“Leon” (1994) and “Most Wanted” (1997) – Plagiarism!

Summary: Most Wanted (1997) copied many, many parts out of Leon (1994) — action sequence for action sequence, camera angle to camera angle.

I watched a 5-minute clip of Most Wanted on TV a couple weeks ago, and it bothered me so much that I have to let it out here in this post.

The scene I watched had the main character escape from some cops in an upstairs apartment room. This action sequence copied so many things from Leon, that I was left with disgust. So here are all the things that were copied from the Leon’s last action sequence:

• when the main character gets almost shot by sniper fire from a nearby building, through the windows (and just before this happens, the main character sees the sunlight reflect off of the lens of a sniper rifle’s scope — which is exactly what the main character Leon describes to Matilda in Leon when he is teaching her about sniping); in Leon, the main character gets almost shot by sniper fire when he tries to save his potted plant
• after some policemen raid the apartment room, the main character shoots all of them, and in response, an outside policeman says something like “man down!”; in Leon, after Leon takes out all of the first wave of policemen, a policeman outside the room says to his radio transmitter, “man down, man down,” and Stansfield (the villain) responds “I told ya”
• the main character dresses up into a dead (or unconscious?) policeman’s uniform (SWAT uniform), and escapes; in Leon, Leon switches clothes to escape the hundreds of SWAT policemen lined up outside his apartment room

Seriously, the director of Most Wanted, David Hogan, copied all of this out of Luc Besson’s Leon. Shame on him. Yes Mr. Hogan, you have an artistic license as a director, or réalisateur as they say in French, to draw inspiration from primary source material. But to copy everything down to a line in a 5 minute sequence is just too much. It’s unacceptable. That’s why I flipped channels instead of deciding to sit down and finish the movie, which seemed interesting at first.

(By the way, Leon is probably my all-time favorite movie for its blend of comedy, tragedy, action, suspense, and even a touch of romance. There’s no movie quite like it.)

Getting Things Done (GTD) – First Impressions

So I checked out a copy of the renowned “Getting Things Done” book by David Allen. If you go to sites like lifehacker.com, then you probably heard about this system already. I can’t do a book review because I skimmed parts that honestly did not make sense to me. I’m writing about this book though, and the strategy of getting things done proposed by the book, because I think there are some points that is applicable to any system designed to maximize productivity.

First, the GTD way of doing things is not another time management system. The book talks nothing about how to spend your weekends or how to get that 20-minute nap in the afternoon. (Well, it does talk about doing your “weekly reviews” on Friday afternoons to go into the weekend with a clean slate, but really, this is just a suggestion that may not work for you.) It doesn’t really talk much about time at all. I like this aspect of it, because, in my own personal experience, flexibility to adapt your workflow to any situation is the key to increased productivity.

Now, to the basics. GTD, in its bare elements, consists of some rather simple principles:

1. Write down everything that you need to do. Write down everything that you want to do, as well. If anything comes up and you need to do it, or you want to do it, write it down immediately.
2. (Complete those tasks that you’ve written down–since they’re more manageable now due to your having written them down in a smart way.)
3. Once a week, review all outstanding/uncompleted tasks and plan for the next week. This is time to review any projects that need tweaking, etc., and should take a couple hours.

That’s pretty much it — Principle #2 isn’t really a principle as you can see, I just put it there to make the 3rd one make sense. Principles #1 and #3 are really, really new to me, and have given me some new insight into how to handle tasks.

The beauty about Principle #1 is that, once you do this, you don’t need to think about anything that has not been completed. And the lists that you end up writing up need not be detailed; for example, it could be something as vague as “learn to play the piano.” Once you’ve written this down, and you tell yourself that you don’t need to mentally remind yourself about this, you make room for other thoughts.

As for the actual tasks that really do need to get completed, you break them up into environments. It’s a to-do list, but a much better one, constrained (split up into subsections) by where you are or what you will have with you. Thus, the “Next Actions” list (GTD’s to-do list) may be composed of multiple lists like: @home, @computer, calls, emails, @work, @school, etc. See how these topics already make the decision of where you should be doing the tasks? This makes a huge difference for me. Try it out–this aspect alone will help you quite a bit–you’ll have to do less thinking about the task and how to do the task, when you’ve completed this first step of writing down tasks based on context.

About Principle #3: Apparently, this is the most important part of the GTD system (or any productivity solution). You should do your “weekly review” to take care of your various lists and “stuff” and make sense of them for the coming week. “Stuff” is anything that has not been processed, basically, into a “Next Actions” list. It could be your bank statement. A call from your friend Chris who wanted your input on deciding where to go for the ski trip. Emails. Ah, and that list containing things you want to do (like learning the Piano). “Stuff” is essentially any piece of information that has been given to you, about which you have taken no decisions how to deal with them. During your weekly review, you’re supposed to get everything that has piled up in your “stuff” bin and turn them into tasks for your Next Actions list. (My tip: make these tasks as bite-sized and friendly as possible to make sure that they can be knocked out one after another; there’s no point in writing into your Next Actions list something fuzzy like “plan a vacation trip for the coming holidays,” when “call travel agent” would be more to the point). And generally, this “weekly review” is the time when you take a step back from your tunnel-visioned Next Actions list, and try to get the big picture, and make any adjustments to your Plan for World Domination or whatever else plans/projects you might have (I’m assuming that everyone has such a plan, or set of plans, because otherwise, they are merely reacting to stimuli from their environment and not taking proactive actions about their lives). Also, it doesn’t hurt to do a monthly and yearly review to take a look at your more overarching plans/questions/ideas (your post-graduate plans, your questions about the meaning of life, etc.)

Allen does give some concrete tips to optimize the way this system works:

• Get a physical basket or tray where you can put all the stuff into one place for processing in your weekly review (I like this idea, and I started just putting everything in one pile in one part of my room for this purpose, since I’m too cheapo to buy a tray for this); Allen calls this basket/tray as the “in” basket in his book
• Only use your calendar to put things that are absolutely mandatory for you to do, or things that will by their very nature expire automatically after a certain date passes. This will make your calendar function as an instant visual check on which times are available for you to mold to your wish (your Next Actions list). Also, by keeping your calendar free and clear of any “to-do” activities that are less-than-mandatory, you will avoid the psychological letdown of seeing your commitments fail. Keep your calendar sacrosanct. (I like this tip too, and use it in my own calendar now. No more generic reminders on calendars!!!)
• Keep 43 manila folders. Thirty-one of those folders should be the days in a month, and 12 of them the months of the year (voila, 43 folders). This is, essentially, a gigantic calendar that has a 3rd dimension. The point is to use these folders as way to keep track of which tasks need to be completed on that day. So if one of your Next Actions list’s tasks was to go see the Super Bowl, you could put your Super Bowl tickets into the “21″ folder for the 21st of the month. The trick is to open the representative folder for the current day in the morning, and then take care of everything inside, or to use them as reminders; it’s like the President getting his executive morning briefing of all events for that day. Before you go to bed, you should take whatever is remaining in that folder, and move it into tomorrow’s folder. It’s quite an imaginative idea, I have to admit. However, I have not implemented this system because I don’t get enough “stuff” from people to really make use of all those folders. But hey, I’m sure it couldn’t hurt.
• Keep an archive. I.e., you should keep a file system for archiving material you might need later (aka “reference material”), such as phone numbers of people or a list of those new product lines that you wanted to take a look at in the future. Receipts, invoices, faxes, they all fit into this category. Allen doesn’t like hanging folders (I think it was because they’re weird to carry around with you), but hey, if you’re archiving material and you mean to keep them inside those big boxes or drawers, I don’t see why hanging folders can be such a bad thing).

It’s only been a couple days since I’ve implemented the essence of the GTD system, but I think it’s working. I feel less stressed out because of Principle #1 (see above). Also, it took me a while to write down everything that I want to do (learning foreign languages is a big one for me). I plan on breaking down every project/plan I have written down into smaller chunks that can be considered a task in the Next Actions list. Also, whenever I write down anything into the Next Actions list, I write down the estimated amount of time that it will take me to accomplish that task (always using conservative estimates), and also the amount of energy required for me to do it (is it creative work, or is it filling out a registration form?), in my own “code” language. This way, I can glance at the Next Actions list, and just see which one is the easiest one to do (or the hardest one, for that matter). (Again, the key is to prepare these tasks for ultra-easy consumption; more thinking at the processing stage (of the stuff) about how tough something will be will help you quickly choose a task from the Next Actions list and start completing it.) The time/energy requirement are not my inventions; Allen says that you should use these criteria when deciding which task to complete next — I just systematized it into the Next Actions list itself (much like how you break it down into @home, @computer, etc.).

Try it out. Get the GTD book for more details, but basically, as far as I can tell, everything I’ve written here is the heart and soul of GTD (the book itself is filled with the typical motivational testimonials and anecdotes that are entertaining, but are, really, just filler).

Law Exam Study/Preparation Tips

Finally, I just finished my spring semester exams yesterday (the last of 6, yes SIX, final exams). I don’t write about the law and law school much at all, although my original purpose for this blog was to capture such experiences. So this post is meant to restore some meaning back into this blog, if that makes any sense…

Anyway, it looks like people are really coming to this blog to get info on Linux and Rails tips for common problems that I’ve faced and written about. Most of the search terms look like that. So, in the same spirit, here are some tips for studying for law school exams/finals:

1. Get as many past exams (along with the model answers) from the instructor of your class. Usually your law school will have these in the library or have them as PDFs for you to download online. Get them, and if your instructor does not have any past exams (e.g., for those newbie professors or adjuncts), then get past exams from other instructors who’ve taught the same class, but preferably the old veteran professors (the old people). Once you have them, you should at least read ONE of the answers straight out. You might read more than one answer (two or three seems like a good number for me). If you want to actually spend 3 hours on an essay, be my guest — that’s OK, too. But what I’m trying to stress here is that, once you read the model answers, you should try to extract the short, simple formulations of the rule and write them down. Chances are, you will find a treasure trove of short, quick, cute sentences that are easy to remember, instead of long ISSUE-FACT-HOLDING tripartite chains of sentences that might be found in your case briefs/outlines (depending on how detailed you are). The great beauty of this technique of extracting rules from model answers, is: (A) you get rules that are neither too simplistic nor too detailed, and just enough to get you the full points, and (B) you gain the insight of the instructor — how much ambiguity or un-detailedness the instructor is going to allow. And another minor bonus is, if you haven’t asked the instructor about it before the exams, you gain a sense of whether the instructor likes to see section numbers of statutes or case names (some instructors don’t like it when you don’t mention these explicitly, so you’ll know what their expectations are when you read the model answers). No one ever really spoke about these aspects of studying past exams — people (and even instructors themselves!) kept telling me to do the exams in “testing conditions,” and then to just look at the model answers for comparison. I think it’s some sort of conspiracy. Anyway, my tip to you as a somewhat experienced 3L-to-be is: extract the rule from these model answers, and use them in your own answers in the exam.
2. Get sleep. Sleep is necessary for your brain to repair neural connections (and strengthen other ones), in preparation for the waking hours to come. Don’t squeeze in an extra hour or two to get that one last hypo into your head. You remember things better with clarity if you get enough sleep prior to an exam — and especially for those essay exams, it’s clarity and preciseness that counts, not volume of material that you’ve mastered. So get some sleep!
3. When you’re two days away from any given final exam, a good way to measure how much you know something is to (in addition to tackling bite-sized sample hypos from supplements) get a blank piece of paper, and your outline. Randomly select any single “topic” of your outline to yourself (just un-staple the outline and shuffle the pages around blindly if you have to), and then once you select a topic, put your outline away and write down all the key concepts of that topic onto the blank sheet of paper. I use a plain white piece of printer paper for this, because that’s the same kind of paper used in my law school for blank sheets for notes. This exercise is helpful because it forces you to not just think of the rules or even say them from memory, but makes you write them down in an unfamiliar setting (on a completely empty piece of paper). It’s one thing to look at your outline filled with detailed notes about other topics in your peripheral vision, and another thing to work with a blank sheet of paper without any such unconscious reference points. I’m a visual learner, so this helps me get to know the rules cold, rather quickly.
4. Get a study partner. The exercise you should engage in is taking turns pretending to be the professor of the course. Select a topic (preferably one that is your strong suit), and begin to tell the other person everything that you know about that topic. History, policy, modern developments and variations — everything! Do it comprehensively, like a lecture. Give your partner examples to stress distinctions. Meanwhile, your partner should be busily asking you questions to try to throw you off. Answer all questions. If you cannot answer them, forward them to your professor. This should take you about 30 minutes or so (you don’t want to make them too long because you’ll lose track). When you’re done, switch places, and have your partner give a lecture on some other topic. Repeat as necessary — I recommend doing this as much as possible (biweekly is great, weekly is even better), because it forces you to understand something in its bare essentials. Trust me, if professors stopped writing about their subject matter or stopped giving lectures, they’d forget things, too. If you really can’t find a study partner, then do it yourself to an imaginary audience. Or force your roommate to sit down for 30 minutes.
5. Finally, study in as different places as possible. If you’re just re-memorizing some portion of your outline (at any time during the semester), try to do it in the gym when you’re on that walking machine, or at your local coffee shop, or anywhere else. Mix up the time of day as well. If you can’t find decent places to do this (although I highly doubt it), then what you can do instead is to study in different positions. For example, you could study on your desk, then standing up on some podium, then lying down on the floor, then upside-down holding up your outline to the ceiling, etc. The point of this exercise is to detach any muscle-memory/environment-memory that may be associated with your knowledge of the law. It’s going to force your brain to use law-only neurons to strengthen existing connections, not those neurons that are about “the library” or “the desk.” As an added side effect, you’ll feel little to no stress facing the dreaded “exam atmosphere” of the final exam room, since by now, environments should have little effect on your ability to recall the law.

I hope you find these tips useful. As with any piece of advice, only use those suggestions that help you, since chances are, you’re different than me, and not all five tips will work for you to your advantage.

EVGA 8800 GTS + EVGA 680i Issues Resolved

My system has 1 SATA drive and 1 IDE drive. The SATA holds my Windows XP, along with several other partitions for pure data purposes. My IDE holds another partition for storage purposes, but also has my Mint installation. (Yes, I dual-boot. It’s the best of both worlds, with games on XP and real work on my solid Linux environment.) I had some random crashings (no blue screens), and some strange behavior. Here were the symptoms of my system:

1. BIOS would not detect my SATA drive, and would change the HDD (hard drive) boot priority from my IDE (which holds the GRUB bootloader, I think) to my SATA, thus making me automatically go into Windows without loading GRUB a choice. (The temporary solution was to change the HDD priority in BIOS to load my IDE drive first, before my SATA, and this made GRUB show up.)
2. Even after changing the HDD priority back, GRUB would stop detecting my SATA drive, and thus would not boot Windows.
3. Within Linux, sometimes one of the partitions on my SATA drive would not be auto-mounted by Mint like they always were before.
4. I noticed strange characters (data reading corruption) for some of my mp3 files that were on the SATA drive in my Rhythmbox music player.
5. My dual LCD screens would suddenly stop receiving signals from my video card.
6. When I ran Memtest86+ v1.70 from the GRUB menu, it would run for a while, but then all of a sudden, my computer screen would go blank/black!
7. I got error code 26 from my motherboard during POST. (EVGA 122-CK-NF63-TR LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail)
8. Suspecting bad video ram, I checked my video card (EVGA 320-P2-N811-AR GeForce 8800GTS 320MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card – Retail) by going into NVIDIA Control Panel in Windows XP just to see if it would crash my system. It did. Clicking on NVIDIA Control Panel immediately crashed my system (blank/black screen, but no automatic reboot).
9. When I booted up Mint once, one of the Screenlets started out with messed up graphics.
10. My system gave a blank/black screen randomly while in both Windows and Mint.

The solution? I changed the power connector to my video card, from the default one that came with the video card, to a 6-pin connector that my PSU came with. The one that came with my card actually had only 5 pins (if you look inside, there is only metal for 5 of the pins, since 1 pin out of the 6 doesn’t have any conductive metal in it), although the NewEgg images on the product denote a 6-pin (PCIe) connection (see the other images in the link)! It now all makes sense, since I had attached both the 5-pin connector and my SATA drive’s power connection with the same power cable. My SATA hard drive was receiving not enough power, which explains the strange data reading corruption I pointed out (and why BIOS failed to recognize it sometimes — since the drive was not starting up at all). It also explains why my screens were going blank – my video card was not getting enough power! It’s strange, because I had not had any problems for several months with my old configuration. Either my PSU is slowly generating less power (it’s a 530 watt power supply), or the old 5-pin connector was bad.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my experience. The lesson? Strange symptoms do not always mean that you need a BIOS update, or your PSU is dying, or your SATA drive is dying, or your motherboard killed your SATA drive, or your video card is dying, or that your RAM is bad. All of these ideas were brought up in the many forums I googled up to see any similar troubles for owners of the same hardware as myself. No one suggested a faulty power connection (or that the power connection on 1 power cable (“rail” as they call it?) had been overloaded with too many connections). So, next time, be sure to check your power cables, and make sure to distribute power as evenly as possible across all the cables! (My system has since been up without a hitch running through graphics benchmarks, rendering tests, and what have you.)