I'm going dark

Not really, but that’s kind of what I feel like (and it’s probably what I should do). Yesterday was the first day of BARBRI, a ~1.5-month study course for the almost-impossible California Bar exam,¹ which I’m taking near the end of July.

I’m putting this post here so that I can reference it when making excuses for the lack of new posts, the slow e-mail responses, and the loss of all quantifiable productivity (ugh!).

The study course requires 8-12 hours a day (fours hours of lectures and then they suggest you study 4-8 hours on your own). After having just finished the six day, six-hours-a-day PMBR early bird review, I’m at a total loss as to how anyone could work on this stuff for 8-12 hours a day for a single day, much less an entire summer, yet that is our plight. Did I mention that it’s all mind-numbingly boring and tedious and dry and dense and…

All of this is just a long-winded way of asking you to please cut me some slack. As always, I will reply to every e-mail received, it just might take me a bit longer to get to it (especially the can you please help me with… e-mails).

And what will I be doing in my downtime on top of replying to e-mails, keeping up with the 250+ feeds I’m subscribed to, and writing posts? Learning Ruby on Rails of course. I’ve never been so excited about a new language + framework; the whole convention over configuration emphasis really, really intrigues me, because it seems to work to abstract away all of the mundane elements of programming so that your output is limited more by logic than by syntax (read: you can be more productive and in a shorter amount of time). The end-goal here is to use RoR to build my own CMS to power this site, something I’ve been putting off for far too long.

FOOTNOTES

1. The exam is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, in the country. It’s three, brutal, six-hour days (18 total hours of test-taking) and has an incredibly low pass rate. 🙁 ↩