a couple links from the web

since that's what this post is about, i might as well have a descriptive title. that, and, it's rather early in the morning, and i went to bed rather late last night, and this pattern is occurring for the second day in a row. the first link is for the backup service mozy which i've been setting up and playing around with the last couple days. the idea and interface are pretty straightforward - you select a backup set of folders on your computer to sync, essentially, and mozy runs in the background and maintains an updated copy of them on the internet. it seems pretty clean to me, and they give you 2 GB free, which is indicative of how cheap storage is these days. the neatest part, and the only reason i feel this software is cool enough to mention, is that mozy automatically maps a network drive which connects to your personal backup area on their servers. they integrated it fairly well with windows explorer. it's a very nice touch.

the other link is to the Hardball Times. at this point in my law school career i'm sufficiently checked out that i only regularly read sports blogs. the current post on THT is one of the most complete and comprehensible descriptions of the sport of cricket that i've ever seen, and for the first time in my life, i feel like i get it. i still think it's a vastly inferior sport to baseball, for any number of reasons, but it has some bizarre and fascinating efficiencies, in its way.

i wondered if something like this was going on

the washington post currently features an article about the DoJ Honors Program, noting that the control of hiring decisions has just been passed back to the career lawyers and away from the political appointees. now, i recently applied for the DoJ Honors Program - and received a lightning quick rejection. sure, i'm not the perfect candidate, but i'm not that bad. i wondered at the time if they could tell from some of the things on my resume that i was a democrat. it seems that that is the least of what they probably considered. they may even have been looking at things like my facebook profile, if the article is to be believed.

some notable quotes from the article: "[P]olitical appointees... had rejected an unusually large number of applicants during the most recent hiring period."; "The House and Senate Judiciary committees also are investigating allegations from an anonymous group of Justice employees that most of those cut from the application lists had worked for Democrats or liberal causes and that Elston removed people for spurious reasons that included 'inappropriate information about them on the Internet.'"

there's more stuff like that in there. it's an embarrassment to the department, and i hope people don't forget it soon.

musings from the A2K2 conference

i'm sitting at the A2K2 conference at yale. i am afraid i don't have any deep substantive thoughts about access to knowledge to share with you. but i am feeling a little wistful about my impending graduation and departure. there really are a lot of great things about being at yale, and i will miss all of them. but there is one thing about yale that i will miss more than anything else: the law school dining hall's cookies. i imagine that sounds silly to outsiders, but, trust me. these things are ridiculously good.

the red sox

the red sox just swept the fabled yankees in a fairly memorable series, including the record setting game 3 where the sox hitters clubbed 4 consecutive home runs (by manny, j.d. drew, mike lowell, and jason varitek) off of yankees' starter chase wright. after jeter homered to tie the game, lowell added a 3-run HR for good measure, to put the sox up for good. matsuzaka allowed a couple more runs, you know, just to keep it interesting, but the bullpen held on to a 1 run lead, and that was that.

can't you just picture a typical red sox fan yelling at the TV after that sequence of HR's? i imagine it would be something like "whose offense is vaunted now? huh? huh? bitch."

ok, maybe not.

musing on blogging

a lot of different people blog for a lot of different reasons. probably, for most, it's ego-driven - we blog because we want to share ourselves with the world, in a sense. we share our observations, our thoughts, and our feelings. we share a lot, and it can be very personal, at times. and there are times when the sharing crosses the line, when someone blogs about something that they should not have, either because they're embarrassed about having put themselves so much and so personally on display, or because they blogged about a subject (whether a topic or a person) in a way they should not have. different people probably have different lines, just like in normal social conversations. but in social situations there's always an outlet - there are friends who you can tell anything to, without telling it to the world. the blogosphere is sorta line the minimum common denominator acquaintance, in a way. because it's so clearly public (and even google searchable), you can only say on a blog what you would say in person to anyone, which sometimes feels very limiting.

i'm a very sharing person, in my usual social behavior and in my blogging, but i, too, have my line, and occasionally something is over it. i'm curious about the extent to which such hidden stories work their way in to the timber of my other posts, painting and simultaneously hiding a picture through simple words. or perhaps i'm imagining a level of subtlety that most blog writers, and most blog readers, find unworthy of their time or attention.

checking in

let's see, what have i been up to since last saturday? a decent bit, i suppose. sunday was one of the most productive days i've had all year; i think i worked from noon to midnight, relatively consistently. monday and tuesday were much more sensible. yesterday i went to see 'voyage', part 1 of 'coast of utopia', tom stoppard's new play. i was very impressed, mostly by the dialogue, but also by the acting and the set design. they had a couple semi-transparent curtains that made a nice background effect, and a large number of mannequins that represented the oppressed serf class in russia in the 1830s, accentuated by a few mirrors and the presence of several serf cast members. there was a very bizarre, disturbing character towards the end of the play - a six foot ginger cat, reminiscent of donnie darko's bunny rabbit, both in the style of its insertion into ordinary life and the sense of fate and doom that it conveyed within the story.

other than that, fantasy baseball remains active, and my draft league team hovers around 8th-9th place of 12. 3 of my hitters are still batting below .150, and while two of them are sitting on the bench, i keep thinking adam laroche will get better, so i've been playing him, at least against weaker RHP. my starting pitching hasn't been as good as it should be, though it's been fine; i have johan santana pitching today, along with el duque hernandez against the primarily RHH lineup of the florida marlins, so i am feeling optimistic. with howie kendrick's broken finger (out 4-6 weeks), i've been relegated to playing ryan theriot's hot bat and hot feet at 2B, with b.j. upton at 3B, until alex gordon snaps out of his start-of-season slump (.125/.208/.229).

finally, my final two concerts with the Yale Russian Chorus are this Friday and Saturday; the Friday one is an on-campus concert at Dwight Hall, which is actually going to be recorded as a live concert, with some of the tracks going on to our next CD. we recorded a CD a year ago, and it's still in production, which annoys me greatly. but i'm psyched about throwing a live track or two on there, especially if we perform Bogoroditse Devo up to our usual levels.

why the FCC is not the KGB

this is outstanding, though i think few people will appreciate it as much as me. apparently chairman martin of the FCC, who is sometimes considered controlling, has begun making a variety of KGB/FCC jokes. these are especially appreciated by a future FCC employee who also recently hosted a James Bond party (class of '007, baby!) while attired as a KGB agent. in martin's latest salvo, he gave a 'top 7' list (he must have gotten bored trying to come up with 10) of reasons why the FCC is not like the KGB. most of the reasons are not funny, lending additional support to the theory that he wrote them himself. however, i did like #5 ("KGB can monitor the NSA’s activities") and #3 ("The KGB is run efficiently").

in memoriam

so it goes.

R.I.P., mr. vonnegut.

man...

as if i didn't already think alyssa milano was hot, she has created a line of women's baseball apparel, and is modeling all of the outfits on the MLB.com shop page: touch by Alyssa Milano

my favorite, unsurprisingly, is the Red Sox hoody. shades of 'anger management' there. yum.

what to do, what to do...

so, i'm getting my first law paper published this semester. we just finished the last round of edits, and, apparently, they are going to finish the proof in the next 48 hours. so now only one question remains: wtf am i supposed to do with the 50 printed copies they're sending me?

option 1: bonfire (duh)
option 2: build a small fort in my living room, to protect me from the world
option 3: be a tool and go to some random conference and hand them out
option 4: pile them in the YJOLT/ISP office as a semi-durable memorial to me
option 5: invent + test a special catapult built to accept only journal paper proofs as ammunition

other ideas? votes? leave comments.

tuesday's awesomeness of the internet

i apologize in advance for not having any truly original content for today. i blame the 4+ hours i spent this afternoon playing Desktop Tower Defense. [warning: do not attempt to play this game if you value your sanity or your free time. however, should you attempt to play, begin on easy, and construct a maze with the cheap cannons to send the bad guys back and forth past the same guns. on the medium level, first funnel the bad guys from the top and left to the same point, then build a narrow pathway maze.]

in lieu of original content, i will share the best of the world of metafilter on the day. first is the metafilter community observation of a curious feature of google maps's driving directions. to investigate for yourself: ask for driving directions from new york, new york to paris, france. look at step #23.

second is the Donkey Kong mural photoset at Flickr. apparently some bored engineering students, armed with 6400 post-it notes, some mr. pibb, at least one set of white bunny ears, and 5 hours of free time, created an enormous mural in homage to the classic arcade game. you should check out the pictures. they've got some in-the-making photos on their livejournal page.

also a shout-out to the red sox for demolishing the seattle mariners' mediocre pitching staff. way to pick on someone littler than you. i mean, i appreciate the effort, and it's nice once in a while to just kick ass. but, make sure you score runs against good teams, too.

i remember 1992

ESPN.com - McAdam: Young Bucs giving Pittsburgh a reason to believe

i remember 1992, the last season the pittsburgh pirates posted a winning record. i was a kid in the northern panhandle of west virginia then; that was the summer we moved from the little town of chester (pop. 3000) to the "big city" of wheeling (pop. 30,000), both to get away from a waste incinerator that had been built across the river and to allow my sister and i to go to the Linsly school in wheeling. the pirates were a big deal for me then; they had an amazing team, featuring not just the stellar Barry Bonds in his true 300-30-30-100-100 prime, but also Andy Van Slyke, as the article notes, and the then-rookie knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, whom the article omits.

i was a baseball card collector then, like any good 11 year old boy. but, presaging later in life in other contexts, i was a few years behind the times, and baseball cards were being overproduced (both in numbers and in flashy graphics) and were no longer very valuable or interesting. i clung strongly to the few older cards i accumulated, and to the few rookie cards that i bothered to mail to the players to have signed and returned. and then, a year later, in the summer of 1993, i left my few favorite cards behind by accident when i moved out after a summer geometry class at the Center for Talented Youth in baltimore. we went back a few hours later, before we left town, but the cleaning crews had come through, and i never saw them again.

i'd like to say that this incident had a transformative effect on me, something about not growing too attached to material goods, or appreciating the transience of value in general. but i doubt it. i think there's a box in my parents' garage somewhere with the remnants of my baseball card collection. if they didn't toss it when they moved from wheeling down to sunny st. augustine, florida. but, if they did throw it out, i can't say that i would mind much. and i'll always have the memories.

on a not-so-random street musician, Washington DC, lawyers, and the meaning of life

There is a fascinating article in the Washington Post this morning. Gene Weingarten, listed as a WaPo 'staff writer' but better known to me as Dave Barry's (perhaps former) editor, organized and described a stunt, a trick to test the mettle and the humanity of government employees. He should have started with an easier crowd; they failed miserably. The stunt? Take one of the world's foremost violin players, and stick him (with his $3.5 million Stradivarius) in the L'Enfant Plaza metro stop during the morning rush hour, and let him play. Record the performance on hidden video, and see how many people stop to listen, and how many give him money.

Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

The results, to spoil the article just a bit, are disappointing. Of the 1100 people who passed through the station during the monitoring period, a mere 7 stopped to take in the performance for more than a few seconds. About 30 threw in some money. This is a violinist who sells out every concert hall, at hundreds of dollars a ticket.

I like reading about the musician's reactions to the setting. He gets annoyed if he's playing in a concert hall and someone coughs; yet, in the high traffic subway station with everyone rushing past, he feels an incredible joy when someone pauses to listen, or when someone throws in a dollar bill instead of coins. Instead of finishing a piece to thunderous applause, there is only "another thunderous silence", the clap of hands replaced by the clap of dress shoes against sturdy easy-clean tile floors.

There's a lot of quasi-philosophical discussion in the article about the meaning of all this, about whether we should be thinking less of these people for ignoring the musician. Some Kant is quoted, which I'm a bit skeptical of, not just in this application but in general. But the article points out that every child is distracted, every child stops to listen. They don't walk around all day with a million other things on their minds, and so they notice and appreciate the music.

One passerby paused for a minute to glance at him, acknowledging his presence. She found herself wondering about how he could make a living playing the violin in subway stations, and about how to game the system to get the most money out of it. But she didn't notice the music at all, she was so distracted by her thoughts of the financial aspects of it. Turns out, she's a government lawyer.

I think that I would have stopped to listen. I certainly hope I would have. If I spend so long in DC, and so long working as a lawyer, that I rush on by and ignore such things, then it will be time for me to pack up my bags and move on. The only question is whether my eyes will still be open enough to see it.

[from the article:]

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W.H. Davies

the ongoing angst of a neurotic fantasy baseball manager

in my fantasy baseball draft, i chose outfielder chris b. young of the arizona diamondbacks in the 10th round. i stand by this selection. i needed a third outfielder; his upside is high; the outfielder taken in the pick before mine was delmon young, and the next outfielder taken was torii hunter, so i think i took him in the right spot in the draft. but he's a rookie, and he was off to a slow start, so i said to myself that he needed to earn his lineup spot. which he did, in a big way, yesterday, with a 3 run HR. i had seriously considered playing him yesterday because he was up against a very weak pitcher, but, in the end, benched him - meaning i did not get any points for that. my whole offense has been starting a little slow, and i could really have used those points. arrrrrrrrrrrggggggggh.

i even had a dream last night that, instead of just hitting one HR while benched, he had actually hit 3, and had gotten like 6 RBIs, and that one of the other guys on my bench had 2 HR's and 3 RBIs, meaning i was actually out 5 HR's and 9 RBIs. which would actually have been a huge freakin' deal. 1 HR, 3 RBIs... not so important.

cold spells and the east coast

look, i've been a wanna-be new england'er all my life. for a while there i was making steady progress - i started in west virginia, moved east to baltimore, then northeast to new haven, and then spent a summer in boston to audition it as a place to live. but the last couple winters in new haven have worn me out. i'm sick all the time. and this latest cold spell is just not acceptable. for crying out loud - the seattle/cleveland baseball game is currently delayed due to snow. umm... it's april 6th. wtf.

this is just another reason i am looking forward to next year. though i imagine a few years in DC will convince me that it has objectively the worst weather in the world. we shall see.

misc updates

Things are proceeding well over here in the world of Chris. I'm finishing up my preparations for the summer - I mailed off the full application for the Moral Character determination required for the California bar, I settled a sublet for June + July in Berkeley and mailed the rent checks, and so forth. Now if only I could sublet the other two apartments I have leases on, in New Haven and in Arlington... As amusing as it is to have my name on two places this summer and to be living in a third, I'd rather not add an unnecessary $2000/month to my already growing debt.

Fantasy baseball continues unabated. I was in 2nd place of 12 in one league, before slipping to 4th overnight - but I'm not worried, a couple of my hitters haven't gotten going yet (but will), and a few people had lucky starts from their pitching staff, and mine should demonstrate its true dominance in a week or two. Today's Tigers/Blue Jays game was postponed due to "cold". Who the hell ever heard of a game being postponed for that? I mean, I don't blame them, but it seems like an unlikely occurrence.

I am going to NY this weekend for a play, and next weekend am hosting a James Bond themed cocktail party. The weekend after that, I have two concerts, and the weekend after that, a conference. It's a good thing I gave up working a while ago, or I'd be seriously pressed for time.