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June 25, 2006
Reflections from the Bar/Bri midpoint
There are thirty days until the California bar exam.
When I speak to California attorneys about their experience with this exam, almost all have used the word “stamina.” It reads on this exam in two ways.
First, the exam itself a three-day siege. A certain amount of physical and mental endurance is necessary in order to avoid gibbering on day three.
Second and more importantly, exam prep (administered, for about 95% of law school grads, by Bar/Bri) itself is a challenge. 8–10 hours a day, 6–7 days a week, for just under two months. For me, for now, this is the more difficult stamina challenge.
It’s very difficult to feel any sense of accomplishment from bar study. One day pretty much blends into another, and benchmarks of progress are few and far between due to the very large number of subjects under analysis. The process can really start to grind. Last night, I ended up walking the streets at midnight, listening to Sigur Rós, in order to recover perspective. “What is the point?”
“You can’t learn everything” is repeated endlessly to applicants. But the expectation that you will try to learn everything is equally well-communicated. Our most recent practice tested us on exceptions to exceptions to rules—issues that have never appeared on a bar exam, but that do reflect settled law. Could it be tested? No one knows. Maybe, I guess. Maybe it will be tested, and I’ll get it wrong, and I will fail. Better make a flash card right now.
At dinner the other night, David said that the bar exam’s gotten harder just because there’s so much more law now than in the past. I guess that could be true but of course it doesn’t change the price of Bar/Bri books in China.
I have concluded that the only thing to do is to draw lines around each subject area, denoting the depth to which I am willing to study, and hold myself to those depths. Any deeper, and the cost/benefit of the dive no longer balances. I have a marriage to consider, and a move to the East Coast. Some of my classmates have infant children. Others are working full time jobs. For me, and for them, we just have to draw a line and rely on ourselves.
That’s inconsistent with the Bar/Bri mindset. Their paced study program recommends up to twelve hours’ study every day. That might help me pick up some extra points, but would turn me into a shell. To that extent, the Bar/Bri program is bad and unhelpful. It’s guidance, of a sort, but it’s not realistic or consistent with maintaining the stamina actually required.
So that’s where I am right now.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 12:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 21, 2006
Procrastinatr and the Power of Social Hacks
If you follow Mac news/reviews at all, you’ve probably heard or will hear about the Procrastinatr fiasco. The brief recap is that Brian Sutorious, a college kid, posted a hot new “app” called Procrastinatr, that promised to help Mac users organize their lives better. Somehow it got picked up at TUAW, that’s the above link (Procrastinatr.com is dead now), and a whole bunch of well-meaning Mac users, probably productivity geeks, downloaded it. The only problem was, Procrastinatr was a trojan. When you ran it, it used AppleScript to move all your iCal events back a week. And Procrastinatr didn’t prompt for an Admin password because iCal files, like most user-created files, are in ~/.
Good joke? Bad joke. But a wonderful cautionary tale; a whole bunch of Mac users willingly installed and ran Procrastinatr (I confess, I visited the site and considered downloading it); now everyone is reminded that the net is basically Deadwood.
Is the Mac a secure computing platform? I guess it is resistant to true viruses. But security means being an active, thinking net user. “Files Are Not For Sharing” is a joke, but “Look both ways before you double-click” is not.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 20, 2006
How do you grow a “neutral” net?
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the net neutrality issue for some time. The whole thing seemed too easy. On the one side, plucky proponents of neutrality (the Good). On the other, greedy advocates of traffic discrimination (the Bad).
Over at the Weekly Standard, Andy Kessler has has identified the Ugly—and it is our stagnant market in information carriage.
Net society’s no longer satisfied with a high-penetration network; we want it to also get faster and faster, forever. Kessler points out that the only ones in a position to make that happen—the telcos and cablecos—lack incentive. It’s way more profitable for AT&T to just keep charging out the wazoo for international calls than to build out. And it’s more profitable for Comcast to charge you $100 every month for the same TV. Companies like these might (maybe) make infrastructure investments if there were a really big carrot before them, like the opportunity to extract rents from the big companies doing business online; if they’re prohibited from doing so by net neutrality rules, then there’s no carrot and the likelihood of real infrastructure investment goes to zero.
Talk about a Hobson’s choice. Either you give up on neutrality, and hope that in their graces, the telcos/cablecos decide to become aggressively pro-consumer (*cough*), or you embrace neutrality and resign yourself to a lifetime of watching “Lost” in 320x200 on your giant plasma.
Unfortunately, having done a great job identifying the problem, Kessler doesn’t do a great job identifying any solution. Carrots aren’t working, he says, so let’s try a stick. His proposal is to maybe threaten a government takeover of the entire infrastructure—that’ll put the fear into ’em, he thinks. Personally, I doubt that that would work. But Kessler’s thinking about the problem in the right way.
A better stick? I’ll take a shot: Aggressive public—federal, state, municipal, whatever—subsidy of mesh networking. Get these things out there using whatever moneys you can find, get them fast, and get them working. If they need access to the backbone, give it to them at public universities and other government-owned facilities. Whatever you do, give the telcos/cablecos no influence over the project—no connections to the backbone, no IP assignments, nothing. If you need space to put the repeaters, use eminent domain to get them up on the telephone poles for added “in your face”-ness. Encourage startups to come up with new (and, initially, low-bandwidth) uses for these things, probably with an initial emphasis on locally-oriented content. Then start looking for ways to get the bandwidth higher.
Once the telcos and cablecos start seeing a potential lunch-eater right in their own back yard, spurred forward with public money but not quite publicly-operated, they might get a reality check and really innovating on their networks even in an atmosphere of neutrality rules.
Remember those stories about how much AT&T hated packet-switching in the early days, and it was only because of DARPA and the public universities and a few key startups that anything happened to get AT&T off its butt and innovating? That’s where we are now. We’re not trying to move to publicly-owned information carriage, just private operation that’s got the right kind of incentives. It just takes a little bit of guts, in the right places. Where have you gone, J.C.R. Licklider?
Posted by Rob Courtney at 02:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More on OmniOutliner + Law School
Erik Schmidt is a 2L at Santa Clara Law School; like me he loves OmniOutliner for law school. Erik has taken it all the way, though, and is rocking a full-on kGTD system. Check it out for another view of the cathedral.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 08:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 19, 2006
Open source test taking
You can take the California bar by hand if you want to, but after three years’ hard PowerBooking my handwriting has become pretty much illegible. People like me have to use laptops.
You can’t use a (G4) Mac though.[1] To promote security and discourage in-test peeks at notes and outlines, California requires installation of a program called ExamSoft.
My non-expert understanding of this program is that you install it with Administrator rights on a PC running Windows. Then, on test day, you can load up ExamSoft and have it reboot the machine in “Exam mode”. What ends up happening is that upon reboot, ExamSoft takes over your boot routine so that you don’t get Windows as you’re accustomed to it—you get ExamSoft’s test-taking software, and nothing else. By taking over the shell, ExamSoft is able to stop the user from accessing any of his other files or running any other programs. You take the test, and ExamSoft saves your exam encrypted on the drive.[2] Then you reboot out of ExamSoft, back to your normal computer.
You won’t be surprised, Reader, to learn that this system is not without critics. There are reports of it crashing in exams, which really is a terrifying prospect. But more then anything it seems a G– – d– – systems maintenance nightmare. Even if the software works, and doesn’t crash on the exam, the thought of installing this thing, knowing that it’s going to be rewriting boot routines, etc., gives me the heebie jeebies.
On the other hand. people will cheat on this exam unless prevented. The stakes here are high enough for even the most honorable among us to be tempted. Either the bar exam needs a soup-to-nuts reconsideration to take that into account,[3] or some stop-gap is needed.
So I’m giving this solution to ExamSoft: port your app to Linux. License Red Hat or roll your own distro, and distribute the product on CDs or by direct download ISOs to applicants. Then, on exam day, just have everyone boot off the CD. We applicants will gladly pay the price; ExamSoft can get a controlled operating environment—no more system conflicts from people installing Bonzo Buddy or running otherwise non-standard OS installations[4]—and the bar gets the satisfaction of insulating the profession from digital reality for a few more years. And the best part? Linux runs on just about any processor architecture. So those of us with old G4s could play, too.
What do you say, ExamSoft? It’s too late for me of course; I’ve gritted my teeth and installed ExamSoft on a ThinkPad borrowed from my Dad (Happy Father’s Day!), and come July I’ll be engaged in any number of pagan rituals in the hope that they’ll keep my computer from crashing on those three magical days. But future generations could really benefit from a little progressive thinking now. And it would convert ExamSoft from a systems integrity scofflaw to a cutting-edge innovator in one swoop. Win-win.
fn1. Hypothetically you could use ExamSoft on an Intel Mac running Windows XP. One of my classmates is considering this on his new Mac Book. fn2. ExamSoft confers other benefits too, like letting the bar examiners push the bar exam out to applicants’ computers several weeks before the actual exam. It’s eerie knowing that the entire exam is sitting there, encrypted, on the PC on my desk. fn3. It does, by the way. But that’s another topic. fn4. People with non-standard hardware might run into a hiccup or two. But that shouldn’t be a problem—at this point in time, neither ExamSoft nor anyone else wants applicants to use their 802.11x cards or other peripherals. If the screen, disk, keyboard and mouse work, you’re pretty much money.Posted by Rob Courtney at 09:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 10, 2006
Still Intermission—New Domain
I hesitate even to post anything, but I did pretty well on my Con Law practice questions, so what the hey. I am pleased to announce that there is a new way to access this blog! You can get to it the old-fashioned way, through good old courtney5.us or, if you’re feeling sassy, through the brand-new domain unique-identifier.net.
It’s the exact same content, delivered on the exact same schedule—i.e., intermittently, if at all—accessible with one less mouseclick. Joy!
Posted by Rob Courtney at 06:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2006
Intermission
Sorry about the delay here folks… maybe go and get a snack or something, ’cause it might be awhile. It turns out California has this exam you have to take to be a lawyer and hooo! is it hard. I think I should take some time thinking this over.
Quick hits, if you require them:
- Graduated from Stanford Law School
- Purchased and watched Top Secret!
- Have been playing Katamari Damacy like it was 2004. We even got the soundtrack, Katamari Fortissimo Damacy
- Apparently Bruce graduated from Bowdoin
- Suryo came to visit
- Have now watched all of “Lost”; thinking of moving on to “Deadwood”, “Buffy”, or maybe “Six Feet Under”.
Okay, seriously I have to go work now.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 08:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack