Ding Dong Wedding Bells

Congratulations to Raquel, my friend and fairly frequent commenter here. She's getting married to a wonderful boy named E! The two of them have promised not to let the marital industrial complex grind them down, which bodes well for their future, I think.

Posted 05:53 PM | Comments (4) | life generally

BlawgCoop & WordPress

Welcome to Legal Fictions, a new 1L member of the BlawgCoop! Legal Fictions is currently undergoing the finals process along with many of us, but he's keeping a healthy perspective on the whole thing. If you have time, wander over and say hello. Incidentally, BlawgCoop (or Co-op) is open to all, and now supports WordPress as well as Movable Type, thanks to the generosity of Dreamhost, which just tripled our bandwidth allowances and added one-click support for installing WordPress. Pretty cool. I've played a little with WordPress and found it to be a very nice and robust blogging platform. It seems to have just about all the functionality of MT, and then some. For example, it allows you to post “private” or “secure” posts to which you can control access—might be nice for when you want to rant about your professors or fellow students, but don't want all the world to see. I fear that could cause some trouble, though. What if I posted a “private” rant to which I gave you access, then you quoted my rant and blogged about it on your own site? I'd still be in the same trouble as if I'd just made the post public in the first place, wouldn't I? My thinking is that any idea of posting “private” stuff online—material you don't want other people to see—is just asking for trouble. But that's a tangent. The really cool thing about WordPress is that it's released under the GPL, which means no one will ever be able to tell you what you can or can't do w/your installation of it, something Dive Into Mark called Freedom 0. That's certainly something to think about if you hope to be blogging for more than a little while. I know some people (like Dive Into Mark) jumped from MT to WordpPress when MT started its new licensing scheme a few months ago, and some of those people wrote extensive comparisons of the two programs. Here's one from Burningbird, another discussion here, a comparison of the template systems in WordPress, MT, and Blogger, and an essay by the same person on why he decided not to switch from MT to WordPress. In all, it sounds like the consensus is that WordPress remains a bit more difficult to customize than MT, but may be easier for newbies to manage apart from fiddling with templates and stuff.

Posted 12:18 PM | Comments (1) | law school meta-blogging

Conlaw Too

Two-L final two was . . . Well, I don't know, actually. The only thing certain is that it's over. I got to the final and started looking through my outline and realized I'd printed it out with some of the items collapsed.* Oops! This meant my outline was incomplete for two questions and I had to rely on a downloaded outline I'd brought with me to fill those gaps. I don't think that was a big deal, but who knows? It felt mostly fine, but I finished 15 minutes early, which is an ambiguous sign. There were 9 questions, some with subparts, and the directions informed us that most questions could be answered in 2-3 sentences. I wrote a lot more than that for most, but not for all, so we'll see what that means. Generally my post-exam thinking (and not just for this exam, but for all of them) is something like: Initial euphoria—It's over! —followed fairly shortly by a period of increasing concern that I totally failed, followed by a period of not caring/not thinking about it, followed by learning the actual grades and dealing w/whatever the reality ends up being. Concidences: This was a ConLaw II exam, and it was in the same room as my ConLaw I exam. I also finished that one early and got my best grade so far in law school. I'm not going to interpret that to mean anything. The ConLaw I final included a multiple choice section, and I was a pretty good edumacated guesser, I think. On to Corporations, the class I took so I could “know my enemy.” I'm just kicking myself now for not taking it pass/fail. The exam is Monday morning. Here's a sample question from an old exam in that class:

Assume that Ellie Mae has won. She moves to include Mayberry, inc. in the valuation of Clampitt Oil Co. to determine the value of her shares in dissolution. Please write your opinion disposing of this matter.

Ha! That makes me laugh! I have no clue even where to begin with something like that. It's going to be a loooong weekend. * I take notes and assemble outines in NoteTaker, which is—tadah!—an outliner! The image above and right shows you what it looks like. The arrows pointing down mean that section is “expanded,” showing you all subsections, while the arrows pointing to the right mean that section is “collapsed,” with all subsections hidden. This is super-convenient when you're sorting through information b/c you can “hide” what you don't need at the moment and focus on just what you're dealing with. It's also nice for making study outlines b/c you can put all the extraneous stuff in the “collapsed” part, and just print out the essentials. Of course, that only works if you remember to expand the right sections before printing...

Posted 09:59 AM | Comments (3) | 2L law school