Humorous Guide to the Law - I've been meaning to rave about Sean Carter's funny book: If It Does Not Fit, Must You Acquit? Sean is a Harvard Law School graduate and runs the great legal humor site Lawpsided, which I also highly recommend. His book is not only funny, but it actually attempts to explain how the legal system works.
For example, the chapter on Contracts he explains that there are four essential elements to a contract: an offer, an acceptance, consideration, and a lawsuit. The book is broken down into sections that cover the basic areas of law, which include (in addition to Contracts) Torts, Real Property, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Courtroom Law. This is a great gift for a lawyer or law student to give to their relatives to help them understand the basics of law, without feeling intimidated. After all, you've got to love a book that explains the First Amendment as "the freedom to pray, bitch and moan."
Movies on your computer - the other night on TechTV's ScreenSavers program I learned about Movielink, which is a site that allows you to download fairly recent movies (i.e. Murder by Numbers, A Beautiful Mind). You can view them with RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, and you have 6 days after the download to view them. Once you start viewing the movie you have 24 hours to watch it, but you can watch it as many times as you want in that period. It looks like most movies are about $3.99 to rent, but you get $2 off the first rental. Looks like most movies are about 500 MGs to 1 GB in size. I'm downloading the movie Changing Lanes to see how it works. It seems to be sort of like Audible.com's online book store in that you can pay for the movie and download it later if you want.
Later: I started viewing the movie and RealPlayer needed to download some security plug-in, so it was good I was connected to the Internet. I'm assuming (hoping) that in the future RealPlayer won't need to talk to the Mothership everytime I'm about to play a movie. Like what if I wanted to view it on a plane, or someother place without an Internet connection? Surely, that won't be a limitation. We'll see. Anyway, the quality of the picture was pretty good. If I could watch movies on a plane then this is a definite possibility (especially since my laptop doesn't have a built-in CD-ROM or DVD player).
11:10:09 PM
Who is Howard Dean? - He's the governor of Vermont. I don't know if Rick is right that he can emerge as a "legit" candidate for president, but I like what he says: ""I think the country's being run now by ideologues of the right," [Dean] says. "They can't tolerate ambiguity, and without ambiguity the world can't survive." read more...
5:35:29 PM
Understanding Bureaucracy - "To achieve results, you've got to do something. If you do something, you'll make mistakes. Mistakes are, by definition, a process violation." Phil Windley [via Scripting News].
Man, that is so true. I worked for the government only once in my life: I went to clerk for a federal judge for two years after law school. The judge I worked for was a Type A (actually triple A) personality who believed in getting things done. He couldn't stand wasting time. If we law clerks weren't busy in the chambers (a rare event) he would send us to the chambers of one of the magistrates to help out. Needless to say, he had little patience for the typical government routine.
He was a practical man and believed in doing things, not theorizing about them. He did have one theory that he told me about though. It was his theory of "how to succeed in government." He said "to advance you can't make a mistake, and the more you try to accomplish the greater the likelihood of making a mistake. Which is why eventually people in government learn to avoid trying to do things."
I was shocked when I first read about Phil Windley's resignation. I've never met the guy, but I have read his weblog and watched (from the sanctuary of my news aggregator) him try to use his position as Chief Information Officer of the State of Utah to give that state's citizens better eGovernment. Looks like he's a victim of the first principle of success in government: avoid, at all costs, trying something new to get better results. Or maybe I've overstated that. The first principle is probably "don't try at all."
I'm sad for the citizens of Utah, and --frankly-- for citizens of government everywhere. People like Phil are to be lauded and given tickertape parades.
A Mad Tea Party - It's hard to keep up with sites that don't have an RSS feed, and I really like this one. Turns out it does have an RSS feed (but you have to check out the "tools" link and then click on "syndicate". Anyway, here's what I like about the site, which is written by an anonymous law student at a Boston area law school. The writer is obviously intelligent and gifted, and often sarcastic. And, even though she writes anonymously (which gives her license to skewer others) she is often sarcastic about her own tendencies as this recent post entitled Blithering Sycophant shows. Every law student should read this site, or at least check it out.
9:51:38 AM
Spreading knowledge is good for everyone - that seems like an obvious proposition, and yet it is vitally important to dwell on how critical this proposition is. If you are at all inclined to think about these things check out Virginia Postel's article in the New York Times entitled When Knowledge was Spread Around So Was Prosperity. (thanks to Jim McGee for the heads up).
9:28:37 AM
