You start to get more senior.  Start to pipe up more during meetings.  Your Boss puts more confidence in you.  “You run this call – I have something else (i.e., more important) to do.”  Still, you remain relatively low-key.  You know you’re still not good enough to run with the big-dogs.

You bide your time, learning, speaking occasionally, marking up documents.  You get shut down and overruled, but once in a while, your comments slip through.  You sit in the main courtroom, in the middle or back.  You slowly gain responsibility for one or more agreements or pleadings, though your product is an ugly, misshapen ingot which must be hammered and refined by your betters into a surgical steel blade.

Your writing gets better.  Less red ink is spilled at your expense.  You learn what is important and what is not.  You learn how to pick your battles.  You are the Lead Associate.  You are the Primary Drafter.  You sit in the front of the courtroom.  You take fire, but now you know how to fire back. 

Suddenly, your Boss is called away, or indisposed.  The documents require your signoff.  A seat is saved for you in front of the courtroom bar.  Others speak.  It’s your Turn.

You step up to the podium…

Now, it seems history is repeating itself.  I recently saw an article, here, Panasonic G10 plasmas have a problem with voltage adjustments which affect the black levels on the sets.  Here is my advice to all of you who have been screwed:

1. get as much as you can via the class action lawsuit that is now in place.  If you can get a credit, do so, and buy a tv.

2. sell your tv as fast as you can.  if you get a new tv from Panny, sell that too.

3. Never buy another Panasonic TV again.  I have since bought a Samsung Plasma, and could not be happier.

Take it from my experience, cutting your losses now will pay huge dividends to your psyche down the road.

“Jersey Shore”
“Real Housewives” (all of them)
“Keeping up with the Kardashians” (notice a theme starting to develop?)
Jay Leno
The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Times Op-Ed piece here)

Things that make the world a better place:

Google, for standing up to China.
Sorry, thats all I got.  It’s easier to be bad than good, I suppose.

With your feet in the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your head will collapse
But there’s nothing in it
And you’ll ask yourself…
Where is my mind

1. I’d never carved a pumpkin before.  Seriously.  Not bad for a first time, huh?  Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year.

2. Saw Where the Wild Things Are.  Not bad.  The book didn’t give them a lot to work with, but they made it work. 

3. Saw Away We Go.  Awesome.

4. According to my Facebook photo feed, there is a baby boom going on.  When did Facebook stop being about hot girls and start being about babies?

But I still miss the old one.

When I was 6, my parents told me that they were getting rid of our family car (a Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme) and getting a new one (a Volvo). I remember being sad to the point of tears.  I remember pleading with them to keep it, saying “but we have so many memories in that car!” Heh. Six years old. Guess I will never change.

Duffy – Stepping Stone

1.  It’s true, I haven’t written in a while.  Work is still busy.  Also, I haven’t been posting as much since I started writing in my moleskine pocket journal.  In the month of May, I became very sick and didn’t want to bother with computers or technology.  I completely withdrew from television and print media.  And something strange happened.  I started having cinematic, vivid dreams.  Sometimes, while I was awake.  Sure, you can blame the medicine, but I think the absence of media consumption forced my brain to return to its imagination.  It was straight out of Thoreau’s Walden.

2.  I am starting to grow weary of New York City.  I went home the other day, and as the historic downpour continued, I realized how beautiful it was out on the island.  Suddenly, the rain turned from something to resent into something to relish.  You could smell the earth, the trees, and all of the vegetation.  Everything was so green.  All I smell in New York is car exhaust, garbage, fetid steam vents, overly burned meat on a stick and the farts of the guy just up the street.

3.  More than anything, a lot of the excitement of New York seems to have left.  Ever since the economy tanked, the energy is just not there.  The massive layoffs in New York have affected everyone, including the still-employed.  Bars are morose, parties are muted.  I, for one, don’t like partying as much knowing that many of my friends are in debt, unemployed through no fault of their own, and hoping to ride out the storm.  There’s just less to celebrate these days.

4.  I just went to the Beyonce concert last night.  Man can she sing.  I don’t think that there is any female artist today who even comes close.  Our children are going to be hearing stories about her, the way people talk about Ella, Tina, and Aretha now.

5.  I am obsessed with building a home theater PC, or HTPC.  I know all the parts I want, but I just can’t settle on a case I like.  It is ridiculous to me that Time Warner can charge 100 bucks a month for cable TV, when Hulu is out there pushing content for free.  The entire business model of Time Warner is going to change, and I think they know it, which is why they are trying to promote bandwidth-use caps.  Unlike Netflix, which is attempting to craft creative solutions to its soon-to-be-obsolete business model, Time Warner takes an opposite approach, similar to the one taken by the MPAA and RIAA, and one that is destined to fail.  The HTPC will be a symbol of that failed business strategy, as hopefully I will be able to view all video content that I currently watch on cable through my HTPC, for free or near-free.  Soon, episodes of shows will pop up via RSS feed, allowing you to watch right then and there.  I expect the back-end to be sleeker than Google Reader, so that it is a video-friendly interface that automatically downloads and updates the shows you select.  I think Boxee already does this.  If you are interested in a similar project, I recommend you read up on the forums at AVSForum and Silent PC Review.  In case you are wondering, I am thinking an E5200, 4GB ram, 1TB WD Green, LG Blu-Ray, and either the Zotac 9300 (mini-ITX) or the Gigabyte 9400 (mATX).

6. Speaking of media, this preview for “The Pacific” gave me chills.  It’s the sequel to Band of Brothers, and it looks incredible.  I can’t wait.

And it is glorious.

Feast your eyes on this:

A buddy and I just went out to lunch and had this, the king of all sandwiches.  He found it randomly by surfing Midtown Lunch, a website subscribe to but clearly I have been underutilizing it, since I hadn’t heard of this place before.

Midtown Lunch calls this sandwich from Free Foods a triumph, and they are right on.  The sandwich isn’t even on the overhead menu, you have to ask for it, and I would have never known to were it not for ML.  Anyway, the sandwich is awesome.  Tender, juicy duck, swiss cheese, russian dressing, and is that tiny bits of orange?  A genius made this sandwich.  A goddamn genius.  A mother#$@#, lyrical wordsmith, mother @#!$@ genius.