law course) or not. If I get into the moot, that's an additional 3 credits. If not, I'll probably take either Business Associations or International Criminal Law as an additional course for 4 credits. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 27th, 2008
12:23 am	a list. The Big Read's Top 100 Books - of which, they figure the average adult has read six. What I've read, bolded. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Really? Top ten? Ooookay.) 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Well, I'm reading it now, so I say it counts.) 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (...SERIOUSLY?) 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd 48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 52 Dune - Frank Herbert (and I regret it) 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (shut up.) 69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession - AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte's Web - EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (WHAT THE FUCK, BIG READ. WHAT. THE. FUCK.) 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (this is a weird list. Is Hamlet not one of the Complete Works of Shakespeare now?) 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 16th, 2008
1:19 pm	WTF From comments at my site: Are you the same Chris Bird that was accused of distributing oxycotton is Toronto a couple of years ago? I was investigating you on the internet and there is a Chris Bird from Toronto, coincidentally an athlete who was accused of such and even admitted doing so under oath. He's "investigating" me? I smell FreeDominion. The combination of selfrighteousness and basic stupidity ("how could there be two Chris Birds in a city of six million people?") is memorable. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
1:49 pm	The toughest thing in the world, vol. 12 Writing someone who is smarter than you - not just raw intelligence (that's actually pretty easy, it just takes time), but eloquence, insight, brilliance. These are incredibly difficult to write. Everything you put out just sounds trite. Back to the grind. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
2:57 pm	The discussion with Hostpapa THEM: So what type of site is it? ME: It's a personal blog. THEM: A personal blog with that much traffic? ME: Yes. THEM: We thought you were having people download movies off you or something all of a sudden. What happened? ME: I got linked by Fark, Boingboing, Joystiq, Defamer, Kotaku, Metafilter, and Digg, among others. THEM: Wow. Well, we can lift the suspension if you can do something about the links. ME: Uh, I'm a freelance writer. Getting traffic is the point of the blog: it gets me writing jobs and increases my profile. If I was a business, would you seriously tell me to just serve less customers? THEM: No, we wouldn't. You're right. We'll figure out if we need to change your billing structure later, but we'll lift the suspension immediately. ME: Thanks. (29 Comments |Comment on this)