Thursday, March 5, 2009

Modern Quill

The Great Northern New England Beer Tour!

Posted: 03 Mar 2009 06:33 PM PST

Here is some of the planning for the GNoNeBT . . .

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Thursday, January 8, 2009

Modern Quill

Unconventional wisdom

Posted: 07 Jan 2009 11:47 PM CST

There’s an old story that goes thusly: a man suffers from disabilitating headaches. He doesn’t respond to painkillers, nor migraine medication, nor even caffeine. After countless trips to expensive specialists, a doctor finds the solution: he has a build-up of pressure in his lower spine, which is transferred to his head.

The man feels wonderful after his operation. He’s ready to return to work and decides to visit the tailor to update his wardrobe. As soon as he tells the tailor that he’s shopping for a new suit, the tailor asks, “How much are you looking to invest?”

Tailor at work by Kent Wang, 2006

“It doesn’t matter,” the man admitted, “I owe a quarter million dollars to different doctors and hospitals.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the tailor said. “44 long, twenty-three inch sleeve?”

“Yes, I think so,” the man said. “That’s impressive.”

The tailor nodded sagely and said, “If you’d like a new shirt, I reccommend a 34-inch sleeve with a 16-inch neck. If you’d like dress shoes, I’m sure you take a ten. A wide ten.”

“You’re amazing,” the man said, but the tailor shrugged it off. “I’m not that good. I still need to measure your seat and inseam.”

The man laughed. “What about my underwear?”

Without missing a beat, the tailor said, “34 inch waist.”

“Way off,” the man said, clicking his tongue. “I’ve been wearing 30″ by 32″s for years.”

“Very funny,” the tailor said, “You’re a 34.”

“No, really.”

The tailor sighed and slapped his measuring tape against his thigh. “Sir, that’s impossibe. You’d know if you were a 30. If you shoehorned yourself into a 30″ waist, all the pressure would press directly against your spine and you’d have one hell of a headache.”

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I’m a big fan of unconventional wisdom. On the MBTI I come out as an INTP personality, which I’ve confirmed. I’ll never be a 43 Folders Getting Things Done type of person. Forget GTD, I’m all about FIO: Figure It Out. I like devising, revising, and unravelling systems. (GTD people are probably TJs instead of TPs) One small confirmation I had was Christmas with my 6-year old nephew, trying to build his Spykee robot (the Spykee Micro, we’re not made of money). To my nephew’s dismay, one of my first steps was to disregard the directions entirely.

One issue that I’ve been trying to figure out was the problem of window ice. The scenario goes like this: a big ice storm moves into my portion of southern New Hampshire at noon, and will leave by nine. Naturally, I have to work 1-8 (no calling in with bad weather. I work at a grocery store, and the customers will ALWAYS find a way to shop). So I use my remote starter (I’m so spoiled, the car’s last owner installed it) and let my car warm up. So my car is toasty when I drive to work. But that car stays toasty for quite a while later. Any snow that lands on the windshield flash-melts. Then, the snow on top of that half-melts . . . Long story short, ever notice that it’s easier to clean a windshield that was cold when the snow started than one that was warmed, cooled, and then snowed on some more?

My solution is less than perfect, but I ran Trial #1: Attack of the Clones today. I turned off the heat, and rolled down the windows to try to chill the windshield, still running the wipers. When it got cold enough-judged by how late I was willing to be for my shift. Then, I rolled up the windows (important step) and got out of the car, and sprinkled snow on my windshield.

The result: counter-intuitively, that portion of my windshield was easiest to clean off. It froze into a giant block of ice that I broke with one or two swift jabs with the scraper. The rest of my windshield was hellish to scrape off. Instead of one big piece, the rest of the windshield was covered with a million tiny pieces of ice roughly the size of one snowflake each.

In conclusion, I have no idea why I wanted to write a blog about this. This is going to make my content-targetted Google Ads space really interesting.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Modern Quill

Charice makes me feel old

Posted: 28 Dec 2008 08:04 PM CST

Sometimes, I worry too much about mortality. Well, I’m Catholic, and my father is unseasonably advanced compared to the parents of other 21-year olds (he has three decades on my girlfriend’s mother). And in the back of my mind I keep little nuggets like, “You know, Mozart died at 35. You’re three years past his middle age, bucco.”

Charice album cover. Star Records, 2008

And then I turn on “Hit Man, David Wallace and Friends” on PBS and learn about Charice. Mein Gott. Even though I can safely say, “I’ve never wanted to do a convincing cover of a Whitney Houston song,” I still envy her raw talent. There’s no doubt that a lot of talent at a young age can be a curse as well as a blessing, but I wouldn’t know too much about that. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when she stops covering the standards and does her own thing. Maybe her album is worth a look.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Modern Quill

Posted: 20 Dec 2008 03:44 PM CST

This is a test of using Google Docs to publish to my blog.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Modern Quill

SMC and Twitter

Posted: 14 Dec 2008 06:07 PM CST

Does anyone at SMC use twitter? I’m not too keen on getting started, but I figured it would have caught on. Dennis Jansen at No. 634 pointed me towards this NYT article . . .

I thought the article was interesting, but perhaps a few degrees away from the actual user experience.

The beginning of the article said that FB was the “digital commons” and that its main function was to track people’s activity on the Internet. I respectfully disagree. My memories of Facebook back in the day was that it was a way to meet people and learn more about them: hence its name. It was something of a sophisticated bulletin board where wall posts, photos, and events were posted in their own peculiar ways. When I first started using FB, groups were the main thing. Reunion groups were ways to meet new people and share experiences.

On the beginning of the stalker-feed:

"Everyone was freaking out," Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn't any way to opt out of News Feed, to "go private" and have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options. "Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, recording every single move," a California student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another chimed in, "Frankly, I don't need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends with Steve." By lunchtime of the first day, 10,000 people had joined Parr's group, and by the next day it had 284,000.

Ok, I dig it. But dig this next paragraph:

Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they'd like it.

Uh huh. I know many people still don’t like it. This is really more of an instance where the users can’t be trusted with how to use the product, isn’t it?

A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users.

I still wish they hadn’t. This was a big shift. I remember the summer before college, eagerly waiting to get my school email to get a facebook account. It was a college thing to do. The focus was on your “network.” Now, I’m getting friend requests from Melbourne because someone saw that I was a hypnotist. I don’t have the time for studies and managing my facebook presence.

In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing.

Sigh. There is a major bias in that assumption. “Right now, Facebook is a way to follow other people’s lives, therefore that must be what we wanted all along. The thousands of people who used Facebook before that were just confused.” Once, Facebook was about communication. If I needed to get into contact with someone, Facebook was often times less crufty and more reliable. I could email them, or let Facebook email them as well as posting on their wall. Again, groups were a big function of Facebook then. If good design choices were made, Facebook could still be about communication.

Unfortunately, I think this is all just academic. I don’t think anyone used to the Stalker Feed could imagine using Facebook without it.

Jansen’s comment was especially interesting:

It's the flip side of the small-town feel of microblogging: everyone is up in your kool-aid: This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. Young people at college are the ones to experience this most viscerally, because, with more than 90 percent of their peers using Facebook, it is especially difficult for them to opt out.

Small-town life? Not really.

You see, I haven’t posted a picture to Facebook in over eighteen months. My status updates just point to this blog. I don’t send bumper stickers, snowballs, pokes, gifts, etc. My wall posts are carefully considered.

The NYT explains that the stalker-feed is the digital equivalent of body language. You watch all these subtle cues, and suddenly you know everyone better.

That theory of aggregate information has got to be true in face-time. It would be impossible to measure every single body movement during a social interaction. Just ask a poker player. But remember: digitally, we represent ourselves as constructs. We omit more than we present. We lie with impunity. How many times have you seen two best friends “married” or “engaged” to each other?

One of my professors wrote his dissertation on Lord Byron’s letters, and required that my class read the letters also. They are carefully construct, succinct, and acutely self-conscious. I was told that Byron wrote to a family member as a child and added the postscript, “This is the first letter I ever wrote.” He was aware that his letters would certainly be circulated.

We’re the same way on the Internet. We that we need “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” It’s when people break down that firewall, which comes more through ignoring its presence than accidental gaffs, that we get into trouble.

But unlike body language, this aggregate information is stored, syndicated, and publicized. All it takes is one malicious person to take advantage of that . . .

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Modern Quill

0L’s LSAT Page

Posted: 13 Dec 2008 01:48 AM CST

0L is a senior at Toronto’s York University, who studies film production. He’s applying to law school, and he wrote a great page about the LSAT: “How to Increase your LSAT score.” You can find it here.

I will regale readers with my own LSAT experiences thus far someday, just not now. I agree with 0L’s advice: what I really want to give him credit for is some of the supplemental material:

Work through 10 or more preptests. Someone with too much time on their hands put together a torrent containing with 35 tests in pdf form on The Pirate Bay. For my moral superiors I'd recommend you buy this and/or this. There aren't substantial differences in LSAT tests from year to year (logic games get easier, reading comp gets harder), but the more recent a test you're doing the better. [Legalaims.com]

I will point out there are some more legit ways to get your hands on materials:

Student Resources: Since most students enter law school straight out of undergrad, it would be foolish not to check in with the career and grad school councilors. My school has those same 35 tests in dead-tree version. I’d be very disappointed with any student resource center that didn’t have some version of prep books and practice tests.
As of right meow, the LSAC website has a real, honest-to-goodness LSAT administered in June, 2007. It’s in PDF format.
Friends: I’m acquiring quite a library of prep books and study guides. I don’t know too many of the pre-law students here . . . some of them seem to want more of the Ally McBeal / Denny Crain track than anything else . . . but I won’t have any need for them when I’m in law school. They’ll probably get donated to that Student Resource Center mentioned above.

Don't underestimate the psychological element. I think I made this mistake the first time around. I can't offer much advice on how to minimize test anxiety though - in fact if you have any suggestions feel free to comment below. Either way, I think it's important to realize that this is a very important factor.

One particularly sneaky thing I’ve noticed, that the prep books seem to gloss over, is that there are six sections on the LSAT. The writing, and some combination of Analytical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and Logic Games.

Most practice tests I’ve seen give you four sections: One of each of the Big Three, plus one. On the real LSAT, it would be the Big Three plus two, due to the experimental section. When I took a 5-section simulated test, I was amazed at how much mental fatigue set in.

In addition to the things I mentioned above, here's what I'm currently doing in the week leading up to the LSAT (I'm grasping at straws here, but this can't hurt):

Healthy diet: everything planned, home-cooked and nutrient-rich.

Exercise: gym every other day, hot yoga a couple times.

Supplements: ginkgo biloba and cod liver oil daily.

I haven’t tried the supplements yet, but it can’t hurt, and they’re good for you anyway.

One thing that I noticed 0L left off was Prep Courses. For the low, low price of $1,300, you can invest 51 hours you should have been doing homework with towards a class that, most likely, is only going to be useful to the middling types. But if you’re a real gunner, you could spend $1400 for twice the classtime or drop 8g’s for a six-week summer course.

I don’t have that kind of money, and that’s time I can use blogging. I’m highly skeptical of these classes anyway. I can’t knock them, because I haven’t tried them, but I wonder what they can teach you that a good book can’t.

One thing I’ve heard around the interweb is “the classes are good for people who aren’t good self-motivators.”

You’re not a good self-motivator, and you want to go to law school? Whaddaya know.

I’ll be going more in depth about my LSAT experiences and how I’m preparing in later posts.

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My pre-law journey part I

Posted: 12 Dec 2008 04:09 PM CST

I’ve heard law school described as a refugee for the intellectually aimless. I can see how that can be very, very true.

As it is, I’m struggling to discern my vocation. As a Catholic, I believe that there is a “path” that we ought to be on, even if it’s as hard to find as that unmarked left turn going to Aunt Trudy’s. Next semester, I’ll be taking an internship with the State Attorney General. I think that if I can work for a semester in an underfunded, thankless state agency with two part-time attorneys to supervise me, and still want to be a lawyer, I’m on the right path.

Old gavel and court minutes displayed at the Minnesota Judicial Center. Released under Creative Commons by Jonathunder.

So, right off the bat my pre-law focus is, “Do I want to be a lawyer?” I don’t think the phrase “intellectually aimless” has ever applied to me, and I don’t want to change that habit now. While I hear that you don’t have to be a lawyer when you earn a J.D., and there are many “J.D. Preferred” jobs that don’t involve practicing the law, I’m keeping those on the backburner. I’d much rather assume that the three difficult, expensive years I’m anticipating will lead to the practice of law.

But what put the notion of law into my head to begin with?

My high school mandated a civics component, which was achieved one of two ways. One semester of a civics class, or two semesters of a senior class called “Law.” The class was phenomenal.

Mr. Walter Lubelczyk was a tremendous teacher. Unfortunately, time has pulled the plug from http://www.lubelczyklaw.org, which was maintained by a West High School alumni (Jeremy Hitchcock ‘00, now a bigwig at DynDNS) for many years. The class was a mashup of Constitutional Law, both Federal and State, torts, and general aspects of the common law. Some of the cases were strictly academic exercises (if you stab a dead guy, but you didn’t know he was dead, is it attempted murder?) but many aspects of the course had down-to-earth, important information about buying a car, renting, and so on.

The class format was always exciting. The class was broken up into groups, who were assigned cases. The three-person group would have to prepare an opening argument, an examination, a cross-examination, and a closing argument. A randomly selected “judge” would be there, to implement a summary judgment, but then it generally went on to the rest of a class, as a jury. You got extra credit if you convinced the class to your side of the case. You got triple credit if you convinced them to the wrong side of the case law.

This was when I started to think the law was interesting. Everyone in the class did. He picked some really awesome cases in true torn-from-the-headlines fashion. A kid gets flattened after he shakes a vending machine outside of K-Mart, and so on. It was really the first time I had ever been expected to carry on a logical argument, even if it was only with myself. There was a certain dance that happened in the class. More often than not, we could predict which way a case would go, because it would go in the way that didn’t make sense based on the case law we had already learned. We just didn’t know why we were wrong, and that was the excitement of the class.

“I know we’re going to lose,” I thought, “my case makes too much sense to win.”

Sure enough, we’d wind up on the wrong side of the law. We’d be shocked, outraged, maybe even appalled for about thirty seconds. Then it would click, we’d absorb it, and we’d use that same material to argue to argue the next case.

Long story short, if you went through Lubelczyk’s law class and you didn’t want to be a lawyer, there was something wrong.

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My pre-law journey part I

My pre-law journey part I

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Thursday, March 5, 2009

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Thursday, January 8, 2009

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Monday, December 29, 2008

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Saturday, December 20, 2008

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Sunday, December 14, 2008

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Saturday, December 13, 2008

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My pre-law journey part I

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