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Loans, Wisdom, Juris Novis, Free Donuts, and...
- Divine Angst has much more information about consolidating student loans.
- The Divine one has also begun posting (e.g.) at Blawg Wisdom. Watch that space for more contributions from a crack team of law students and pre-law students who have volunteered to help keep things up to date and more entertaining and useful for you. Thanks to all of them for their generous efforts!
- Thanks to Juris Novis for putting ai in its mix of law student blogs. If you're looking for a good, compact snapshot of what the “blawgosphere” is talking about on any given day, Juris Novis appears to be a pretty good place to start.
- Did you hear about the lawyer whose opening statement lasted 119 days? (via On Firm Ground)
- Have you seen the latest Blawg Review over at Crime and Federalism? It's packed full of too much goodness to list here, so check it out.
- I'm sure you've seen this, but I have to link to the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries as compiled by a bunch of conservative free-marketers. All i have to say is that if the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union actually had put the Communist Manifesto into practice, the last 100 years would have been very different.
- Free Donuts in Dupont (and Alexandria, and Rockville) today! What could be better!?
Happy Annibirthsaryday
This is a big day for the family Imbroglio—it's both my sister's birthday and my parents' anniversary. That may sound odd, but it's really mostly a coincidence, I think. My sister was born several years after my parents married, but it just so happened she decided that their wedding anniversary was the perfect day to see the world for the first time. I think they sort of planned it that way, sort of, but I'm not sure. The point is: I have a terrific family and I hope they all have a wonderful celebration day!
Posted 07:06 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | life generally
Aaack! Consolidate Loans or You Will Spontaneously Combust!
Memo to college law students: Consolidate your loans now or pay more later.Yeah, that's right. Rates are low, but they're going up on July 1. You wanna pay even more for this already insanely-overpriced education? I don't think so. So what to do? Well, Access says it will consolidate for you. Access owns my soul, so perhaps I'll let them consolidate it, too. But if you don't want to go that route, NPR did a piece on this recently that might have more options. I'm assured that consolidation is possible even if you're still in school, which is a new thing. Probably everywhere you look you'll find banks jumping to help you with this. They know you're going to pay them lots of money over the life of those zillion-dollar consolidated loans. Mmmm. Feeding the machine. Satisfying, isn't it? Ok, so no, but still, what choice do we have? So consolidate your loans already, will you? You can send the money you save right here. ;-) UPDATE: It appears I don't know as much about this as I thought. (Shock!) If you know more than I do about loan consolidation pros/cons/strategies, or know where I (and others) could learn more, please do share!“The rates in effect right now are the lowest in the history of the student loan program,” he said. “It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Posted 08:30 PM | Comments (8) | law school
What My Inbox Tells Me, Among Other Things
- Sitting checking my email box I realize: Wow. My ebay account has been suspended so many times it's not even funny. I wonder why ebay keeps reinstating it if they're just going to suspend it again. Also, PayPal sure does need me to verify my account a lot -- like every day and sometimes twice or more the same day. Not a very tightly run ship, that PayPal.
- Yubbledew says we shouldn't listen to Amnesty International when it says America is abusing its prisoners—and especially when reports of abuse (see e.g.) come from “people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth” (emphasis mine). You tell 'em George! Now, should we listen to claims that something is absurd from someone who speaks in absurdities?
- disassemble |ˌdisəˈsembəl| verb [ trans. ] (often be disassembled) take (something) to pieces : the piston can be disassembled for transport.
- And speaking of language, do you speak Deadwood? (Caution: This link is absolutely not for those offended by, um, vulgar lingo.)
- Is it just me, or has Daypop died? No matter when I try to load the page my browser says it cannot connect to the server. That makes me sad.
- iMuffs: Cool. Now that portable music players are small enough to really fit in your pocket the most annoying thing is dealing with cords. No more cords, no more problems. Of course, if you have a shuffle or have something non-iPod, you could always just get a cord keeper. Did you know that while I was whiling away the hours redesigning this site (to no purpose, since RSS is killing design; the horror!), I actually should have been grading about 100 journal competitions? Funny, I didn't know that either. Oops. I need to hire someone to keep track of my to-do list. If you see a help-wanted ad like that soon on the DC Craiglist, that's me.
- Congratulations and best wishes to my Seester who has a job interview today. Knock 'em dead! (But not really, of course. More language games....)
Posted 06:53 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack | lists
Marathon, Whitman-Walker, and Ads on ai
Hi. I am currently training with the AIDS Marathon Training Program to run the Marine Corps Marathon this October. Participants in the program each raise at least $1700 in donations for the Whitman-Walker Clinic in D.C. The clinic provides comprehensive medical services to the D.C. community, and is especially committed to ending the suffering of all those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. Your donation will help ensure the clinic can continue to provide its vital services to the D.C. community. To get an idea of how important those services are, check out this startling fact: D.C. has the highest per-capita incidence of HIV/AIDS in the nation! (More from the CDC.)
If you have ever wished you could do something nice for the Imbroglio (because, well, why wouldn't you wish that?), or if you would like to help out the Whitman-Walker clinic, or both, please make a donation today. Thanks!
About the [nevermind. This has been edited to comply with commercial restrictions]. help me meet my $1700 fundraising goal.
Posted 09:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack | marathon meta-blogging
Welcome to ai Version 3.0
And just like that, the imbroglio is all fresh and new. The biggest changes are obviously to the banner and the move back from two to three columns. Long-time readers might recall that the original imbroglio was a rust-colored three-column design, so this is something of a return to the imbroglio's roots. The banner is another story. I've already received feedback that the blue bar behind the title should go all the way to the top of the page. Does anyone else think that would be a better look?
Aesthetics aside, the purpose of this redesign was twofold. First, I was just tired of the old look. It's nice to shake things up once in a while. I wanted something simpler, cleaner, perhaps easier to maintain. To that end the new page is missing several of the sidebar features readers said they weren't even aware of or rarely read. These include the ambivalent bits links blog which was fun for me but for few others, apparently. I'm planning to incorporate links like that elsewhere, or perhaps restart the feature if I find I miss it. Other missing “features” include ambivalent comment (which I'd never fully implemented anyway), the audioscrobbler recently played tracks sidebar, and the ambivalent voices sidebar. Again, some of these may see new life someday, but for now it's nice to have a slightly simpler page. There's obviously still a lot of content packed into this page—too much, some might say. What's here is useful to me, and I hope you find it so, as well.
The other main reason for the redesign was the marathon I'm training for. You may notice that the right column is dominated by a request for support in this endeavor. I have no idea if it will lead to anything, but I figured it was worth a shot. I played with the idea of placing some Google ads on the page to generate marathon money, but then I read here that I probably wouldn't make more than $1-2/week and I decided it just wasn't worth it. My intention is not to offend anyone by asking for money, but to make it easy for anyone who might desire to donate to do so. It's a terrific cause and all donations are tax deductible! I'll be writing more about this as the summer progresses, but anything you can spare will be a great help, both to me in my own fundraising goal, and more importantly, to the important work of the Whitman-Walker Clinic.
I think that's about it other than to note that this redesign took far longer than I expected. The technical work involved is not so great, but I think there's a psychological hump to get over when you're planning to reformat thousands of pages in one fell swoop.
For those of you reading the RSS feed, please click on through and tell me what you think. For those of you viewing the actual page, well, what do you think? Love it? Hate it? All feedback is welcome. I aim to please so if anything does not appear to be working or if anything is hard to read or difficult to understand for some reason, please let me know.
Posted 09:39 PM | Comments (20) | meta-blogging
Redesign in Progress
Just a quick warning that I'm about to update the templates on this site. If things get very funky, this is why.
Change is good, right?
Posted 08:09 PM | meta-blogging
Black Background Blogs
In my ongoing but sporadic and completely self-serving series of polite and humble requests to bloggers everywhere: If your blog has a black background behind light text, can you please please reverse that? The light text on black (or other really dark color) background is very hard to read. If you'd like a black background, why not put that background around all the margins but keep the background on the main column of text light? That's what I've done here at the imbroglio and many other bloggers have done the same. It's just much easier on the eyes and is therefore more reader-friendly. You want to be friends with your readers, don't you?
Thanks.
Other posts in this series:
Posted 07:29 PM | meta-blogging
