suspended conversation

my work at Free Press

2009-12-15T10:24:00.009-05:00

i sometimes get asked a simple question that has no simple answer: what do i do? the short(-ish) answer is, i'm a Policy Counsel for Free Press, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that does lobbying and grassroots work in support of media and telecommunications policy issues. we work on a broad range of issues, from preserving the open Internet, to fixing broken markets in media, television, wireless, and Internet access services, to developing and supporting a better system for public media and for journalism. that much, everyone reading this probably already knows. i'm a lawyer, but i don't have clients, and i don't sue anyone - and although i don't think my friends or family doubt my contributions, they may rightly wonder just what exactly those contributions are.

my generic duties are the same as those of most lawyers and policy people in D.C. - i read, i write, and i talk to people. why does that help? let me give you a little more detail:

i read, a lot. the more i read, the more i can understand the positions of the other political players in DC, and the more i am aware of the general climate and culture. this helps me know where to push, how to push, and who to push on (not necessarily in that order) when i write (see #2) and when i lobby (see # 3). reading about outside-DC events, like developments in technology, also helps me shape my (and Free Press's) positions on what the right policy should be.
i write, a good bit. i write comments and portions of comments to be submitted to the FCC; sporadic letters to the FCC and to the Hill; occasional white papers for a range of audiences; and sporadic blog posts. i sometimes write with colleagues from my organization, sometimes with colleagues from other organizations, and sometimes solo. my writings are sometimes more legal in nature (e.g. comments on Public, Educational, and Government cable content), sometimes technical (e.g. white papers on Deep Packet Inspection and Application Bias), sometimes more rhetorical or philosophical (e.g. a Free My Phone blog post on my vision for wireless services), and sometimes a mix of all of the above (e.g. initial and reply comments on truth-in-billing). i think of my writings as the most directly valuable contributions i can make, because they contribute to the conversation as a vehicle for the policy outcomes that Free Press supports.
i lobby - sometimes. usually at the FCC, explaining Free Press's positions and trying to win staffers over; once in a while on the Hill. i do not lobby often enough to have to be a registered lobbyist, which i personally consider fortunate, because that entails a lot of paperwork that i frankly don't want to do. but when i do lobby, i have a chance to sit down face-to-face with a decisionmaker, to whom i can explain and defend my position, and from whom i can learn more about the political climate and the right pressure points (see #1) to help me guide future writing and lobbying.
i go to a lot of meetings. a lot of people are working towards the same goals, and i try to spend lots of time talking to them about what our shared goals are, and how we can work together to divide up the load or at least support each other to get there. a lot of other people are working against my goals, and i meet with them sometimes too, either to find a middle ground or to pull them over to my side. some of those people working with me are in public interest organizations, some are at businesses, and some work for the federal government - and the same is true of the people who work against me. meetings are almost as important as reading and lobbying for gauging political environments and identifying pressure points.
sometimes i also go to conferences, either to attend or to present - like Supernova in San Francisco in the first week of December, where i spoke on a panel about broadband in a lineup that included representatives from Comcast and Verizon, a heavily deregulatory former FCC commissioner, and one fellow public interest person (but i'm used to being outnumbered). conferences can be a couple different things - they can be part of the advocacy process, to push an issue, or they can be educational, to help develop my understanding of the right policy outcome.

i suppose the next question is, how does my work help the broader goal? over the long haul, my writings and lobbyings and meetings can help produce a favorable FCC order or a favorable bill, or at least help avoid unfavorable orders and bills; that's generally the tangible target result. but, these are the rare phenomena - it's like when you're playing tug-of-war against another team and they finally fall over or the knot crosses your line. continuing the metaphor, most of what i do is pull like hell on the rope and hope the knot moves a few inches closer to my side, knowing it might take weeks before i can tell. FCC comments and white papers and lobbying meetings mostly lead to news articles, which lead to FCC investigations and open proceedings (generally questions from the FCC directed to industry), which reveal more information about how messed up our media and telecom ecosystem has become; that then leads to more news articles and an ever-growing momentum which is fueled by more comments and white papers and even more news articles. that's the big-picture, months-in-development story of how the rope gets moved.

i consider myself very fortunate to be where i am - i have a dynamic, interesting job with a lot of new things to learn and a lot of fantastic people to work with. sometimes i also feel like i'm a little bit crazy, going to work every day with 300 hundred pound juggernauts staring down at me from the other side of the rope (the industry lawyers and lobbyists, and their astroturf allies). but i can't imagine doing anything else. i really believe we need to change things, so i plan to pull on that rope as hard as i can for as long as i can, and i am proud that the people around me are pulling every bit as hard, or harder.

(and, if you want to contribute, here's a link.)

three updates

2008-12-02T11:14:00.002-05:00

i haven't updated here in a while - been busy with work, mostly, and non-work projects like going through the publication process for a paper. my apologies. the election was kind of a big deal, of course, but by now we've moved on, we have recovered from the champagne hangovers, and we are all thinking about policy and politics for 2009. the Cabinet is being assembled, and other important positions (like the CTO and the Chairman of the FCC) will follow at some indeterminate future point. many future deep thoughts about the possibilities of progress depend on these appointments, and little can be said until then.

if you will indulge my briefly, i submit for your temporary amusement a brief post on a few of the most important things that have happened, in my opinion, in the last few weeks.

1) one high-ranking Senator is planning to introduce a new Net Neutrality bill in January. the Comcast victory was great, don't get me wrong; but the FCC's order is being contested in court, and i prefer to have clear, well-defined statutory provisions, to protect net neutrality with more than the discretion of the FCC's Chairman and Enforcement Bureau.

2) Canada's leaning in a different direction, having chosen not to stop Bell Canada's wholesale p2p throttling. i recognize that this is a very different context than the limited Comcast case, and that the same decision opened a rulemaking process to investigate a more general response to such industry action, but the CRTC had an opportunity to make real progress and to lead the rest of the world in going down a path that, for the United States at least, appears inevitable (not to mention *correct*). i'm not sure i was expecting a different outcome, but i was hopeful, at least.

3) the change.gov team is doing everything the way i would, if i were in charge. embedded YouTube (and other formats) for Presidential addresses. creative commons licensing for content. putting high-profile, experienced academics at the top of the FCC review team. makes me wish i was more of a part of it - though, i'm not sure what else i would suggest they do.

that's all from my world, off the top of my head. apologies if i failed to mention your favorite issue, but, well, get your own blog.

the Freedom Doctrine

2008-08-13T09:13:00.002-04:00

the FCC's Commissioner McDowell, already having established himself as the right-wing equivalent of Resident FCC Firebrand Commissioner Copps, has raised the bar a step higher. in his latest escapade, he has suggested that an Obama presidency would lead to a return and expansion of the Fairness Doctrine, and that net neutrality is the first step down this road. let's review, shall we?

the Fairness Doctrine required over-the-air television broadcasters to dedicate a portion of their air time to the presentation of multiple points of view on controversial topics. though a lot of concerns were raised about the constitutionality of such a regulation, the Supreme Court upheld it in Red Lion Broadcasting Co v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969). but it was abandoned by the FCC anyway, and as McDowell admits, it hasn't been suggested (or, i'm sure, even considered) at the FCC, and no one in their right mind would consider extending it to the blogosphere or any other portion of the internet.

more importantly, though, the Fairness Doctrine has nothing to do with net neutrality. there's a difference between regulation and control, at least when the objective of the regulation is to force the control to be in the hands of the people, not the government or any corporations. with the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC decided to force broadcasters to transmit certain types of content whether their listeners wanted to hear it or not, all in the name of fairness; with net neutrality, the FCC is forcing the cable companies (the equivalent of the broadcasters) to allow users of their services to communicate freely, without any restrictions. it's sort of the antithesis of the Fairness Doctrine - in fact, i suggest we call it the 'Freedom Doctrine'. Commissioner Copps, are you listening?

a beverages post

2008-08-10T16:06:00.004-04:00

in the spirit of my short-lived beer blog, this is a post about gourmet beverages. over the last week or so, i had the opportunity to try a few nice things, so, here are some brief reviews.

wine:
the highlight of the last week, unquestionably, was the cakebread, or the 2003 Cakebread Cellars Benchland Select, to be precise. cakebread is known for decent chardonnays and world-class cabernet sauvignons, and the benchland select is no exception. complex flavors, incredibly smooth finish, and a ridiculously long and pleasant aftertaste. it's the sort of wine where the term 'sublime' can be used without it being ridiculous.

last night i opened up a bottle of 2006 veritas claret, brought back from a recent VA winery weekend. the claret is a drinkable virginia red wine, with a touch of the smokiness that characterizes most of the Virginia merlots and cabernet francs, in my experience. the Veritas Claret is a blend of mostly those two grapes. it didn't disappoint, but better wine can be had for a lower price. my Virginia wine weekend as a whole was outstanding, though. i saw a lot of fantastic countryside, and i had some surprisingly good wines. the best wines that i tried, hands down, came from Pollak vineyards. Pollak had the only truly great red wines i tried in Virginia - their merlot tasted like good bordeaux, and their cab franc tasted like a good rioja, with flavors of dark chocolate to die for. their white wines were no less impressive. i used to refuse to drink chardonnays, because i hate the over-oak of California wineries. but Virginia wineries do it the right way, and Pollak, in particular, achieves the perfect balance of vanilla/toffee and pure grape. i would drink their estate chardonnay any time of any day and count myself a happy man.

on my last evening visiting my parents, we opened a moderately priced bottle of barbaresco as well, which was my first opportunity to try the renowned Piedmont varietal. i enjoyed it, but i was not blown away, and my parents were not enthralled by it. perhaps it needed to open up more; i'm not sure. i have a cheap ($20) 2003 barbaresco, from a winery with young vines, that i have been holding on to, and my first experience with the type will encourage me to let my bottle age a little longer before consumption.

beer:
my parents brought back a bottle of dark efes beer from their visit to Turkey; they have not been able to find it in the United States since they returned. it's quite good overall, with great up front flavors of coffee hard candies and of chocolate, though it is a bit rough in the finish. but, a tasty and interesting beer which i will keep my eyes out for in the future.

cocktails:
my roommate made a round of Pimm's Cup cocktails over the weekend. the Pimm's Cup is a combination of an herbal-citrus-gin concoction known as Pimm's No. 1 and other non-alcoholic liquids, in this case Sprite. toss in a slice of a citrus fruit, or even grapes or apple slices or almost any other fruit imaginable, and you have made a very refreshing drink. at my suggestion, we added a few drops of angostura bitters to one of the glasses, which i think enriched a lot of the flavors even more. very tasty stuff.

pessimism in copyright law

2008-08-03T15:12:00.004-04:00

bill patry, long time copyright law scholar and blogger, has decided to end his personal blog. his many devoted readers will miss him, but his reasons are fair and hard to argue with. [even had bill not given a reason, i wouldn't have blamed him, but i'm not exactly a role model for blogging dedication.] i sympathize with his pessimism over the state of copyright law, in particular. i went to law school to do technology law and policy, and certainly the foremost area i had in mind to work on was copyright law and its extensions, such as the DMCA. but over the first couple years of law school, including writing a paper about the errors of Grokster and taking a summer internship at the EFF, i started to turn away from it. in part that was because i saw a reasonable wealth of copyright law scholars and activists and a shortage of scholars and activists in the telecommunications side of technology law and policy, and i wanted to move into a less crowded field. but in larger part, the progress and momentum of copyright law and policy discouraged and disappointed me too much.

some are not so pessimistic, such as tim lee. he suggests his youth, but i don't buy that, in part because i think i am a year or more younger than him. i think it's more likely the second reason, that tim isn't a lawyer. i don't like the sound of that because i don't feel that it gives tim enough credit; i think he knows the legal background as well as i do. but the difference could be that, as he says, he isn't afraid of the gap between the letter of the law and its enforcement. i am very afraid of that gap, because it imposes a chilling effect on people, at least at the margins. also, i don't think the gap is as big as tim portrays it. i think that the RIAA and MPAA and others aren't letting their efforts wane at all; i perceive it instead as a gradual picking off of victims at the edges. they are starting with the large format uploaders and the universities

regardless of any possible reasons for our difference of opinion in this matter, i'm with bill - in the negative camp. maybe it's going too far to say that the war has been lost, but that's how i have felt before. lessig tried to overturn the CTEA, and it didn't work; challenges to the DMCA through judicial and legislative branches have similarly failed to achieve significant benefits. for every Lexmark there's at least one Blizzard v. BnetD. we can come back, i think; i just don't see the light yet.

[update: it's like the judges were reading! today's 2nd Circuit decision on Cablevision's DVR is a rare and significant victory for balance in copyright law.]

complete lack of accountability and the IOC

2008-07-31T15:19:00.003-04:00

my sister is boycotting the Olympics. her post is great, and to summarize it wouldn't do it justice, so, please read it in the original. i will take one piece out of it to set up this post, though: Amnesty International has demonstrated that the Chinese government has failed to keep its promises of human rights reform, and from the looks of things, it hasn't even tried. the IOC and the rest of the world had hoped for more when allowing China to play host, and this failure threatens to undermine the spirit of the Olympic Games in a major way. now the issue has hit home a little more directly for me: the Washington Post reports that the IOC is allowing the Chinese government to filter Internet access at the games, even though the IOC and Chinese government had specifically pledged to allow unfettered Internet. according to an IOC official, "The pledge of unrestricted access applied only to sites related to the Olympic competitions."

that's bulls*&t. am i surprised? no, not really, just upset. i'm not surprised that the Chinese government isn't allowing unfettered communications. i'm also not surprised, as my sister notes, that the U.S. government isn't taking much of a stand against it. not only are American athletes still competing in the games, but also President Bush will be attending the opening ceremonies in Beijing. whether we like it or not, China has become a serious power in the world and is not to be trifled with. even my periodic short-term attention span hasn't made me forget the impressive and very scary Chinese anti-terrorism exercises that made the rounds of the Internets not long ago. and for some time now China has been an economic power not to be trifled with.

but, war isn't THAT imminent. as the human rights leaders of the world (well, before the Bush administration), we owe it to the rest to set an example. i'm not sure what the right answer is. at a minimum, President Bush should not be attending the opening ceremonies, and it should be deliberate and overt, as a protest against the broken promises of the Chinese government... but good luck getting that to happen. i don't know that i want to deprive our athletes of the opportunity to compete in the games - it only comes along once every four years, after all. maybe that is what it would take to get worldwide attention to the issue, and to get the Chinese government to feel something resembling shame. but would even that be enough, or is it already too late?

freedom isn't free

2008-07-30T11:41:00.002-04:00

Rebecca MacKinnon has a great post today in response to a Silicon Valley conference she attended last week. the main observation of her post seems to me to be that Silicon Valley operates as a tenuous "benevolent dictatorship", and remains largely unaware of the massive legal and political regimes that might restrict their innovations and that many in Washington, D.C. spend sleepless nights worrying about. (she also expresses concern about the "benevolent" nature of the dictatorship - more on that later.) and she's absolutely right about the importance of this aspect of technological innovation. with apologies to Team America: World Police: freedom isn't free, it costs folks like you and me. i also agree with her implicit wish that engineers be aware of the fight that goes on in the policy sector, though i wouldn't say that i feel they should assist in it necessarily. they contribute through technological innovation, and others of us contribute in our own ways.

also, at the moment, the fight to preserve openness and innovation in the Internet is going pretty well. the strategy of private sector deployment of Internet access, checked by reasonable government regulation to protect openness and other consumer values, seems to be rolling along. the Commission is poised to put a check on Comcast's activities (see also here), even as Comcast enjoys tremendous growth. 2009 will (hopefully) show us the deployment of open-access wireless services on the 700 mhz spectrum.

we are starting to have a little breathing room, perhaps, so a few people are asking, what next? where do we go from here? Tim Wu has an op-ed in the New York Times today advocating that we pursue alternative sources of bandwidth just as we are pursuing alternative sources of energy. two of his suggestions are municipal wi-fi and buying/owning your own bandwidth (see, e.g., Derek Slater's post on the latter). i'm skeptical of both of these, though they're great ideas and i'm glad that they are part of the conversation. i have more faith in the third approach, encouraging competition among broadband providers. whether through spectrum (as Wu suggests) or scaling back the monopoly-use rights given to cable and fiber service operators, competition in high-speed Internet service provision has a great deal of potential, but we have to be careful with how we do it. rolling out wires is expensive, after all. and establishing reasonable interconnection charges have plagued the FCC's regulation of the phone network for decades (and have caused worse problems in Japan).

Rebecca MacKinnon's post alludes to another possible direction: looking within the Internet, at the application and service providers there. as she implies, many of us trust our current benevolent dictators, particularly Google and Apple. but scare stories are starting to appear - such as Google selectively releasing some versions of the Android SDK, or Apple persisting in holding iPhone developers to its NDA even though this impacts their ability to share information learned in the software development process and thus limits innovation. Richard Bennett has been trying hard to redirect the Net Neutrality debate away from internet service providers and towards Google. i don't know that i'm lying awake at night over Google yet, but, i'm keeping my eye on the blogs at the least.

there's a lot to think about, and a lot of work to do. as to where the 2009 focus will fall? we will have to see.

Blizzard's litigious ways

2008-07-17T22:39:00.004-04:00

during my 1L summer (the summer between first and second year of law school), i had the great opportunity and pleasure to be a summer legal intern at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. one of the cases i helped with while i was there was the 8th Circuit Appeal of Davidson v. Universal Associates, better known as Blizzard v. BnetD. the case dealt with a group of amateur software developers who created a rival server to Blizzards -- which they called BnetD -- that allowed them to play the Blizzard game 'World of Warcraft' online, without using the official Blizzard server. their story was that Blizzard's official server was buggy and didn't have some features that they wanted, so they made their own. Blizzard doesn't charge for playing the game on their server, though they get some ad revenue for it, but that wasn't their issue with the developers. unlike Blizzard's official server, the unofficial BnetD server was unable to tell whether a copy of the World of Warcraft game was an official registered copy with a valid CD key, or was an illegal copy of the game. so Blizzard's theory was that the developers had created a server of their own so that they could play (and empower others to play) illegal copies of the games. they brought suit under the DMCA and under contract and copyright law, and they won.

i wrote about this case in one of my papers, a paper about the effects of cognitive framing. the case hinged on the interpretation of a very ambiguous technical term, "interoperability", contained within an ambiguous provision of a complex and largely unlitigated statute. the 8th Circuit's opinion distinguished the one and only relevant precedent, Lexmark v. Static Control Components, on fairly thin reasoning, and ruled (in my opinion, without much in the way of an explanation) that the activities of the developers exceeded the bounds of the DMCA interoperability exception and constituted a copyright violation. i thought the opinion showed signs of undue influence from cognitive framing activity in the briefs, so i wrote the whole thing up as one of my paper's key examples.

apparently Blizzard is active in the courts again - this time, challenging the developer of "WoWglider", a "bot" program that allows users to leave their characters running and continuing to accrue experience and gold even when the user is not at the computer. according to Sherwin Siy over at Public Knowledge, one of the legal theories raised by Blizzard was that the use of the World of Warcraft software in conjunction with the WoWglider program is not a valid use under the license terms for the WoW software, and that in the absence of permission under the license the minimal technical copying activities involved in operating the game constitute copyright infringement. (Ars Technica has a slightly reworded explanation of the same theory.) on motion for summary judgment, the trial court judge agreed with Blizzard in many respects, including Blizzard's copyright liability theory.

i'll leave the detailed analysis to others who are far more qualified, and take up a little bit more of your time to examine the policy issue. what do we, as a society, want to be the outcome of this case? Blizzard has a valid point: the use of the WoWglider software lessens the enjoyment of the system by legitimate game players, by making it harder for them to compete and advance in the game (certainly relatively speaking, but in MMORPGs, that can be an absolute statement as well). but Blizzard has every right to try, through technological means, to shut down the use of bots, or (even better) to try to detect them and identify the human users behind them, and ban them from the system. do they have the right to punish the developer of the software? do we want them to have that kind of control, reaching outside their domain and getting the law on their side? i am extraordinarily uncomfortable with that kind of power. what right do they have to interfere with how others choose to use the open tools of technology which they are given? they have the rights that we give to them through copyright. unfortunately, these rights and the laws that underpin them are being stretched to bizarre and unrecognizable levels to make sure that companies like Blizzard maintain as much control over their products as possible, even when the technology cannot support that control. why? is this in service of some hidden policy goal, one which is incredibly pro-business and anti-openness? is it the product of effective framing and litigation techniques (imposed on judges unfamiliar with the technological concepts at issue) by the well-funded industry lawyers?

i wish we knew. maybe then we could fix it.

my future cause

2008-07-16T21:41:00.002-04:00

i ran across a couple great links dealing with my soon-to-be employer. one is a commentary on the Republican party and the Internet. it has three distinct pieces to it: the first discusses the Democratic party's fundraising success using small donors organized over the Internet, and advocates a Republican adoption of a similar model; the second is an argument for why Republicans should support net neutrality; and the third is an observation that rural Americans, who are disproportionately Republican, also have disproportionately less access to broadband Internet, and perhaps the Republican party should care more about that. the authors are taking a neat angle by acknowledging that the market for internet services isn't a functioning free market at all, and asking what can be done, under that assumption, to promote core Republican values: "freedom, independence and empowering the majority of Americans who want to be protected from abuses of power, be they from Big Government or Big Business." good stuff...

GOP should get serious about cyberspace - Politico.com

the second article is from the other side of the political spectrum - it is a terrific, very liberal piece about media and democracy and the Internet. it emphasizes the value of information, complete and unrestricted, and it expresses concern that an overly concentrated, overly corporate media landscape does not promote the value of information above the value of a share of stock. it weaves this with talk about "new media", the Internet, and how the ideal media landscape that it presents is under attack by the same forces as those driving concentration of ownership of TV stations and newspapers across the country. the rhetoric is a tad heavy handed (complete with obligatory George Orwell reference) and the article degenerates into a mini-rant against the Iraq war partway through, but the first part of it is a spectacular description of the what and the why for many of the things i stand for. [also, if anybody else is curious, Wikipedia describes the "fifth column" concept.]

Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column? - In These Times

the inflated importance of "customer service"

2008-07-15T21:58:00.002-04:00

http://dcist.com/2008/07/15/murky_coffee_vs_teh_internet.php

i've been thinking a lot about this story, and for a while, i was of two minds. i'm a dedicated coffee snob - i have a double espresso every morning - and while i enjoy iced lattes on occasion, i can't imagine pouring hot espresso over ice and serving it. it would dilute it. at the same time, if that's how a customer likes espresso, that's fine... it's not like the coffee is REALLY ruined in any serious way.

but, at the same time, Murky Coffee has a menu of drinks. that's what they serve. if you want something that they don't serve, don't complain about it and get angry, just go somewhere else. Starbucks will certainly pour your espresso over ice if you want it. if you like your espresso poured in a glass of OJ, your taste preference doesn't mean Murky Coffee should be required by law, custom, policy, the tenets of "customer service", or anything else to pour a shot of espresso into a glass of OJ and serve it to you. it's enough that that idea is repulsive to them, that they feel that will reflect badly on the quality of their product, even if it's no trouble at all for them to do it.

i won't deny that Murky went a little too far here... i think that their attitude was unwarranted, at the very least. you can be polite about everything, saying that you don't serve your espresso over ice, that you're sorry, and that it's store policy. don't be demeaning as if the customer is stupid or wrong for having the preference they have. be polite but firm that it's not something you recommend, but leave it at that. and if you have to, suggest that you will give them a cup of ice and an espresso (which is what the store did), or remind them that they can go to Starbucks down the street if they want to.

so, i support Murky in principle... just not in execution.

suspended, indeed

2008-07-15T20:49:00.002-04:00

well, it has been... 13 months. i briefly created a beer-themed blog (beerjd, as i called it) in the interim, but that was abandoned rapidly, for several reasons, mostly a growing interest in learning about wine. i'll probably always find most of my motivation in technology law and policy, though, and in everyday observances of the world.

a very brief recap of events since June 1, 2007, to be followed by a more substantive post (or two). the bar studying process was one of the worst periods of my life, but the exam itself wasn't the end of the world (even though i barely slept during those nights out of anxiety), and i passed on the first try, so all's well that ends well? i worked for 10 months as a government honors attorney in DC and i was very happy with it. but then i got a great opportunity to do a "dream job", at least for my background and interests, so i chased it and got it, and will be starting soon. i have a steady and serious girlfriend, which makes everything else in life better. i'm blogging from a black 13" Macbook, having shelved my long-beloved (and 4 year old!) Dell X300 to escape from the Microsoft hegemony. [and, yes, to substitute instead the Apple one... but, what can you do...] i think that's about it.

blogging from Berkeley

2007-06-01T00:28:00.000-04:00

it has been a long, long time since i last blogged on this space. sure, the calendar says it hasn't even been two weeks, but in the last two weeks, i feel like i've lived and aged years. the two days after my last blog post i spent packing up my life's belongings; the next day i spent 8 hours, with future roommate Rich, loading my and his stuff into our 17' UHaul. then we drove it to DC, unloaded, and unpacked, and then came back up to New Haven. last saturday morning, on the 'Hike with Harold', i felt, for the first time in months, a sense that my life was at peace, that i had crossed the hump of overwork, and that i could actually stop and breathe for a minute, because i didn't have dozens of overdue tasks breathing down my neck.

what a fleeting feeling that was. graduation came and went, including a few quasi-official parties at my apartment, and i found myself very busy with friends + family and with preparing to leave town. then i did leave town - i drove down to baltimore and got on a plane to come out to Berkeley for june and july. i spent all 6 hours of the flight (+ waiting periods) listening to two days' worth of property lectures which i was missing, because the review course began early last week; i didn't mind that, but as much as i almost enjoyed the semi-rote, semi-automatic process of listening to audio and filling in a worksheet, i'm not so certain that it sunk in to my head very well, as i'm currently struggling with review questions for that same material. i've been in berkeley for a day and a half now, and i feel overwhelmed again. i had a new neighborhood to learn my way around; provisions to acquire; several more days of review material to catch up on; new classes starting at the same time; social activities on the horizon; friends i haven't talked to in weeks; leftover law school responsibilities (though thankfully few of those, all journal related); and so forth. and to top it all off i'm still on east coast time, and i stop being productive at 9 pm, and can't sleep in past 6 am without difficulty.

thankfully i can see the light at the end of the tunnel. i'm already provisioned and rapidly getting adjusted to the new space. i will time adjust, i just won't get as much done as i otherwise could. i can stretch out the catching up process into next week easily enough - it's better to learn it right than to learn it fast. my social activities will wait until i am ready for them, and i'll do enough to maintain my sanity.

breathe, chris. juuuuuuuust breathe...

all done.

2007-05-18T14:39:00.000-04:00

just turned in my last final, a bit early even. i'm surprisingly happy with it. guess i'm finally starting to figure out the law school gig, now that i'm on my way out the door.

the emotions haven't sunk in yet, but they will soon. i always have a delayed reaction to this sort of thing.

oh my god

2007-05-15T16:24:00.000-04:00

law school is almost over. how did that happen? i still remember the conversation i had with one of my advisors in the late summer of 2003, where we sat down on a couple couches in the recently refurnished JHU Levering dining hall and i explained the many reasons why i thought going to law school would be a good move for me. i remember sitting in a room in goucher college in october of 2003 taking the LSAT. i remember wandering around stanford's campus in december of 2003 after a job interview with Google, thinking about the future and what i wanted to do with my life (which is especially funny, as neither Google nor Stanford wanted me). i remember standing in my living room, about to get on a plane to visit Boalt, getting the call from Dean Barnett to let me know i'd been accepted to Yale. i remember admit weekend - i remember that very, very well, including a conversation with ali nardali about going from math and science into law, and a conversation with zach summers where he was still trying to decide whether or not to go to law school. i remember standing in front of the glass case in the entrance of the law school where they posted the small group assignments, asking the random group of people assembled there if anyone else was in Carter's small group, and meeting my first fellow small group member, kate wiltenburg. i remember the first word spoken - 'Jaffee' - in my first class in law school - civil procedure with owen fiss. i remember a lot of joy, a lot of sadness, a lot of success, a moderate amount of failure, and a lot of boredom.

but now, it's almost over, and soon, there will be nothing more to remember. the chapter of my life on 'law school' will be closed, forever.

:'(

brief fantasy baseball post

2007-05-13T16:42:00.000-04:00

anthony reyes is going to give me a freaking heart attack. he lost his first 5 starts, and pitched OK in his last one, but didn't get a decision. i decided to pitch him today, against a mediocre San Diego offense, in a real pitcher's park, and he promptly forgets how to hit the side of a barn with a baseball, throwing 3 walks in the first 2 innings (along with 2 hits, 2 earned runs, and 3 strikeouts). what kills me is that his peripherals are actually really good. assuming normal distributions of everything, he should have like a 3.8 ERA, which isn't great, but it's worth playing, especially since he strikes out almost a batter per inning on average. his projections are all through the roof, but i'll be damned if he isn't actively trying to see how many different ways he can suck before he finally starts pitching well. grrrrrrr.

well, this is it...

2007-05-11T11:03:00.000-04:00

my classes are over. after all these years, after all these tears, i'm done with it. i'm taking two finals in the next week, and then it's all over. today is a real turning point in this ongoing existential reflection, because the law revue has come and gone. it was pretty fun this year, something i'm glad i played a small part in. but over the last week, the rehearsals for it rounded out my general over-scheduled life, and prevented me from having any real time to reflect emotionally on the upcoming transition. in my head, i kept saying to myself, push through, push through, you've got to push all your energy towards the law revue. and now it's over.

i hope you'll forgive me if my posts are sparser and less coherent in the near future - it's hard to put in words the sorts of things that i'm feeling. that, and, i do have two finals to take, for classes i literally have not read for since January, and after that, i have to move to Arlington and then come back to New Haven. you know, the usual.

busy, busy, busy

2007-05-07T11:56:00.000-04:00

i've been very busy the last week or so. fortunately, unlike my classmates, i am not finishing up a paper, writing reading notes, or doing much of anything for my classes. i've just been having 2-3 rehearsals a week for my choir and almost daily rehearsals for law revue, the skit show, which is this thursday.

that, and, as always, obsessing over fantasy baseball. most recently i traded todd helton, billy wagner, and alex gordon for mark teixeira. this was perhaps objectively the worst trade i've made, as i likely overpaid, but the truth is that i wanted to sell gordon, i wanted more HR's, i'm punting saves, and the guy who had teixeira a) also had ryan howard, and b) really likes helton and gordon. so i stand by the decision.

today begins the last week of classes of my law school career, and thus the last week of classes for me, ever, until perhaps the day when i am teaching my own. while i am very much ready to be working, and to be in DC, i don't think it fully register to me until today that this really is the end. yes, i'm sick of it. but this life is all i've known for the last 11 years (counting college, grad, and law school - high school is a little different). i don't know if i'm emotionally ready for this major of an adjustment... in a way, i'm almost glad that i'm going to have bar review lectures in june, to sort of transition me a little bit.

sometimes, a couple lines say it all

2007-05-01T11:09:00.000-04:00

"New York has lost eight of nine and is last in the AL East at 9-14. Entering Monday night's games, only Kansas City and Washington (both 8-17) had poorer winning percentages."

ESPN.com - Steinbrenner supports Torre

[p.s. in case it's not clear, i'm a huge Red Sox fan, and this is one of the happiest days of my life.]

a couple links from the web

2007-04-30T08:40:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-28T02:14:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-27T17:07:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-23T08:15:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-21T08:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-19T11:15:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-14T21:56:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-12T14:33:00.000-04:00

so it goes.

R.I.P., mr. vonnegut.

man...

2007-04-12T14:01:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-04-12T11:49:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-11T00:07:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-09T08:30:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-08T10:11:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-07T09:21:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-06T19:33:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-05T12:27:00.000-04:00

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.

i am, officially, a tool.

2007-03-31T17:07:00.000-04:00

i have become a tool of the american consumerist, conformist community. i just bought an iPod [8 GB nano]. it was just too pretty; it made me want it.

sigh.

the draft

2007-03-30T22:20:00.000-04:00

so, the fantasy baseball draft is over. we all got up at the crack of dawn and took over a seminar room in the law school, making our picks live over coffee and donuts. it was a good way to go, i think; better than an online draft or even a night time draft, where everybody's really tired and grumpy at the end.

my league has 6 categories for offense and 6 for pitching, though one of the pitching categories is IP, which is combined with a max IP of 1250, meaning that everyone should try to actually hit 1250 so that they can split that category. the other 5 pitching categories are W, S, ERA, WHIP, and K [total, not K/9] - pretty standard. the 6 offense categories are R, RBI, BA, OPS, HR, and SB - so, like pitching, 2 rate stats and 4 absolute.

here's my draft order, with my pick by round and overall, with by position and general notes:
1 (2) Johan Santana (SP) - the pujols of pitching
2 (23) Carlos Guillen (SS) - my most questionable pick; early, injury risk, high OPS
3 (26) Jason Bay (OF) - a solid hitter across the board, even a few SB's
4 (47) B.J. Ryan (RP) - joe nathan, k-rod, and mo rivera were all gone
5 (50) Ben Sheets (SP) - injury risk, but phenomenal pitcher - great K, WHIP
6 (71) Adam Dunn (OF) - perpetual 40-HR hitter; low BA but high OPS
7 (74) Howie Kendrick (2B) - weak last season, but on the verge of greatness
8 (95) Jered Weaver (SP) - amazing last season, great K/WHIP; but how many IP?
9 (98) Todd Helton (1B) - should be .900 OPS, may be even more
10 (119) Chris B. Young (OF) - stud prospect for D-backs; mini-Jason Bay with more SBs
11 (122) Jason Isringhausen (RP) - will still get plenty of S, but peripherals are ??
12 (143) Adam LaRoche (1B) - was last season's .915 OPS a fluke? he's at his peak age.
13 (146) Alex Gordon (3B) - often considered best '07 rookie in MLB; all-around hitter
14 (167) Anthony Reyes (SP) - another young SP who shined last year, with IP questions
15 (170) Russ Martin (C) - solid offensive catcher in a weaker LAD lineup
16 (191) Greg Maddux (SP) - amazing 5th SP; reliable, high IP, low K
17 (194) Brian Giles (OF/BN) - not what he used to be, but a strong 4th OF/trade bait
18 (215) Orlando Hudson (2B/BN) - backup MI; a pure PECOTA-driven pick, good #s
19 (218) B.J. Upton (3B/BN) - he will get playing time, and SB's
20 (239) Kevin Gregg (RP/BN) - unlikely candidate for eventual Marlins closer
21 (242) El Duque (SP/BN) - good WHIP, sporadic ERA/injury history

I am quite happy with this configuration. I admit Guillen is a question mark; I picked him because of the decent shot he has at getting a .900 OPS, because he will likely bat 4th in a potent Detroit Tigers lineup, and because (at the time of the draft) it was a contract year for him. Of course, later on draft day, he signed a 4 year extension, giving him license to slack off as much as he wants. Oh, well, such is life; he still has talent, if he stays healthy and stays motivated. I am psyched about Alex Gordon in the 13th rd; I wanted him (he's one of the reasons I picked Santana and not Alex Rodriguez), and was prepared to pick him 4 or 5 rounds earlier had I thought I might lose him. I also have a good feeling about Ben Sheets; in my preparations for this draft, the very first decision I made was to take him with my 5th pick, which I figured (correctly) would be in the middle of a run on ace SP's, after the more reliable Zambrano, Webb, Halladay, et al. I knew Sheets would fall to the 5th round, and I felt certain that he wouldn't fall further; and I think I was right about that.

fantasy baseball

2007-03-29T10:39:00.000-04:00

I have been borderline obsessed with fantasy baseball for the last few days. The only thing that keeps me from blogging about it incessantly is that blogging is a distraction from reading and thinking about it incessantly. Our draft is tomorrow morning, and I still haven't decided what to do with the #2 pick. At first I was thinking of Ryan Howard, which I'm pretty sure would be a bad choice, because by the numbers Alex Rodriguez is superior. I leaned towards Jose Reyes for a while, but if he doesn't crack .350 OBP (which he probably won't), I don't know if I can take him. So now I'm thinking about taking Santana. Good friends of mine, whose opinions I trust, have said Santana. But at #2? Hrm. He rocks 5 of the 6 pitching categories, though...

just sent out the email

2007-03-26T14:57:00.000-04:00

i just emailed the YJOLT body asking for interest in being an officer next year. sending it produced a very strong emotional reaction in me. i am pretty sure we're going to have a good crew of officers involved next year, but this organization is something that i've been running pretty hands-on for the last year, and i've put a lot of myself into it. i'll stay involved with the WPS, i'm sure. but still, it's kinda hard for me to think about transferring control. i feel sad and slightly worried - not that the next EIC won't be terrific, but that i've somehow messed things up in a way that hasn't been discovered yet, or that the changes i've made won't work out in the long run. the new website might not work out, the WPS might not get any submissions or might not get any comments, i might not have made the right publication offers at the right times, i might not have done enough recruiting and we might not get enough 1L's next year, etc. all the things that might go wrong... and i won't be there to help fix them... i can't just set it aside and not care any more, that's not who i am...

putting things in perspective

2007-03-24T22:57:00.000-04:00

you know, people aren't everything. i'm not some big environmentalist or ASPCA junkie; i'm not cruel or deliberately harmful, but i don't exactly dedicate my life to protecting non-human living organisms. but once in a while, you see something in nature that makes you realize how small a part of the world we people are - whatever we might think. the ocean has always done that to me. my parents live very near the ocean, and i'm always awestruck at its sheer magnificence - in the "size" sense of the word, not so much the greatness, as i tend to avoid both the sun and swimming, and am thus not much of a beachgoer.

as with the ocean, i have often been struck by the beauty and majesty of trees. if you feel any sympathy, or if you just want to see some cool pictures, check out this link, on the ten most magnificent trees in the world.

whew

2007-03-22T20:39:00.000-04:00

i just manually removed a 'trojan vundo' virus from my sister's computer. norton can't handle it, and neither can ad-aware, or even my usual advanced set of anti-spyware/anti-virus tools. had to go here:

http://www.aux.uwm.edu/compop/Vundo.php

it took well over an hour. probably would have been 15 minutes had i not tried all of the above options before discovering what exactly it was called and then googled it to find a virus-specific solution.

random thought

2007-03-22T08:47:00.000-04:00

thought for the day:

what is the bible? is it history or just story? or perhaps it's His story? how does one's answer to this question shape one's religion, and how does one's religion shape one's answer?

or maybe i should go get another cup of coffee...

[edit: my early morning poignancy surpassed my early morning grammar. evening-time, more lawyer-like chris, less creative but more correct, stepped in to fix things.]

assorted thoughts of the last few days

2007-03-21T21:35:00.000-04:00

for the first time in years, i'm starting to feel like i have a long-term career plan, one that i'm happy with. i'll work in my next job for as long as i'm enjoying it, spending some time on the side continuing the legal scholarship i've been doing in law school. and when i get tired of that, i'll go teach at a low-tier law school, continue the research, and try to start a clinic, one focused on writing amicus briefs for domestic appellate cases in technology law. my emphasis is slightly different from the EFF, Public Knowledge, the CDT, and similar groups, so i don't think it would be that redundant; i expect my techniques (which are influenced by my research) will be slightly different as well. anyway, i'm very excited about this. and it might even leave me time, down the road, to create my dream gourmet beer bar.

i've spent a lot of time over the last few days enjoying the warm florida air and reading 'Catch-22', but i've also spent a lot of time cleaning up footnotes for one of my papers (and, as soon as i finish with that, i have to clean up the other one for publication), and proselytizing for my journal. i'd have to say, if i were to rate the level of enjoyment of these activities on a scale of 1 to 10, the first be a 9, the third a 7.5 (yes, that high), and the second somewhere around -40.

why is it that, when i actually feel lonely and want company, i cannot stand to be active on instant messenger? i think it indicates that such forms of communication are, fundamentally, inadequate substitutes for actual human contact. and i think it taps into the ongoing debate concerning the formation of real lives and of virtual lives, and the extent to which it is healthy to develop the latter if it even slightly impacts the former. but that's a conversation for another day... with a human, and not with an unresponsive computer screen...

my new home, as of fall 2007

2007-03-18T20:39:00.000-04:00

i just signed a lease on a 2-br/2-ba (w/ a close friend for a roommate) in arlington, VA in the new Quincy Plaza building, by the VA Square orange line metro stop. i'm very, very, very excited. if you look at the floorplans, we're going to be in a '14'. it has amazing appointments (both the building and the apartment), lots of closet space, and an open island kitchen with cabinets suspended from the ceiling for glasses. the space is smaller than either of our current apartments, but we will consciously shed furniture and design for it - i am confident it will work out well.

back from tour

2007-03-18T20:12:00.000-04:00

i just returned from an amazing tour with the yale russki xor [pardon my weak transliteration]. 7 concerts in 7 days in the virginia/DC area, all of our concerts ranging in attendance from 75-150. the tour was amazing for two reasons. first, this is perhaps the greatest choir experience i've ever had. it's a small group, we do interesting and varied music (almost never in english), and i have a real, and important, role in this group - i'm the lowest of the low basses, and in a russian choir, that's pretty important. second, i got to bond with a lot of the other choir members, including a few who 2 weeks ago i would not have thought i could bond with. i actually stayed up all night last night hanging out with people - we chatted until the sun rose, and then went for breakfast at 7 when it started, and then i finally slept a couple hours from 8 to 10 am (and a couple more on the afternoon flight). spending a large chunk of time in close proximity with people really brings out who they are, in a way you can't perceive even after a year of occasional interactions.

one more post before break

2007-03-10T06:19:00.000-05:00

In half an hour I leave for my extended spring break. Please leave lots of amusing off-color comments to delight me upon my return.

In the meantime, check out the following. This is a report on a high-class speed dating event in New York City. The rules? Men who wished to participate needed to make at least $500,000 per year in income. Women needed to submit 3 different photos of themselves. A (male) reporter snuck in to sit down at empty tables to hear the women's stories. Consider the elderly lawyer gentleman who claims women like him because he drives a Porsche. Or the (also lawyer) 75 year old who insisted on buying a new bottle of champagne for each of his 3 minute dates. The stories are funny, but the pictures are funnier.

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/02/natural-selection-1.php

Ah, the social opportunities I will miss, living the GS life. *a single tear trickles down Chris's cheek*

latest in the series of bizarre sentences

2007-03-07T19:24:00.000-05:00

so, a supermodel assaults her housekeepers. it's apparently severe and frequent enough of a problem that, instead of merely leaving, one of them brings her to court for it. but, of course, she's a celebrity. so, instead of going to jail, she is sentenced so scrub floors for 5 days.

http://www.actressarchives.com/news.php?id=4435 (courtesy of Google News)

and they say that the rich and famous get off scott-free. ha! that'll teach you to assault a housekeeper. we'll make you do her work! for 5 whole days! what could better serve the purposes of the criminal justice system than that?? i bet that housekeeper feels so much better now.

continuing the series

2007-03-07T00:46:00.000-05:00

you know you've been too long at YLS when...

#4: you laughed when you read #3.

[courtesy of zbs]

in the ongoing series...

2007-03-07T00:26:00.000-05:00

you know you've been too long at YLS when...

#3: you insert a footnote into the paper you're writing that says "insert generic rule of lenity citation here". and this represents one of your more complete, thought-out footnotes. and the subject of the paper has nothing whatsoever to do with criminal law.

you know you've been at YLS too long when..., cont'd

2007-03-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

#2: you manage to fill an entire, long day with law school activities, while still not spending any time reading for your classes. and then you repeat that for the next week and a half. [this has been me since last monday.]

you know you've been at YLS too long when...

2007-03-05T14:43:00.000-05:00

#1: not only have you accepted the diet pepsi machine's bottle sticking problem, but you know exactly where to kick it to free the stuck soda on the first try. [hint: it's about 4 inches to the left of the leftmost opening where you reach in to get the drinks.]

karma

2007-03-05T10:01:00.000-05:00

i found a $20 bill on the sidewalk on the way in to the law school today. i'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. maybe i'll donate it somewhere to forestall any karmic repercussions.

or maybe i'm just being pessimistic, and this is my lucky day.

fox's new show 'the winner'

2007-03-04T22:09:00.000-05:00

oh, i get it - it's supposed to be ironic, because he's such a loser. ahhhhhhh. still not funny though. sorry.

one more week left of considerable work before spring break - tour in DC for a week and then florida for a week with the 'rents. you'll hear no complaints from me.

if, like me, you need a break - take a puppy break.

checking in

2007-03-03T10:49:00.000-05:00

it's been a while, hasn't it? almost a year and a half now. nothing like imminent deadlines on a research project and a set of paper revisions to spur a man to inaction. that means it's time for a new image layout and some posting!

i'll save you all the monotony of a full recap. in short, things are going well. i finish law school in may, take the bar exam in california in july, and move to washington DC in late august or early september. i am looking forward to being a full time employee, for the first time in my life, after spending 11 straight years in the higher educational system. i will miss the friends i've made, though my addiction to IM and email will help keep the bonds from sundering completely. on a professional level, i am excited by the possibilities my job will offer to me, and i am optimistic that in the future i can forge for myself a rewarding policy- and/or academic-oriented career spanning the gap between law and computer science.

baseball's spring training has begun in earnest, and i am avidly following the media extravaganza that is daisuke matsuzaka. hopefully, with dice-k, schilling, beckett, papelbon, wakefield, and lester, the red sox will not have to start a single game this season with other teams' cast-offs. but, we shall see. expect more baseball related posts from me as the season progresses.

there are four things in this world that i truly love. technology law and baseball have been mentioned. as to the third, music: i heard mahler's 3rd last night, performed by the yale philharmonia. it's a very interesting symphony. stylistically, it's all over the map - it fluctuates between the light and the dark so often that i felt confused. i thought the performance was quite good; the woodwinds and the strings impressed me in particular. and while i enjoyed the choirs, they were singing from the balcony, which made them sound a lot more muddled than they should have.

can anyone who knows me guess what the fourth thing is? if you said 'beer', you're close; i'm actually referring to gourmet liquid beverages as a pantheon. coffee came first, then tea, and beer was third, though it is arguably the most active. recent highlights of my beer tasting include 'la rulles', a very yeasty unfiltered belgian golden ale, and the 1990 bottle of thomas hardy's ale that i consumed in washington last november.

well, that's my life in a nutshell. as the pathetic peripatetic calvin would say: more bulletins as events warrant.

anagrams of me

2005-11-19T19:49:00.000-05:00

Internet Anagram Server

A brief self-centered post, by me, on my birthday. The Internet Anagram Server turned up a few outstanding rearrangments of my name.

hi sly ricer
sire richly [also 'rise richly']
lyric heirs
i cry relish

I can't decide whether #2 or #4 is my favorite. Votes are welcome.

on "the pocket part"

2005-10-20T14:59:00.000-04:00

The Yale Law Journal has released a new online companion site called "The Pocket Part". It is named after late-stage additions to legal publications which include updates in the law and additional commentary released after the beginning of the publishing process. It publishes short versions of the journal's articles, short responses, and brief comments. The Pocket Part strikes me as an original and different medium for online scholarly communication, and I thought I'd bring my blog back from the depths of oblivion to write up my thoughts.

Professor Balkin has spoken highly of the Pocket Part already: "If The Pocket Part catches on, I predict it will change the way we think about law reviews and what one can do with them." Prof. Balkin thinks the Pocket Part is a "participatory medium that permits a continuous conversation and that is organized around scholarly work of the highest quality." He contrasts it with traditional scholarship which he calls a "one-to-many" medium - the effort and ideas are created and developed by one person, and are read by many people. While scholarship does overlap, in that authors cite each other, there's a big difference between a true conversation and cross-citations.

I don't think that Prof. Balkin's characterization is entirely accurate. I think the Pocket Part is a new and original level of the scholarship process, but I don't think it's a discussion forum, and I'm skeptical about its long term value and success.

Let me provide some context. There is currently a three tiered system of discussion of legal scholarship:

1. The top tier of the current system is the true one-to-many tier - the actual hard copy published articles. These represent a lot of individual effort and self-expression. Articles in this tier are part of a larger discussion process, but only in the sense that all of legal scholarship is interactive. The articles are foremost about the speaker and only secondarily about the exchange.

2. The second tier is the academic blogging community, which is a mixed bag of thoroughly written articles (such as many of the posts on the Yale ACS blog) and short comments on current articles and events. This middle tier has elements of both one-to-many and of many-to-many communications - there's a certain amount of individual preparation and idea formulation, and a large amount of exchange and inter-post feedback.

3. The third tier is personal conversation, which isn't a form of media but is an important element of the legal scholarship process. Conversation is almost pure exchange, in the sense that a true minimum amount of planning and forethought go into what is expressed by each individual (especially when I converse), because it is designed to get immediately to the point in order to get feedback from the listeners.

I would place 'The Pocket Part' between Tier 1 and Tier 2. The format is ostensibly that of a blog - it publishes an RSS feed, and it updates regularly. But there's a very clear structure and hierarchy to the site. There's the main article, which is described as being an "op-ed" length version of the Journal article; then there are two 'Responses' by established authority figures (in the October issue, a D.C. Circuit judge and a respected senior Yale professor); finally, there is a "Discussion" section, which is where student journal editors and others can leave their feedback.

The Pocket Part refers to the main article as "op-ed length", but the analogy does not stop there. Both the responses and the comments will be miniature op-eds expressing the opinion of the writer. They will more closely resemble Tier 1 communications than Tier 2 or 3. The authors will likely expend more effort in the development of their writings, and will perhaps direct them more to the expression of their own ideas than responding to others.

There are two elements to Tiers 2 and 3 that set them apart from Tier 1. The first is that there is no real quality or quantity barrier to contributing - you can say as much as you want, and you can put as much or as little effort into what you say as you want. The second is that there is a perception that you're not being professionally evaluated on what you write (though blogs are changing in this context - note the recent discussion surrounding Dan Devine).

The response section of the Pocket Part does not meet either of these. I don't know how the decisions are made, but I expect that they want exactly two 'responses', that there is a high barrier to get to be a responder, and that the authors of the response expect their responses to fully enter the landscape of academic detabe on the issue - after all, they give a suggested citation format at the bottom.

The comments section is a little better. There is at least no obvious quantity regulation. But they are (largely) written by student journal members. These students know that their comments may be read by their professors, future employers, the current YLJ board, and others who they really, really want to impress. This places an inescapable burden of accountability on the submissions, which leads to a high quality requirement and a high effort of writing and editing for each post.

Because of these differences, I'm hesitant to believe that this medium will lead to a real "discussion". It's difficult to really interact with another student's comments, because the cost requirements of each post impose a burden of time on already heavy schedules. The posts that are worth writing are likely the individual expressions - as I said before, miniature op-eds. These are the ones in which the student has enough personally invested to be willing to risk criticism and the other potential negative repercussions of posting.

This is not the online equivalent of Tier 3. It's instead a new level of Tier 1 communications, of individual contributions which require less effort than writing entire papers. This can make a dramatic change to the scholarship landscape, and it can add a lot of speakers to the landscape (which is perhaps Prof. Balkin's point). But it's fundamentally not a discussion, and I don't think that it can have the interactive, exchange-based value of discussions. I don't think this structure can lead to a great collective understanding of the issues in the articles.

I could be entirely wrong. Perhaps the student members of the journal can create a landscape where anyone can post a 2-line comment without a second thought. This could then be the environment I want - the interactive, collaborative discussion, the online Tier 3. But I think the external realities of the offline environment of the Journal and of the law school will keep this from happening.

grokster

2005-06-27T14:47:00.000-04:00

for those who are interested, my personal take is up on LawMeme:

LawMeme - Additional Grokster Commentary

i think that i shall never see / a mullet as lovely as a tree

2005-06-22T01:29:00.000-04:00

mullet themed poetry. go to poetry.com and search for poets whose last name contains 'habte'. it's all dave barry's fault.

summer life in san fran, day 2

2005-05-29T18:47:00.000-04:00

Just thought I'd share some information about my San Francisco experience so far. I'm living downtown, a block from the Civic Center BART stop (my transportation to work for the summer). The location is pretty good; there are lots of restaurants, museums, and the SF Opera house within 3 blocks. The neighborhood is a little more run down than I expected, but it's not too bad.

There is a bookstore over by the Opera Plaza called 'A Clean, Well-lighted Place to Buy Books', which I'm told is very well-known. It's one of the best bookstores I've been to in a while. They have a table of recommended fiction with authors I've never heard of. I get tired of the Barnes & Noble displays where their 'recommended fiction' includes Charles Dickens and whatever Oprah last put on her reading list. They also have a number of cards on the bookshelves with descriptions of selected books written by the staff. I've been there twice already, and still haven't really spent the big chunk of browsing time I'd like to.

My sublet is a comfortably large, sparsely furnished studio with an amazing view of downtown and the bay. It's in a 110 year old high rise building owned by UC Hastings. The building is funny - it narrows as you go up, so here on the 18th floor there are only 8 units. According to one of the security guards/doormen it used to be a base for military spy operations, because when UC Hastings bought it there were giant photo development fluid vaults in the basement (he had some other evidence for this as well which I forget). Now, though, there's a full-sized basketball court in the basement. I'm not kidding. Maybe it's where the spy photo developing equipment used to be. There's also a small room off to the left of the basketball court that has a large punching or kickboxing bag and a small upright piano that badly needs tuning.

I always have trouble adjusting to new environments. I'm not strictly a routine person, but I enjoy familiarity to a good degree, and being in a new place is both exciting and stressful for me. I expect I'll feel more at home after a few days, especially once I've made a Trader Joe's run and found a produce market of some sort near here or near work.

blogging from cali

2005-05-29T18:30:00.000-04:00

I don't know how regularly I'll be blogging while in San Francisco for the summer, but while I have a couple things to say and plenty of free time I will post. The first is a little story I have to tell. I believe New Haven is generally considered to have good Thai restaurants. One of these (let's call it 'BG') is well regarded for its food and poorly regarded for its service. I've had a few nice dinners there before, and I'm sure I'll go again, but this experience was rather bizarre, and I would like to share it.

I went to BG with a group of people for dinner the night before flying to CA, to have a nice little social evening with some good friends still in town. The service at first was fine - they refilled the water glasses far more promptly than necessary, took our order and brought our food on time, and so forth. And then the bill arrived. We didn't look that closely at it; we just each figured out how much we owed, put it all together, and realized it was about $5 short. So I took the check and stared at it for a while, and realized they charged us for 3 beers when we only had 2. Helpfully, they had attached the original note that the waitress had taken our order on, which clearly indicated that 2 beers had been ordered, as 'Sapporo' was written down with 2 hash marks next to it. I called the waitress over, pointed this out, and she took the check back to 'fix' it.

To my surprise, when she returned, the bill was $1 higher. This was because one of the prices of the entrees had been changed from $9.95 to $10.95. As the prices were not labelled, but were labelled simply with 'Taxable #1' or something similar, I have no idea which one it was, and didn't feel that it was worth it to challenge the increase. What was worth challenging was the persistence of the third beer on the tab. I looked at the original, which had been reattached to this new receipt, and saw that someone had written a third hash mark next to 'Sapporo', clearly using a different writing instrument (the mark was darker and thicker). It's hard to describe my reaction to this. I'll borrow the words of one of my co-diners, who described it as 'comically unprofessional'.

So, I called the waitress over, pointed this all out, and she took the check back. This time, when she brought it back, the beer was gone. But guess what? They decided to include the gratuity this time. Let's hope that they generally have a policy of including the gratuity for parties of 6 or more, and that they honestly forgot it the first two times, as ridiculous as that may seem. Because the alternative is that they figured we would stiff them on the tip, and decided to include a gratuity in the check to forestall this. As the gratuity wasn't exorbitant (I think it was around 17%), and we were all frustrated and ready to go, we let it stand.

I must say, even though the food is good, it will be a while before I want to go back there.

what is your world view?

2005-05-25T10:07:00.000-04:00

me (it even looks like me. don't you think?):

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.

Postmodernist

94%

Materialist

63%

Cultural Creative

44%

Existentialist

44%

Modernist

38%

Romanticist

19%

Idealist

19%

Fundamentalist

13%

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

creative commons

2005-05-22T08:17:00.000-04:00

This is the clearest article I've ever read about Creative Commons - about what it is, about what it is not, and about what many people incorrectly think it is. Creative Commons is not a step towards revolutionizing the music industry and putting the RIAA out of business. Creative Commons is a set of legal tools to enable artists (and scientists) to voluntarily release some of their legal rights, to take a personal stance that they choose not to charge people who wish to use their work in certain ways, such as non-commercial copying or derivative work creation. It is a tool to enable small-time artists to ensure that people who want to spread their music can do so. This benefits the artists, by spreading their name and allowing them to make more money off of their other works, such as non-CC music CDs and live performances. This recognizes that each CD is not a world in and of itself, but a piece of an artist's larger collection.

And it certainly does not advocate stripping copyright holders of their legal rights. This perversion in particular is disturbing. Liberty is only fully realized by allowing individuals to freely enter themselves into binding contracts of their choosing. Assuming that those who contribute their works to the CC do so freely, i.e. they are aware of their alternatives and of the pros and cons of both CC'ing and retaining full legal copyright (a concern which Lessig addresses - I told you his post had everything), their decision to do so, and the existence of legal tools to enforce their decision, is an ideal expression of freedom.

Now, CC's trickiest challenge is its marketing. There will always be people who CC works that they otherwise would abandon - but this isn't enough to make the CC domain rich, to make ordinary people want to explore the CC domain for music to listen to or scientific ideas to adapt and develop. But in order for CC to contain valuable content, and to continue to get valuable content, it must provide something of value to its contributors. I am skeptical that charitable contributions of valuable cultural and scientific material will continue once the heady initial enthusiasm and energy wears off; this has always been my concern. But if CC develops an active marketplace of content, one with an effective interface to allow contributions to be classified and to allow users to find what they're looking for, so that contributors of content find that their content is frequently downloaded and used, then it will continue in its significance long into the future.

lecturing via videotape

2005-04-28T09:28:00.000-04:00

I think this is an interesting concept:

Brad DeLong: The Future of Higher Education?

The post is about the Teaching Company, which records lectures onto DVD and sells them for individual education purposes. I've had a couple conversations with people in the last month or so about the state of undergraduate education at top tier universities (where freshmen are taught by professional researchers) and at public schools. In the university context, we've discussed expanding on the current class of lecturers, granting them tenure, increasing their salaries, and trying to correct the perception that they're failures. In public schools, the general perception is that salaries need to be increased significantly to create an actual competitive market for teachers.

Instead of both of these, why not use effective presentations on DVD, centrally designed and widely distributed, in the classroom in lieu of poor lecturers? Obviously I'd want to have someone there who could answer questions; it would also be nice to equip students with 'pause' functions so they could stop the presentation and ask someone a question. But it would require a lot less from the teachers, it could greatly improve comprehension and keep students' interests (because the presentations would undoubtedly be more entertaining and compelling), and it would be a lot less expensive. And you'd still need people to create and grade assignments. But the lecture is the most important part of effective communication, so this seems like a really efficient way to improve the quality of education.

i knew it!

2005-04-25T11:31:00.000-04:00

and today the rest of the world is figuring it out too: NYTimes: Watching TV Makes You Smarter

law school and learning

2005-04-25T08:57:00.000-04:00

Look! Harvard students don't learn any law either!

So let's ask ourselves: what are we doing here? This question goes far beyond what I can credibly write in a short blog post. But let me offer a few alternatives, for your consideration:

We're here for career advancement. This 'JD' thing is our ticket to a high paying, high status job. It doesn't really matter what we do here, because we'll learn everything we need to know on the job. Our target is a firm with size, money, and prestige. We select our courses and other activities for the sole purpose of making ourselves ideal law firm associates.
We're here for the environment. We're not-yet-fully-jaded intellectuals who like to sit around and discuss social, political, and legal theory. We design our day-to-day lives to satisfy our intellectual curiosity of the moment; we take seminars because they are venues where our voices have less competition, and where we can show off our rhetorical abilities to the fullest. Some of us are also here for a different sort of career advancement: we want to end up as academics, so we can spend the rest of our lives in this environment.
We're here because we couldn't think of anything better to do with our lives. There are no good jobs for a B.A. in English, and med school and grad school were both unappealing. We'll have some difficulty choosing classes and other activities, but there are enough people around that we'll be able to tag along with our classmates and take the classes they take. We'll end up with firm jobs where someone will just tell us what to do all the time, and our indecision and indirection will never trouble us again.
We're here to fight for justice. There are problems in the world, the wrong people are deciding what to do about them, and we want to equip ourselves with the necessary tools and get ourselves into the necessary career positions to be able to combat them. A lucky few of us will find a way to fight for justice right after graduation, and will spend the rest of our lives living on $30k/year, and losing sleep and developing large ulcers as our efforts struggle against corporate lobbying and the short-term opportunism of politicians. But most of us will take firm jobs after graduation, to pay off our loans or to gain experience, and many of us will stick with them as our ideals are replaced by materialism and momentum, which we discover are far easier gods to appease.

Am I too harsh? I don't really think any of these paths are better than any others. Some treat the law as a calling, and some a job; both have their risks. I don't know if any of us have a choice of which path we take; I think our character makes the decision for us. But whichever path we're on, we owe it to ourselves not to hold on too tightly, or perhaps not to let it hold on to us too tightly.

small world

2005-04-19T09:53:00.000-04:00

did you know that there is a New Haven, WV? there's also a Hartford in approximately the same relative geographic position, though i believe it's just over the OH border. that strikes me as really, really weird. see for yourself.

Yahoo! Maps - New Haven, WV

[in case you were wondering how i found it: i was googling 'new haven post office' and one of the first few links was this page.]

[in case you were wondering why i care: i grew up in WV and now live in new haven, CT.]

mandatory tipping

2005-04-17T16:37:00.000-04:00

I went to a coffee shop today for a cup of coffee and a yogurt. The price was $5.60; I handed the lady $6, and she didn't give me my change. I had fully intended to put it in the tip jar - I do that a lot. But I wasn't even given the option. For some reason I feel offended by this. And don't tell me that she remembered me and that she knew I'd put it in the jar. I don't go there that frequently, I order very different things, I get lots of different checkout people, and I often keep the change.

I wonder when they decide to just keep it. I assume they'd only keep coins - so that if my order was $9 exactly, and I gave them a $10, I'd get my dollar back. I probably would get my dollar back if my order was $19 and I gave them a $20 too, even though that's a smaller tip than they took from me in this case. And I'm sure that I'd get my change if my order was something like $1.33 and I gave $2.

This is also the coffee store that refuses to take $20's after like 3 in the afternoon because they run out of small bills. They need some new management. If they weren't the place with good yogurt parfaits, the richest coffee, and a good selection of loose tea I'd stop going.

Someday I'll open my own cafe. The checkout people will give you your change, they'll always have plenty of small bills, and the menu will definitely have a 'bottomless cup of coffee' option.

it's about damn time

2005-04-12T14:47:00.000-04:00

AP: Wisconsin Considers Legalizing Cat Hunting

'nuff said.

NOTE FOR MORONS: I'm joking. No letter bombs, please.

an ode to coffee

2005-04-08T11:21:00.000-04:00

This truth has filled me up with glee.
I think I'll share, so all can be.
When you're not right,
the world's a fright,
Old Black and Bitter, that's the key.

I like Columbian okay,
but I'd take Kenyan any day.
The taste of wine
is sometimes fine,
but richer taste is the true way.

Sumatra often is my pick,
and Mocha Java does the trick.
They're smooth and strong,
but drink too long,
you'll find they carry quite a kick.

Too, good Sunani warms the room.
Yes, Kona wipes away the gloom.
They cost a price,
and they're real nice.
But naught compares to good Jablum.

Inspired by: 3martini: Hold on Tiiiiight to Your Dreams

Coffee - Wikipedia

why i don't do podcasts

2005-04-07T12:01:00.000-04:00

Reference sites: Wikipedia on Podcasting; iPodder

Initial disclaimer: I've never listened to a podcast. If you're the type to automatically dismiss my criticism just for that, then feel free, or find a more emotionally invested person to pick a fight with.

Maybe there's a world of wonders of podcasting which I have yet to discover. But I think there are a lot of things in life that don't need to be experienced, and I personally plan to include podcasting in that category. I think it's a fad that will go away once people stop being amused by it, and I'm willing to put that down in print, knowing that there's a possibility it will become huge, in 6 months or so I'll start podcasting, and I'll have my words flung back into my face. I don't think that people who enjoy it are wrong. I just don't understand what they get out of it. Here are some of the reasons why I think it's not a great form of communication (which mostly seem to be derivable from the fact that I have the attention span of a gnat). If any big podcast fans want to supply their reasons for liking it, I would be happy to hear them.

I'm not an audio learner. I have enough trouble with lectures which are given by (supposed) professionals. I prefer communication in the form of pictures, source code/mathematical formulae, and direct physical contact.
Listening to an audio recording of someone's speech demands almost full attention. It's hard for me to pay that much attention to a recording. Hell, it's hard for me to pay that much attention to someone in a face-to-face conversation. Fortunately most people don't have that much to say and i can get away without paying full attention. [I'm trying to be funny here.]
Text as a form of online communication is far more efficient. The speaker can convey it faster. I can absorb it faster (and with considerably less attention and greater multitasking capability). And i can screen it much faster. I skim blog posts very quickly (in like 1-2 seconds) before deciding whether or not to read them. Just imagine for a moment trying to determine in 1-2 seconds whether or not a podcast was worth listening to.
I admit additional information can be conveyed through speech that cannot be conveyed through text, such as 1) funny accents and impersonations, 2) dryness to indicate sarcasm, 3) sounds of breathing, and so forth. But I expect a lot of podcasts aren't intended to convey funny accents or sarcasm, and are really just spoken forms of what would otherwise be text posts.

This all is a comparison between podcasting and text blogging. Perhaps a more favorable comparison could be made between podcasting and web publishing of AV files. Perhaps it's best to view podcasting as a combination between text blogging and web publishing of AV files. But I fundamentally don't think the multi-producer multi-user communication environment of the blogosphere will support spoken sound recordings very well.

today in metafilter

2005-04-07T11:52:00.000-04:00

I know the whole posting-just-links-to-other-posts thing is lame, but these two metafilter posts I have to share.

The first links to this site which contains a QT movie of the dramatic end scene from Seven re-enacted with stuffed animals. This is an example of why I am willing to fight for reduced copyright restrictions on derivative works, and if you watch the video yourself, I think you'll be inclined to agree.

The second links to a number of different websites discussing cognitive biases, things like the Zeigarnik effect, our tendency to seek closure for a task and to forget about addenda assigned after our perceived closure has occurred. Very interesting reading, I think, and also more tools that i can use to continue the world-wide imposition of my will on others.

demand, marketing, and the Sony PSP

2005-03-31T14:15:00.000-05:00

Techdirt: Sony PSP: Good Inventory Planning, Poor Marketing Strategy?

This blogpost from Techdirt raises an interesting question. It's about the Sony PSP, a new handheld gaming device, which I understand to be essentially a high-tech Gameboy (I'm not a big video game person, so I apologize for the lack of ready details). It makes the observation that every new technological device in this area is expected to sell out quickly. It references a Reuters article which observes that the PSP is not selling out, that while "specialty gaming retailers" are selling them like hotcakes, retailers like Target got large initial shipments which did not sell out quickly.

What does this mean? Possibilities:

1) Sony wanted a sell-out product, but the device is not as cool as it could be. This could mean that people are disappointed with it, so the usual extra-large crowds are not forming as word of the device spreads. Or it could mean that the device is expected to be so cool that it creates a new market of sorts, drawing many people to purchase it who could not have been predictable customers, just because it's that cool.

Counter: Or it could be that Sony factored in a certain extra amount to cover the extra market, and people really are purchasing it who couldn't have been expected to as individuals, but in aggregate can be taken into account.

Counter-Counter: This is a rather obvious strategy, so if this were really a desirable strategy, one would think that it would be more common in device releases, and sell outs would not be as frequent.

2) Sony wanted a sellout, and the PSP is a cool product, but Sony made a poor estimate of interest at large retailers. I bet early adopters, people who must get the device right away, go primarily to specialty stores to purchase PSPs in the first week of release. I think most Target/Walmart sales of PSPs occur at holidays and as gifts, or as impulse buys, rather than as deliberate pre-planned purchases, which probably make up the lion's share of the historically immense first-week sales of a technology like this.

3) Sony did not want a sellout, and did a better job estimating demand than previous retailers. This is a possibility, of course. But I think that the fact that there are extra units at Walmart/Target but not enough at specialty stores belies this, in the sense that ideally they would all run out at the same time, and that if you want extra anywhere it should be at the specialty stores because these are the places where customers will more likely make special trips to get the device, and thus should not be disappointed in their searches.

The determining factors in these options are two-fold: is this a cool device, and will the lack of a sell-out help or harm the sale of the device? The former I leave to others to answer, but let's think about the latter:

1) Help: Consumers will not be frustrated in their attempts to purchase it. My roommate went to a store several times to try to purchase an iPod, and eventually just ordered one off the web. Consider a less dedicated customer, who says, "I'm going to go out and buy a PSP." The customer goes to the store, the PSP isn't sold out, and just says "Oh, well" and forgets about it, or even says "Hey, maybe I'll get that Gameboy instead."

Counter: Again, I expect most first-week purchasers are dedicated customers, so I think the increased ability of less-dedicated customers to make impulse purchases is not a likely factor in initial sales.

2) Hurt: The sale of devices past the first week depends largely on positive reviews and on media coverage. Positive reviews are probably mostly independent of availability, but to the extent there is any impact, I would expect lack of availability would make the reviewer feel extra-special for having the privilege (nay, honor) of getting to hold and use the device, and thus more inclined to give a good review. Media coverage is another question, one I am not confident of my ability to answer. I expect that because failure to sell out a device is not news (or, at least, not ongoing news) it's less likely to lead to extensive media coverage than ongoing shortages and stories from frustrated customers would. This is especially true when every town's local news station puts a news reporter on TV using the device, to share the honor of experiencing the device with the local population who aren't so privileged.

Really, the situation boils down to common wisdom: people always want what they can't get.

On a side note: Yesterday's new South Park episode involved Kenny controlling the armies of Heaven in the war against Hell using a PSP. He got the job by playing the PSP's 'Heaven and Hell' video game and beating level 60 - a plot well known to me as that of 'The Last Starfighter', which for a very very long time was my favorite movie. Of course, in true South Park fashion they mixed a Schiavo-like scenario into the storyline. But South Park is nothing if not willing to make political statements.

'frusion breakfast brawl'

2005-03-29T00:22:00.000-05:00

Frusion Breakfast Brawl

For those of you who were Nintendo fans: Dannon has posted on their website a boxing game which is exactly the same as Mike Tyson's Punch Out, only with the opponents replaced by breakfast foods. You have got to check this out.

elf/dwarf ninja/pirate

2005-03-23T22:35:00.000-05:00

i am an elven pirate. what are you?

plasticbag.org | weblog | From pirate dwarves to ninja elves

this week in the US of A

2005-03-21T23:19:00.000-05:00

wow. i haven't updated in a while. i get lazy; it's a way of life. but if i'm going to try to be part of the YLS blogging community i should really update more often.

evidently Mansfield Fox, who just did me the honor of linking to my blog, is very, very concerned with the Schiavo issue. okay, i admit, i don't like the thought of a woman being left to starve to death either. though i probably prefer it to leaving her in a permanent vegetative state. but let's leave the moral issue aside. the amount of energy the federal government is paying to this woman is ridiculous. is it really appropriate to have special congressional hearings to pass an emergency bill to move the case to the federal courts to hold a hearing to determine whether or not to order her feeding tube reinserted? i don't want to emphasize the indirection of the process - it's the starting point that bothers me. this is not policy making, it's a pure expression of conservative moral indignation which happens to take the procedural form of a law.

another non-original observation (the Fox makes it here , and Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert just discussed it on the Daily Show), but it's really interesting to note the reversal of traditional positions. evidently federalism/state sovereignty don't matter when the moral fiber of america is at stake.

it was funny to come back from spring break on sunday and realize how active congress was being, on a weekend and all. and on such serious matters - not just schiavo, but steroids in baseball too. it's good how congress isn't afraid to tackle the big issues.

ah, well, it's not as if i like the real legislation congress has passed lately (see here and here). maybe it's better that they accomplish as little as possible. and it's not like there's anything wrong with the world today.

Update: Check out Jack Balkin's analysis of the "fair weather federalists". It's a pretty solid post.

for today's episode of 'what's on the web'

2005-02-19T10:05:00.000-05:00

see Save Toby. not recommended for the faint of heart. the Save Toby website is purportedly about a man who found an injured bunny, nursed it to health, and now is threatening to kill and eat it on June 30th unless he receives $50k in donations.

my first reaction to this was that it was the funniest website i've seen in a long time. the combination of cute bunny pictures and recipes for eating said bunny appeals to me. even better is the combination with the Cafe Press store, which appears to offer a service where anyone can buy one of a large variety of generic white products which have your name, logo, and/or a photograph screened onto them. you can buy your very own Save Toby thong for only $9.99.

my second reaction came after noticing that at the bottom he reports to have already received over $14,000 in donations. he appears to have a paypal account which you can donate to. now i'm concerned, because he's obviously fleecing a lot of people out of their money.

if paypal knew what was going on they'd yank this in a heartbeat. very very bad public policy not to. if the government knew what was going on i bet there's a law that he could be prosecuted for (but i wouldn't know; i'm not at that kind of law school). i wish he had faked the donation system. then this would have been just a very funny website, instead of a legal nightmare waiting to happen. i'm hoping but doubting it stays up until June 30th, because i want to know what he does if he doesn't make it to $50k. i hope he buys some rabbit meat from the grocery store and posts pictures of cooking it. he could have an online voting system for which recipe to use.

consider the following scenario: until mid-June he gets little more than the $14,000 in donations; the deadline approaches; a few of the past givers donate a lot more money in a panicky state to push the balance to $20k or so; he magnanimously decides to let the bunny go. the website becomes much less amusing to me, but now the people who presumably gave him money and are checking the website to see what happens to their poor bunny are relieved and fail to file lawsuits and/or report the web site to the federal government. and he's up $20k and has a very cute pet bunny. the story spreads, he comes under a lot of public fire, he auctions off the bunny for $100k+ to some foolish culture whore, moves outside the US, and enjoys the rest of his life.

or maybe he's not really taking people's money. i refuse to put $1 to the cause to see if it actually gets transferred. if someone else does, let me know, ok?

update: it turns out this fellow's a copycat. the original is a European website called Save Bernd!. same store with generic merchandise. same donations (only this guy has $70k euros and is asking for a million). sooner deadline (march 27th). this guy plans to give 80% of the donations to charity. i've got news for you, guy: still doesn't make it okay.

which famous leader are you?

2005-02-13T13:16:00.000-05:00

Here is a quiz to supposedly analyze your personality and find the famous world leader who most closely resembles you. My roommate, for example, was Bill Clinton. So I took the quiz twice, the first time with 27 questions and the second with 45 (you can pick 9, 18, 27, or 45 questions). The first time I was Hitler, and the second Saddam Hussein. I kid you not. Was thinking about trying to end up as an evil mad dictator but decided instead to just answer the questions honestly. Hrm.

since nobody else is pointing it out

2005-02-09T09:11:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen it, try the Google maps service, featured yesterday in the NY Times here. But before you get too impressed, recognize that the pan-and-scan interface that makes Google Maps so useful is identical to the one used by Keyhole, an outstanding satellite imagery program acquired last October by Google. But if they did buy Keyhole and then incorporate their technology into Google Maps, they did a surprisingly fast and good job. Let's see if Microsoft has the same success buying anti-virus software. I somehow doubt it.

yay for inappropriate children's shows

2004-12-23T13:54:00.000-05:00

this appears to be a clip from a british kids' show, and it drips with sexual innuendo. it's one of the funniest things i've seen in a long time. it's probably staged, because it's just too over the top, but it's still outstanding. definitely not appropriate for children.

Rainbow - Twangers Clip

the secret life of santa

2004-12-23T09:12:00.000-05:00

here's a neat holiday article from the LA Times. my title is so much better than theirs.

LA Times: Ho! Ho! Is More Like Uh-Oh

rare politics post

2004-12-11T09:39:00.000-05:00

Bush Homeland Security Nominee Kerik Withdraws

I don't personally give a whiff over Kerik. I have serious doubts about the purpose and necessity of the Holedamn, I mean Homeland, Security Department, since their most frequent public acts seem to have been increased airport screening (and subsequent increased sexual harassment suits) and a color-coded threat system (which just makes me think "Today's terrorist threat level is brought to you by the letter 'B'"). But that's not what this is about.

The article gives three problems with Kerik which seem to be fairly standard political problems, and it's very clear that the political world is concerned about one but not the other two. The one they're concerned about, and the one he withdrew his nomination over: he hired a nanny and a babysitter, both possibly illegal immigrants, and paid them under the table. Those other two, the one where he used members of his police force to research his autobiography and the one where he was on the board of the Taser corporation while making a push for more use of the devices in police forces, those he can "tough out", in the words of Rudy Giuliani.

Does anybody else have a problem with this? Demeaning, grossly inappropriate use of people who have important jobs who you're supposed to be managing; that's considered okay. White-collar corruption, well, it seems like we assume by default that politicians will try to get some money back for theirr political favors. But, if somebody slips $50 a month cash to his housekeeper and $100 a week to his babysitter, people who are just trying to get their feet under them in the world, well, let's call this an egregious enough offense that we'll make sure the guy who committed such an atrocious crime isn't put in charge of the Department of Homeland Security.

Words are failing me. Too early in the morning. Must switch to robot analytical mode. There are two reasons why this is inappropriate. First, it's unfair to him. It's a pretty minor, pretty common thing. You move into a new neighborhood. You've got some kids, nice big new house. You're chatting with your neighbor, saying, "The missus wants to go back to work, but I gotta put my foot down, 'cause somebody's gotta take care of dem kids, and keep my big ol' house clean." Neighbor says "Man, I got these housecleaners, come through every Thursday afternoon, clean the whole place in 3 hours and don't charge too much. Give them a call." "Yeah, but what 'bout the kids?" "I'm single, so I dunno, but I think the Townsends on the corner scoped out the local babysitting scene." Problems solved, all with the most normal, natural of methods. Bam, now you're no longer eligible for a major public office.

Second, it's unfair to the citizens of the United States. We're looking for someone to head what I'm sure the administration would consider to be the most important department in the entire government. Supposing that the Homeland Security Department actually did have a significant impact on whether or not the US remained safe from a terrorist attack, we'd want absolutely the best possible person to head the department up. I don't know if this Kerik guy was the best, and the political processes that choose department heads give me grave doubts, but supposing he was at least a great guy for the job, letting something like this get in the way of that is ridiculous. I suppose one could argue that it's a litmus test. May I respond by laughing until my sides hurt? He hired a nanny, for crying out loud. Now if one wanted to make the autobiography research incident or the Taser board incident litmus tests, that would be fine with me. But these, the political machine sweeps under the rug.

I think I'm going to move to a little town somewhere and stop reading the news. Ever. I think I'd be happier.

comments on classes

2004-12-04T09:16:00.000-05:00

Only a few weeks of classes left before the end of the semester, so I expect my current handle on the nature of my classes is fairly accurate. And because this is a forum for expressing that sort of thing, you have the dubious privilege of reading about it.

I realized a few days ago that Torts seems to have become my favorite class, which surprises both others and myself. The professor is definitely an entertainer, and also definitely a little full of himself, but that never bothers me. I usually think his lectures are enjoyable and mostly clear (though others disagree). And the subject matter is surprisingly interesting. As little desire as I have to read about people suffering grevious injuries and demanding recompense, there is a surprising amount of abstract theory at work behind the policies guiding the decisions, drawn from economics and sociology/psychology and hinging on concepts such as distribution of resources, cost spreading, and incentive promotion. And I've always been a little turned on by abstract conceptualizations.

Civil Procedure, which started out as probably my least favorite class, has moved up, and may be my second favorite now. The professor started out seeming Socratic and downright frightening, but once I got used to his style, paid more attention in class and felt more confident in my ability to answer his questions, I started enjoying his methods and appreciating what he was trying to do. The last two weeks have been a bear, though, because we're focusing on the Texas prison litigation (Ruiz v. Estelle) and the concept of a 'Special Master', which sounds cool but is actually just a boring and complicated way to enforce a judicial ruling. My problems with this class are twofold: the material is just generally boring, and we spend far, far too much time focusing on minutiae concerning justifications and principles and moral acceptability for the procedures we're talking about.

Contracts has slipped in its evaluations. While I appreciate the considerable clarity and precision of the material and the presentations, the class is my small group, which means it of all my classes is supposed to be about interaction and discussion and a presentation of individual viewpoints... and it's anything but. I'm tired of the rigor (though it's nice as a balance for the other classes), and I'm very tired of the material, which is somewhat interesting on a case by case basis, but leaves me feeling absolutely zero interest in reading more. Contracts is probably last on my list of subjects which I'd like to learn more about, though I admit Civil Procedure sometimes gives it a run for the money. At least the Civil Procedure readings are more interesting, because they're not just dense judicial opinions, but also theories and stories and arguments.

Constitutional Law... I thought this would be my favorite class. I imagined myself as a future legal academic (note the use of past tense), and figured that it would behoove me to learn Con Law and to be interested in it and want to relate other areas of law to it, as it does in a very real sense represent the underlying framework of the rest of our legal system. It turns out that it's very hard for me to not think of Con Law as extremely subjective and arbitrary, a series of vague rationalizations to reflect the Court's purpose as an agent for social change (moving, in my mind, to a far more libertarian world where people do their own thing and the government learns it's not in the business of legislating morality), ostensibly maintaining an adherence to a few pieces of paper written many many years ago when the world was a completely different place, and grudgingly updated over the centuries resulting in even more vague collections of arbitrary words which, along with the rest of the Constitution, have largely been interpreted as the judges see fit, while still carrying the strongest legal weight of any words written in any context. Wow, that was a long sentence. I guess I'm a little miffed. Anyway, the classroom environment is frequently unpleasant too. The subject material is somewhat subjective and meaningless, but it can't hold a candle to the discussions. I think the prof is a great guy, but he lets the discussions move out of control, and we move far away from any productive discussions and comparisons of principles and approaches, preferring instead individual testimonials of the way the law should be.

So in other words I'm looking forward to next semester. I still like law school in general, and I don't regret coming. But these basic courses leave a lot to be desired. Next semester's courseload: Empirical Law & Economics, Information Society, one of {Introduction to the Philosophy of Law, Criminal Law, and Advanced Constitutional Law - if I want to give Con Law another shot}, and (hopefully) an independent study to try to write a publishable legal research paper. Barring that I'll take a second course of the set of three. I'll also be in Habeas Chorus still, and still helping out with the American Constitution Society, and some stuff with the Information Society Project. It should be fun.

the latest installment in the series of "things that tick me off"

2004-11-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

As if the government isn't in a sufficiently dire financial situation, the new spending bill includes creation of a position of "federal copyright enforcement czar", according to this article from Reuters (courtesy of Slashdot). I've said it before and I'll say it again: I think it is not the government's business to enforce copyright. I don't think it's appropriate to have an employee of the government focused on such a private violation, and I don't think it's appropriate for the Department of Justice to be bringing suits against copyright violators.

I can't think of a solid, reasoned argument about it, though. If you can, let me know.

somebody didn't think this one through

2004-11-20T10:35:00.000-05:00

http://zattevrienden.realroot.be/depanneren.htm

This is just hilarious. Who the heck decided to take these pictures just in case something funny might happen?

lake chargoggaga-whatever

2004-11-20T10:27:00.000-05:00

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, the sign proclaims. This is a real lake, in central MA. 45 letters, 15 of them 'G's. Evidently it means "English knifemen and Nipmuck Indians at the boundary or neutral fishing place." I cannot imagine anyone taking the time to actually pronounce the entire name.

NY Times (free reg req'd): What's the Name of That Lake? It's Hard to Say

about a judge

2004-11-15T22:31:00.000-05:00

His name was Bobby Hammerman, and he was a Baltimore Circuit Court Judge for more than 40 years. I never met him, but after reading this, I felt like I knew him.

Despite Detailed Letter, Judge's Suicide Baffling

This is probably the most touching character portrayal I've ever seen in a newspaper article. Read it.

When I think about it, it raises again the old existential questions about the meaning of life, the ones we can never really have an answer to.

world toilet day

2004-11-15T22:27:00.000-05:00

My birthday is this Friday, Nov 19th. This happens to also be the official 'World Toilet Day'. I kid you not. It's an annual event. They have a conference and everything. I don't know what to say.

World Toilet Day

from my brother-in-law

2004-11-14T13:49:00.000-05:00

I had an idea to start a place like this a couple years ago. I think someone stole it. Maybe I should sue. Or, as someone told me, since I sure wasn't going to actually start one, maybe I should be glad someone did. I don't know where this article came from - my brother-in-law sent it to me.

Oolongs offers Elis a cup of tea
Customers select their own tea from over 70, which is then brewed on the spot

BY KATIE DEWITT
Staff Reporter

New Haven joined the tea-lover's craze yesterday with the opening of Oolongs Tea Bar in Sherman's Alley on Chapel Street.

The only tea house in the area, Oolongs offers over 70 varieties of loose leaf tea as well as prepared lunches and select baked goods, which incorporate tea into their recipes. The 14-seat, Asian-themed cafe aims to exude an air of tranquility with soft colors, Japanese lanterns and two stone water fountains.

Koffee Too? owner Tracy Jackson and outside partner Tammy Hackett co-manage and own the tea bar. Originally scheduled to open Sept. 1, Oolongs had its "soft-sale" opening yesterday and will hold a grand opening later this month. Hackett said it took longer than expected to figure out the details regarding tea recipes and vendors, but the final result was worth the wait.

"Tea bars, tea salons and tea cafes are hitting cities nationwide," Hackett said. "We are trying to perfect the experience so that customers here can literally enjoy a perfect cup of tea."

Mark Williams, who worked behind the counter throughout Oolongs' opening day, said it was a positive first-day turnout with a big lunch crowd, an afternoon lull, and then a constant stream of customers throughout the evening.

"I think people see this as a great place to sit and talk with their friends while enjoying a delicious drink," Williams said. "It's a cool atmosphere."

The idea behind the service at Oolongs is that patrons choose their own tea from the variety on display. Customers can smell all of the teas, and even sample a select few on a daily basis. The tea is then scooped into natural hemp tea bags and brewed on the spot. Bar seating offers customers a front-row view of the process.

Hackett said what distinguishes Oolongs from the myriad coffee shops in New Haven is that, most obviously, they will not be serving any coffee. Beyond this, the Chapel Street shop has a "t-spresso" machine that makes tea lattes as well tea sodas, two original Oolongs creations. Hackett said she thinks Oolongs' variety of tastes and friendly atmosphere will appeal to the diverse community of New Haven.

"I think that Yale kids, workers at local businesses, the art community, and the Asian community will all be attracted to Oolongs," Hackett said. "All ages drink tea now, it's not just the old ladies in white gloves."

Located away from street traffic in the alley behind Union League Cafe, Hackett said she expects the bulk of her business from passersby taking drinks to go. Director of University Properties David Newton said he thinks Sherman's Alley is an ideal location for the shop. After much thought about what kind of shop would be the best addition to the retail in the area, he said he thought Jackson and Hackett came up with a great concept.

"Many people walking through Sherman's Alley will stop in Oolongs on their way," Newton said. "It's a natural attraction that will probably keep people coming back."

another good existential law post

2004-11-14T13:45:00.000-05:00

Jeremy's Weblog: The Post

Jeremy Blachman, you're a role model for disaffected 1L's everywhere.

The post is very good, and the fact that it's actually authentic lends extra weight, but it still can't compete with my favorite blog post of all time from the (rumored to be fictitious) Anonymous Lawyer.

another sure sign the world is coming to an end

2004-11-14T13:39:00.000-05:00

So, I'm watching the first Harry Potter movie on ABC yesterday while trying to get some work done, and this ad comes on television, for "Nick & Jessica's Family Christmas". Evidently Jessica and her sister are performing at the same time. Never before will television viewers have been subjected to such a high elbow-movement-to-music-quality ratio.

The sad part is that people will watch it. It's things like this that convince me I'm actually an alien from a distant planet and that my keepers will soon come to take me away.

NYTimes article on breakfast cereal

2004-11-14T13:36:00.000-05:00

NYTimes: These Days, the College Bowl is Filled With Milk and Cereal"

I can't believe this is a real article. Note the following excerpt (emphasis added):

In fact, especially among teenagers, cereal seems to be losing its association with the first meal of the day - a testament perhaps to their rudimentary food-preparation skills, to their widely acknowledged "munchies,'' sometimes caused by smoking pot, as well as to their nostalgia for childhood.

The Times, for Pete's sake. Sheesh.

philosophy post

2004-11-14T13:15:00.000-05:00

If you're wondering about the sudden increase in posts, I credit it primarily to a feeling that I got a lot of good work done yesterday and can take it easy today, combined with a sheer lazy desire to avoid going back to work. I promise I will slow down or stop altogether for another lengthy period of time. Now, on to the promised philosophy post.

Friends of mine have likely already heard my logical dissection of the concept of free will. After presenting it to my roommate yesterday I thought of a resolution of sorts. I may have a copy of the original online somewhere, but I can't find it, so here's a brief summary:

Strip away all the influences on a person's decision-making ability which we do not consider to be part of our true absolute free will (e.g. genetics, past life, and environment). There still must be a decision-making component to us, or we wouldn't have true free will; I've generally referred to this as an internal black box, since we don't know how it functions, it just mysteriously makes decisions. Now consider a decision that must be made, and abstract it (in good computer science thinking) to a decision between 0 and 1. There are two possibilities. 1: Everybody's black box spits out the same answer, 0 or 1, in all contexts, in which case there's no free will. 2: There exists a decision for which person A's black box spits out a 0, and for which person B's black box spits out a 1. Assuming the latter, why does person A pick 0 and person B pick 1? If person A is given black box A by some outside agency, then it doesn't make sense to call this a decision of free will. If person A selected black box A, then on what basis did A pick this black box rather than another? The problem cycles and there is still no solution.

So at like 2:30 am last night as I tried to sleep I figured out the logical way to modify this to make it consistent with free will. You have to challenge the question. You have to say that it makes no sense to ask "Why does A pick 0 and B pick 1?" You have to respond to this by saying that this is what free will is, free will is the act of A picking 0 and B picking 1. The black box is not something which must be selected by free will, it is in itself the embodiment of free will, and to look beyond this is illogical.

This is not entirely convincing to me, as I still look for a reason why person A's free will would select 0 and person B's would select 1 (the original question). But I believe the reason why I lean against free will in this debate is not because I truly believe that the original story is better than the modification and resolution. It's because in my day-to-day life I analyze the choices I make after the fact, and I realize that they can always be predicted. I consider myself insufficiently creative to be able to break free of the influences of my own personality. I am a slave trapped within my own mind. Perhaps this isn't true of other people and they are thus more inspired to fight for the concept of free will. Kudos to them.

posting from the shadows

2004-10-15T08:50:00.000-04:00

i'm briefly sharing with the limited world reached by this the greatest way ever to start your morning.

http://funny2.com/index.htm

i'm sure you've been here before. i know i have. but if it's been a while, check it out again. i recommend Ralph Wiggum and, of course, bad pickup lines.

so true...

2004-09-28T13:52:00.000-04:00

From Crooked Timber: Dubya Channels Calvin, or Vice Versa. I couldn't add anything more.

first LawMeme post

2004-09-28T10:46:00.000-04:00

LawMeme - PFF Files e-Commerce Amicus Brief in Interstate Wine Case

My first LawMeme post is up (with some editing from JG). Check it out.

insomnia posting

2004-09-24T05:39:00.000-04:00

Can't sleep. Been up since 4. Happens once in a while. I've been catching up on my blog reading, which I've been very lax about. I've gone through every category but 'law', which I usually save for last. That and I'm jamming to a couple new CD's (on headphones given the time) I bought cheaply and hadn't gotten a chance to listen to yet. I highly recommend 'Rockin' the Suburbs' by Ben Folds. So as far as insomnia bouts go this is a fairly pleasant one.

Anyway, I'm reading along, and I get to the bottom of the 'econ' category, and I check out this post, which is just a brief comment on illogical disparities in vending machine prices for soda. Trust me, I do have a point I want to make here... patience. When you write a post like this, you're bound to get a bunch of people chiming in with their soda-price life stories. There were a few funny jokes too, and there were also a couple particularly inane comments by the same guy; those served as the actual inspiration for this.

Here's the point, in preview: unmoderated (or moderated only for obscenities) blog commenting is almost universal, and I don't know whether or not that's going to be feasible in the long run. Any time you allow a lot of people to participate in something without any semblance of a screening process, some people, whether through deliberate maleficence or mere idiocy, will come along and make the whole experience ... well, let's just say, much less pleasant than it would be without them.

Major bloggers, including Atrios and Daily Kos often put up 'open threads', just to allow their user community to converse with each other, and these can be terrific reads, because there are a lot of people with a lot of interesting facts and opinions to share, and they can't all maintain their own forums (and if they did we might not read them). But there are also bloggers who have had to disable comments entirely or use work-around systems to avoid spam (automatic programs which track down blogs and automatically insert advertising messages as comments) or, even worse, trolls, individuals who persistently post negative personal attacks on the blog host.

The ideals of these user communities are outstanding. The raw mass information exchange that blogging has led to is phenomenal (as evidenced most recently by the CBS 'leaked memo' scandals; I can track a link down if anyone's interested). And blogging wouldn't be the same without comments, either. I don't think people would read blogs as much if they couldn't comment, though I could be wrong about that. Haven't thought about it enough.

I guess I'm wondering at this point if there's a better way to do this, a better way to provide feedback to the blog writer and to exchange that feedback with others, one which can filter out some of the deadwood. I think the solution here is a peer-to-peer moderation process, something like what Slashdot does on its comment posts (a set group of administrators have permissions to rate posts on a scale of -1 to 5, and viewers can restrict the comment display to ranges of ratings). Maybe their system is enough, and maybe bloggers with big fan bases like Atrios could institute something similar. Again, though, would you have to use some sort of super-user to perform the moderation, or could anyone do it? There are problems with both approaches. And on political blogs moderation of comments could be used for bad purposes.

A lot of these questions are made more interesting by thinking of them in terms of peer-to-peer systems, and by comparing them to the 'client-server' systems of major news media web sites. This is starting to sound like my doctoral research. All I need to do is come up with a media equivalent of our supervised peer-to-peer overlay networks.

But perhaps I'm rambling incoherently because I'm trying to blog during an insomnia bout. I'll let you be the judge.

having finally gotten sufficient sleep...

2004-09-16T09:35:00.000-04:00

Thursday morning brings with it a cancellation of my 8:35 am Torts class, and I get to sleep in for the first time since Sunday. I'm not used to not getting enough sleep; I'm used to my 7.5-8.5 hours a night, and the 6 or so that I've been getting for the last week is starting to drag on me. I need to get used to going to bed earlier.

There's a significant variation in the amount of work which I have to do. The last few days I was fairly underloaded, and couldn't even really work ahead much (plus I find that when I do work ahead I have to spend more time, because I forget it and have to go over it again). Now someone pointed out to me that my first written assignment, a 500-word op-ed piece for Civil Procedure, carries with it almost 100 pages of reading. I have time to do it all this weekend, but still, you'd think the TA's would have said when handing out the assignment, "Hey, there's an enormous amount of reading to do for this, so make sure you don't wait until Tuesday night to start on it." I guess the hand-holding is done. But there are intermediate stages.

Anyway, the reading is about the Guantanamo detainees, and we have time for it, so I'm not complaining. I'm merely pointing out the swing in workload, because after feeling almost bored on Monday, I have 200-250 pages of reading for my classes, and a couple thick papers for the Internet law reading group I'm sitting in on (though naturally the amount of effort required for those is less than the amount for my classes), and I joined the law school a cappella group, and I want to help with one of the journals this semester. I may be overcommitting myself. We'll see how it goes. I'm quite glad that my classes are all pass/fail this term, so I don't need to feel like I'm ruining my future career by not working 20 hours a day to try to get all A's.

sunday morning

2004-09-12T10:47:00.000-04:00

I fulfilled my social expectations yesterday to the best of my abilities, going to two different parties that a few of my fellow 1L's had recommended to me. I'm still not a natural party-goer; when around more than a certain number of people, usually about 8, I instinctively gravitate towards the outside of the room and become quieter. At the beginning I wander around and meet people, but I get tired of that. Then I find people I know and talk to them. Occasionally, though, I get stuck in the middle of a crowded group of people, not talking to anyone, just feeling like a sardine in a can, and I ask myself, why am I here?

I think I got myself a "gold star" in Civil Procedure on Friday. We were talking about whether or not a welfare recipient could use the right to life as a reason to apply the Due Process clause to the removal of welfare, and I said that it's like being at a busy intersection. Without a crosswalk, you run the risk of losing your life; but it's not rational to say the government has an obligation to build a crosswalk in order to protect your constitutional right to life. Evidently my professor liked it, because he answered a few students' questions by saying things like 'The government is not the traffic'. I was mostly happy because the analogy was successful enough to move the thread of classroom conversation forward (which doesn't happen often enough for my short attention span). But now the prof may remember me and call on me more often. Which means I need to keep going to his class. Oh, well.

More pictures from my apartment:

Angle 1 of primary portion of living room:

Angle 2:

Dining area portion of living room (and the boxes we've been too lazy to throw out):

The other part of the living room that we haven't figured out how to use yet:

A view of the Yale med school/New Haven hospital from my balcony:

A view of the Long Island Sound from my balcony:

classes

2004-09-09T08:40:00.000-04:00

First of all, I want to get something unrelated off my chest. Why, why, why can't people learn how to dial a phone number? Okay, I admit, once every five or six months I'll dial a phone number wrong. But I receive a wrong number call at least once every two weeks, and probably closer to once a week; so I'm definitely a net consumer, not producer, of wrong number calls. This morning some lady who wasn't speaking any recognizable language called my cell phone twice in a row. I want some way of charging her for calling me, or of recording the first 10 seconds of calls and issuing a license to use a phone that gets revoked if more than 10% of your calls are to a wrong number. Grr.

Whew. Feel better now. Anyway, I've had three of my four classes already; Torts doesn't start until next week. Contracts is unquestionably my favorite. The reading material is the most interesting; it's my small group which means more individual attention (I'm always a sucker for that); and the professor is definitely my favorite so far. The reading material he assigns is just cases, which is infinitely more interesting than the reading material in Civil Procedure (unless you really like affidavits). The professor himself is incredibly precise and correct, which didn't really strike me so special until I thought about how bad being imprecise and/or incorrect is for a professor. Beyond that, though, he talks faster than I do when I lecture, which is mighty fast indeed. But when I lecture, I make some mistakes, and use unnecessary words, and other rookie mistakes like that. He speaks clearly enough to be working from a script, only of course it's all improv.

Constitutional Law seems good too. The professor seems the nicest and least demanding of the three, though that could change in time. He ran the class discussion fairly well. I wasn't completely sold on the reading, but it was Marbury v. Madison, so it was appropriate if nothing else. It's just a little disillusioning to read that and analyze it and realize that the foundation of judicial review that we law students worship is based on questionable ethics (why Marshall didn't recuse himself), an arguable misinterpretation of statutes, and pure power struggles.

The jury's still out on Civ Pro. I need more than one class to decide my opinion of it. The professor was a little imposing, which doesn't really bother me, since I have more self-confidence in my academic abilities than any five people combined ought to have. He assigns a lot of reading, but some of it is fairly quick, so I wouldn't say it's too burdensome, it's just more than any of the other classes. But some class always has to assign the most reading. The thing that amused me most about Civ Pro is that he largely picks out people to answer questions by simply saying their last name. What's really funny about that is that on Tuesday in class he apparently decided to call students in alphabetical order by last name, beginning with 'J'. I won't list the names here, but there were a couple 'J's, followed by a 'K', then a couple 'L's. Once I figured that out I sat back and relaxed a little more. Now today in class if he starts randomly with 'R' I'll have to worry, because I'll be second or third. If he continues with 'M' I should be good until next week.

Last and completely unrelated: How 'bout them Sox? I think they've won 14 of their last 15 games now, or something ridiculous like that. Division title, here we come.

avoiding reading for contracts

2004-09-06T22:10:00.000-04:00

To put off yet again the reading I need to do for my contracts class (which, in all fairness, I can easily do tomorrow), I thought I'd comment about the assignments I've already "completed". I say "completed" because while I've read through it all and made a bunch of margin notes, my comprehension and retention of some of it is questionable, and I may take some additional time tomorrow to review and summarize what I read.

I had a ton of reading to do for my civil procedure class. It started with 50-some pages of overview material, on all the different actions that are permitted within the course of a civil lawsuit, and a lot of similar material on criminal suits, and comparing and contrasting the two, and a few other similar introductory things. Terms abounded, a few of which I had never heard of before. It took an incredibly long time to read this, somewhere on the order of 2.5-3 hours (my timing is off because I spent some time in the middle talking on the phone). It was also not well retained, because there was just too much information. But I'm sure I'm not expected to have mastered it by the first day.

I also had to read Goldberg v Kelly for civ pro, a significant case on procedures for terminating welfare payments, a case discussed during a mock class at the Berkeley admitted students weekend that I attended. I think it's an interesting case and I enjoyed reading both sides of it.

For Constitutional Law, I read some historical background material, followed by discussions of Marbury v Madison, extending to the origins and early analysis of the concept of judicial review. Also neat stuff. But again, reading 30 pages took me at least 2 hours. I hope this speeds up as I get more used to it.

For Torts I had 17 pages about the constitutionality of workers' compensation requirements; this was pretty neat and I probably read it all in 45 minutes. Don't worry, I'm not changing my aspirations to be a personal injury lawyer. It was a neat analysis, that's all.

I still have Contracts to do. I have three cases to read, Poughkeepsie v Poughkeepsie, Cotnam v Wisdom, and Hurley v Edd-something. Cases are far more interesting than the background material (I never did care for history), so I think I can do that tonight.

Classes start tomorrow, but the only one that meets is Civil Procedure. It will be a warmup day. Wednesday I have Contracts and Constitutional law, a rougher schedule; I also have activities at 4, 5:30, and 7:30. That'll be a busy day.

Photos from apartment

2004-09-06T21:44:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd put up some of the pictures taken of my bedroom with all my stuff in it.  It's still a little messy.  I'm going to get some bookcases.  All the boxes by the bed are books.  I have my eye on this $65 6' high, 5-shelf bookcase from Staples; I can put three of them on the wall beside my bed next to the window, and I think I have enough books to fill them.  They have free shipping too.



We (the roommate and I) ordered a couch (Ektorp from IKEA), splitting the cost.  It'll be here on Wednesday.  Once it's in and the living room is cleaned up I'll post pictures of that too.



The white on the left of the top picture is the end of the wall in the little hallway.  I'm not a very good picture taker.  Need more experience.