Not much to add to what I said last year.
I interviewed a couple weeks ago at a firm whose lobby overlooks the hole, and had some time to ponder it. The site is still powerful emotionally, even six years later, and I think it’ll always be emotional to some extent or another- as it should be. But I’m glad to see some leaders trying to make us look to the future again, even here in NYC, where it is so tempting (and so easy) to focus on the mourning and the pain and the past.
[cross-posted from First Movers]
I suppose it was almost inevitable- you can study for LSATs and bar exams online, and you can invest piles of money into various law school study aids, so it was only a matter of time before someone created an online study system for the typical 1L legal curriculum.
And here it is, or at least, the first one that I’ve heard of. The company calls itself Law Study Systems, and right now appears to have coverage of Contracts, Torts, and Criminal Law- not much, but a good start for lots of 1Ls.
I’ve only skimmed the materials, since they don’t cover classes I’m currently taking, but the material appears to be fairly solid and comprehensive. It isn’t the kind of thing that you’d want to learn Contracts from (that is after all what class is for), but it is probably pretty nice for a pre-exam refresher at the end of the semester, or perhaps as an intro to use over the summer before classes start (as I know some classmates did.) And it has fairly broad coverage- 22 ‘tutorials’ on remedies in contracts alone.
Of course, it has the same problems as most review materials- for example, while it has great coverage of remedies, my contracts course did relatively little on remedies, so that material probably wouldn’t have helped me very much. Of course, no review materials (unless your professor happens to write review materials as well as teach) will be perfect in this sense, but the difficulty of skimming this material to find what is relevant may be a slight disadvantage during last minute cramming. A search function (currently missing, as far as I can see) might help alleviate that, and make it more useful for targetted last-minute review.
Schools appear to have the option to work with LSS to customize the materials- which is an interesting idea. To the best of my knowledge, no law school is emulating MIT’s Open Courseware and putting their course materials online in an organized fashion, and perhaps this might be the start of that for some schools. (Someone will have to eventually- the publicity of making your materials the standard reference for everyone on the web will be too big a lure to ignore.)
Software-wise, this is not terribly sophisticated yet- for example, the online LSAT prep I did was much more interactive, with music and animations, both of which this lacks. Despite the lack of sophistication, the important parts look like they are here and would get the job done- for example, while it is slide-based, it also quizzes you during the slides, so you have to pay some attention (and recall previous lectures). And it works in Linux, so it is likely to work on the Mac as well- something my LSAT prep could not do, in part because of the audio requirements.
Given how little I’ve used this, and given how much different people’s study needs vary, I can’t say that I can recommend this without reservation- but it certainly merits looking at if you’re a 1L who wants to look at online options for studying for your core classes.
[Disclaimer: LSS contacted me and listed me as a 'blog they like', and gave me free access to their premium materials for this review, but otherwise I've received no compensation nor do I have any relationship with them. I reviewed them instead of ignoring them, like I do most linking/review requests, because of my long-standing interest in online education.]
(Another product review offered as part of my ongoing quest to make friend’s lives better.)
Our old roomba has been dying since this spring- battery life was flaky (both because it was getting old and because there were some bad internal connections) and when it did charge it behaved really strangely (stopped and started, backed up when it didn’t need to, etc.) Fixing would have required at least a new battery and probably more work on the sensors and such, so it probably would have cost over $100 to get in working shape again.
So when the new roomba came out, it seemed like a no brainer to go ahead and get a new one. It arrived yesterday, and so far I am mostly very pleased. We didn’t get the very top of the line model- couldn’t quite justify that money for those features- but still, a nice improvement.
The biggest improvement is the noise- I used to not like to run the roomba while I was in the room, because it was too loud. I’m typing this with the new roomba running around the same room I’m in, with no substantial irritation. I know it is there- it isn’t that quiet- but I have no desire to run away to another room. It now slows down before it runs into most things, which is nice- should improve the long-term robustness of the thing. Supposedly it also is smarter about eating cords; I’m not sure I believe that, and frankly, I’m nervous to try (since I think an encounter with a cord is part of what led to the death of the old machine.) But I’m glad it at least thinks that it is the case. At least one (though not all) of the axles which used to be impossible to clean of Krissa’s hair has been re-engineered to make it less likely to collect hair, which is a nice touch- cleaning it will be more pleasant than it was.
All told- I continue to recommend roombas to anyone who doesn’t like vacuuming. It isn’t a perfect replacement for a really thorough vacuuming job, but a 90% roomba-ing multiple times a week almost certainly trumps a 100% traditional vacuum that happens monthly, and the new roomba makes it even more likely that you will use it regularly.
Interesting. Gregor talked about doing a co-working cafe in Boston some time ago, and it sounded interesting then; it sounds more interesting now that it is very real in Manhattan. I no longer exactly fit the intended target market of “entrepreneurs, designers, programmers and technologists”, but I’ll certainly try to sneak down there for a work day some time in October (probably a Friday since I have no classes.)
[By way of a long Chris Messina post on co-working.]
About 10 minutes after I posted yesterday, I found a great picture that I wanted to use to illustrate the post, but I’d already posted and I was lazy. Thankfully, today Simon Phipps gave me a great excuse to post the image anyway. Simon says:
[Miguel is] the lure for someone else’s trap.
The image I wanted to post was this one:
“Sky Strike” by Damgaard; used under the CC-NC-ND license.
Remember kids, the copyright license says ‘you can use it without restrictions…’ but the patent license says ‘… as long as you get it from Novell.‘ If you or your company can live with that sort of uncertainty, or can use other legal techniques to mitigate that uncertainty, use Moonlight; if you can’t, well, you consult your local legal counsel.
bad news: my antitrust class has lecture the day before Thanksgiving, instead of canceling as many profs do.
good news: the lecture has no required reading and isn’t really on the syllabus, so no huge impact if I skip it.
better/worse news: if I skipped it, ‘all’ I’d miss would be a guest lecture by perhaps the pre-eminent jurist of my lifetime.
I guess I’m leaving late for Miami, then.
… but all I can think about when I see things like this and this is ‘where is the patent grant?’ Not that a patent grant is always a necessity before implementing a technology, but it is nice, and does seem particularly useful when one is potentially making oneself a much bigger target for a company who is using the media to threaten your users with patent infringement suits.
To wrap up what has really been a stunning weekend Krissa and I went to have a cookout at a Green Market co-worker’s house. This co-worker happens to live right behind Stone Barns, a big (new-ish) farm-focused educational center with a fairly swanky food concession. I had a great time- lots of cool Green Market people who I’d heard a lot about but not been able to meet before, and a beautiful day to get out into the country a bit.
Ate like a king (despite the lack of ‘meat’ at the supposed bbq ;)- when you work with a bunch of people who are obsessed about food, it turns out that the company parties feed you very, very well. I’m still bursting.
This is beautiful farm country that feels like a world away despite being about 50 minutes from my front door. If you’re in New York, and have a chance before the weather turns, you owe it to yourself to spend a day out there. More pictures here.
I realized a few nights ago that posting about interviews for my next job, without mentioning this past summer, might have given the wrong impression about Red Hat- that I didn’t enjoy it, so I was interviewing elsewhere, or something along those lines. So here goes a quick clarification.
I really, really enjoyed working at Red Hat- I got to work with great people on great projects that were interesting and that took good advantage of my skills and background, and you can’t ask much more than that.
And it wasn’t just that it was good for me- after a summer there, I think very highly of the company. It isn’t perfect- no company is- but it genuinely seems to try hard to walk the walk, and I like that. I would recommend it to friends- which is about the highest praise you can give a company. So I made the right call deciding to go to Red Hat, I think it is a good place to work overall, and I’d certainly consider going back at some point.
But right now there seems to be a strong consensus among all the lawyers I’ve spoken to (including the ones at Red Hat) that I should go work at a firm, so that I can learn more about what it means to be a lawyer- the skills, the lingo, the shared experience, so on. And I’m pretty intrigued by the greater variety of cases and broader resources that you can draw upon in a big firm- I can definitely see myself enjoying that aspect of firm life.
So, while I may well end up in-house at a small tech company again at some point, I do think a traditional firm is the right place for me to be right now and for the foreseeable future. I hope everyone (including my friends at Red Hat) will wish me luck finding the right one. :)
Had a great time at Deblois’s show last night, and a great pre-show time too- walked the length of Central Park on a gorgeous night, and purely by accident stumbled on Caracas Arepa Bar, which is delicious.
Turns out Deblois is on youtube. Also, turns out that besides cdbaby, she’s also on emusic and itunes. Still feels that eventually she wants label support, though, which feels like it shouldn’t be necessary in this day and age, but maybe it still is. Must remember to point her at Keep Your Copyrights.
