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November 30, 2005
Classmates
Two amusing things about some of my fellow classmates:
1. Imagine your professor has just given a hypo and asked a question about a case you're discussing. As they glance around the room, not a single volunteer, they peer over the students, looking for the next cold call victim. Suddenly, a cell phone rings... and clear as a bell, vocals and all, the ringtone is "Wake Me up Before You Go Go". Can you guess who is called? And then it rang again.
2. A seatmate in a class got up at our break to ask the professor a question. He left his composition book closed but in plain view. You know, the one's with the black-and-white mottled covers? Only this one has a different label on it... instead of reading "Civ Pro" or "Torts" it says, "Name: Snoopy, Hobbies: Supertime!" with a picture of Snoopy, doing his Peanuts dance.
I want one of those composition books now! I sincerely hope I get to practice law with people like these two classmates. Too many lawyers (hell, people) are just too stuffy!
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
November 29, 2005
Firefox 1.5
I just downloaded the new version of Firefox and so far, I'm very impressed. I was disappointed that in breaks several extensions that I use on a regular basis, including:
- Bloglines Toolkit
- Copy Plain Text
- ChromEdit
- Greasemonkey
SpellBound
None of them are deal breakers--well, SpellBound would have been but reinstalling the libraries fixed it. Living without the others will be a pain, but I'll cope. And one of the things that will help me cope is the new del.icio.us extension! It's awesome!
Update: Ken hipped me to two new extensions that have become indispensable as well. The first is NoScript which allows you to have Firefox only run JavaScript from whitelisted websites. The second is SessionSaver, which I can't believe I lived without; it allows you to have your current session saved whenever Firefox is closed, and then restores that session when you restart. Awesome!
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
November 20, 2005
Tomme de Fedou
Tomme de Fedou is another ewe's milk cheese which hails from France. I couldn't find any good sites about the cheese to link to, so you'll have to take my word for it. This is a pretty mild cheese, soft, but not completely creamy, and slightly pocked. It has the same smooth texture as other high-fat ewe's cheeses, with just a mild twinge of "sheep". There's nothing spectacular about the cheese, it didn't make me swoon, but on the other hand, I think it is a solid, tasty cheese that would be just right for snacking.
Posted by Dave! Permalink
November 16, 2005
Torta del Casar
Cheese time! This week, I sampled another raw ewe's milk cheese called Torta del Casar. Torta del Casar is a semi-soft cheese, which I've seen described as having the consistency of pudding. My piece was a little firmer than that but it was still definitely on the soft side.
I found this to be a very delightful cheese... it had a smooth texture and a very fruity taste with a hint of nuttiness... slight tang in the aftertaste, but not overly "sheep".
Here's another review over at The Cheese Diaries. I don't know that I would call this cheese, "pinnacle of human achievement in the field of soft and semisoft cheese" but it was very, very good.
Posted by Dave! Permalink
November 14, 2005
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Coming off of a blogging conference, I've made a few changes around here. Most are behind the scenes (I've modularized my templates and stylesheets) and you shouldn't notice them unless I've screwed something up.
The new features you might actually notice are:
- A FeedBurner Feed
- E-Mail Subscription (via FeedBurner/FeedBlitz)
- Updated Blogrolls
- Tags!
If you notice something out of whack, please drop me a note and let me know.
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
BlawgThink: I'm so meta, in my blog.
Here's the BlawgThink final wrap up... Then enough navel gazing and back to the regularly scheduled irreverence you've come to expect here.
There were too many people I met to name them all, but I was very glad for the opportunity to meet everyone. It was very nice to get a chance to meet some people who I've read regularly for some time, and others who I intend to start reading post haste. I'll be updating the ol' blogroll shortly.
A huge thank you to our gracious hosts Dennis Kennedy and Matt Homann who did an outstanding job.
It was also a real pleasure to meet entrepreneurs (yes, solos are entrepreneurs) like Carolyn Elefant and Brandy Karl. They provide refreshing perspective, especially since I'm entrepreneurially inclined myself.
Some other refreshing perspectives to blogging issues, problems and solutions, came from Sabrina I. Pacifici, Henry Copeland, and Jeff Beard. Who all participated in one of the most interesting sessions of the second day.
I got some great tips for streamlining my blog from Fred Faulkner and I have to thank Karl Craine for his generous support of a law student with food.
Finally, it was a distinct pleasure to meet Doug Sorocco who was not only super helpful but an all around great guy, and
Evan Schaeffer who is also great and very supportive of student blawgers.
Thanks to everyone involved, and I look forward to meeting more bloggers in person as I continue to develop the content here on Preaching to the Perverted.
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
November 12, 2005
BlawgThink: Future of LexThink
For the last "session" of the day, I sat down with, Matt Homann and some others to discuss the future of LexThink and share ideas about the successes and failures of the conference. Evan Schaeffer, Carolyn Elefant, and Henry Copeland had some great ideas and suggestions For ways to make not only this conference better--but also taking it to a new level with other topic ideas, etc. Some really good ideas came out of this that I'd love to see implemented in future conferences.
One thing is certain: Henry Copeland gets it. The guy has really great, insightful comments that show he's really on the ball.
Here are some specific suggestions I had for making BlawgThink/LexThing even better:
1. The sponsorships and product giveaways were great, but it sure would be nice to see a Mac sponsor!
2. A little more instruction on the "Open Space" would be nice; having the list of "Open Space" sessions better organized would have been helpful.
3. A little better communication before the conference would be nice; the blog and basecamp were OK, but a tad unreliable. LexThink might want to ReThink their hosting company.
Keep in mind, these are pretty minor criticisms. When you have a two day conference and you can only generate three minor criticisms, that's a damn good conference!
Posted by Dave! Permalink
BlawgThink: Wikis
Here's one of the real successes of the "Open Space" conference model: I'm interested in wikis. I have some personal/business projects that I would like to collaborate on and wikis seem like they might be a good application. So I threw it out there as a topic idea, got my space, and Viola! An instant session on wikis.
Several people came together to share what they knew about wikis, to talk about how they want to use wikis, and Doug Sorocco gave a great demonstration--ad hoc--installing a wiki and editing some pages on the fly. This was exactly the kind of session that makes a conference like this great.
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
BlawgThink: Blogs of Knowledge Management
My first "Open Space" session of the day was one on Knowledge Management and blogs. It was a lively and interesting discussion, with two camps: the "personal voice" camp and the "enterprise blog" camp. In reality, I think both are valid approaches to blogs and leveraging them as knowledge bases. On the plus for the "enterprise blog" vein is the idea that content needs classification and coordination, the value in the blog is the timely dissemination of valuable information. This requires a more controlled and moderated methodology for content creation and publication. On the plus side for the "personal voice" approach is the obvious: content generated by the expert with a unique voice is valuable content.
In the end, I came away with some good insight that there are different applications for blogs and to state the obvious again--different blogging approaches are necessary for different audiences and applications. The highlight of the session for me were the insights from Sabrina I. Pacifici who really understands the needs of enterprise blogging as well as being a prolific blogger in her own right. Great session!
Posted by Dave! Permalink
BlawgThink: Five by Five Live
To start off Day Two of BlawgThink, Matt Homann revived the Five-by-Five feature from his blog, live. It was an interesting panel discussion featuring some heavy-hitting luminaries of the legal blogging world:
Dennis Kennedy
Ernie Svenson
Sabrina I. Pacifici
Marty Schwimmer
Tom Mighell
Carolyn Elefant
There were some really great ideas touched on that I would like to explore more and which I hope have further discussion in the break out sessions later.
So what were all the great ideas? You should have been here. I can't give all the content away!
Posted by Dave! Permalink
November 11, 2005
BlawgThink: Day One Wrap-Up
Well, unfortunately, I had to leave BlawgThink a little early to day to pick up my car. It was a damn shame, too, because I missed out on the last open/brainstorming session of the day.
The idea beind the last session was "Open Space" which is quite cool: people got to choose their own topics, and place them on a post-it note. There were eight "spaces" or so, and people that were interested in a topic would simply go to the designated space for whatever the topic was and discuss it. As many people as wanted to could go to a topic area, you could move from topic to topic, or stay put and discuss as long as you wanted. It's really not more complicated than that... it sound like it would be to simple to be powerful, but I can tell you I was quite excited about it. Anyway, that type of free-form, Open Space discussion continues tomorrow and I'm really stoked.
Posted by Dave! Permalink
BlawgThink: Advanced Tips and Troubleshooting
The last "formal" session (I use that term with some hesitation--BlawgThink is not formal in any way) I attended was presented by Fred Faulkner on some advanced blogging techniques and tips/troubleshooting.
Fred's the webmaster for the ABA and had some great techniques for making blog management easier. There was also some great participation from the attendees in the room regarding problems they've had with MT, WordPress, etc. and sort of a free-form responses.
It's harder to encapsulate this session into a pithy post (like my alliteration?) but it was a good session, and I took away some good ideas for plug-ins to add to my site to help make my life easier. They could probably make your life easier, too. See? You should have come.
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
BlawgThink: Tag, You're It
Another fantastic session!
This one was presented by Dennis Kennedy and Jeff Beard and involved some advanced technologies (many tagging related) for blogging.
Many of the technologies/services I already use, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati.
However, there were a number of cool ideas/services/sites which I don't use, and in some cases, didn't know existed! Here's a few that I want to explore more:
In the vein of beefing up your feeds, there's FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz lets you create an e-mail RSS subscription. I think FeedBurner might allow the same thing, again, I'm going to check out FeedBurner very soon.
In the "letting the world know about my blog" there's Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. Both of these services allow you to ping one site, who in turn go out an ping a ton of different blog indexes. I agree with Dennis--I don't see how these services can make money, but hey, that's not my problem.
I already use the hell out of Flickr and del.icio.us, so I'm down with the tags. TagCloud offers a way to create a cloud of tags based on your posts. Sounded interesting.
And finally, hosting Podcasts and (possibly) VideoCasts can take up some serious space and bandwidth. libsyn and VideoEgg aim to help with those problems, respectively.
Finally, they touched on some services like Rojo, Rollyo, and OPML. Rojo and Rollyo sounded a bit interesting, but not at the moment, and given how I feel about Dave Winer, I'm avoiding OPML as much as possible.
Posted by Dave! Permalink
BlawgThink: Search Engines and Blogs
We all know the power of Google. This session was about how you can use search engines to your advantage and how to tailor your blog to get the most out of search engine results.
Tim Stanley of Justia.com did a really outstanding job of reviewing how the search engines work and what techniques do and don't work for increasing your results. What I found best about this session was that it wasn't about "tricking" search engines into getting good results: it was about consistency in your posting methods, site structure and design, and increasing your profile in the blawg/blog community.
Of all the sessions I've attended today, this has had the best depth of material. Although, the next session I'm attending is on tagging, and I'm keenly interested in that!
Posted by Dave! Permalink
BlawgThink: Building Your Reputation
Well, perhaps my reputation precedes me... and that may or may not be a good thing! But I have met several people who have noted, "Oh, you're Dave!"
This session was given by Matt Homann and was about building your reputation on-line with your blog. The most interesting things to come out of this session were that building your blogging reputation happens outside of your blog.
Matt had some really great ideas about how to incorporate good ol' fashioned networking into blog reputation building: call up people who's blogs you like and introduce yourself. Take the conversation analog, because this is about connections with people. One of my favorite suggestions (which he gave credit to someone else for, but I missed her name) is the "unreasonable demand".
This is a great, great concept! Each week, come up with five unreasonable demands: things that it would be great if they happened, but that you have no expectations for actually happening. Then ask. Let the person know that you are making an unreasonable demand and that you don't expect it to be filled. You'd be surprised how often people shock you and grant your request anyway!
On the technical, blogging side, Matt mentioned tagging blog entries. This is something I have not done yet, but I definitely intend to start. I'm a nut for Flickr and del.icio.us, so it seems a really natural extension of the blog.
Posted by Dave! Permalink
BlawgThink: Podcasting
It's no secret that I would like to launch a Podcast. I've got everything set up and ready to... so what's stopping me? Time. The "producer" in me just won't let me "just do it". I have to fuss and fret over production values. Oh, well.
This session was a great intro to Podcasting. Good information about utilizing and planning for Podcasts; the best thing I took away was the importance of "Show Notes" to make it easy to find your Podcast. Because audio files aren't searchable (yet--get on that, Google) the notes that accompany your show are essential for getting the word out and letting people search to find your Podcast.
There are many issues which were only touched on briefly that I would like to see explored more: what are the licensing mechanisms and issues for using original music in your Podcast. What are the issues about licensing the content of your Podcast?
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
BlawgThink: Advanced RSS
The first session at BlawgThink 2005 just wrapped. It was "Advanced RSS" with Rick Klau from FeedBurner. Overall, it was a pretty interesting session. Some of the topics we addressed were extending RSS, security issues/providing secure feeds, and touched on the dreaded "monetizing" blogs.
It wasn't as "advanced" as I'd hoped, but given that I've written several books on XML, that wasn't too surprising. I also disliked that Rick made editing RSS on your own seem "frightening". XML is text. It has a few rules, but they are pretty easy, certainly not out of reach for most users--that aspect could have been handled better. It was an advanced session, after all. But Rick was very straight up, answered questions, and I did come away with a better outlook toward FeedBurner than I had going in. I think I'm going to give it a whirl.
Note to self for future sessions/open sessions: Seth Godin's "Monetize This".
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (2)
November 10, 2005
Today Sucked.
It was a very busy day today at work, because I'm taking off tomorrow to attend BlawgThink. So I barely got out in time to get to CivPro, when what happens as I get off the expressway? *Bam* I hear this horrible noise as I go through a busy intersection. I immediately pull over, and I have not one, but *two* count 'em, two flat tires. Both on the passenger side.
Of course, I'm not in the best neighborhood, and I'm immediately approached by a number of gentlemen offering to change my tire--or better yet, they have tires right around the corner, for sale! Yeah, sure. Okay, whatever. And in front of me is a woman who *also* got a flat going through that intersection!! I didn't see anything in the road, but it sure does make me wonder.
Anyway, I had to wait 1:30 for a tow truck (thanks, AAA!) which is fine, it was in rush hour on the south side of Chicago. As the tow driver was hoisting my poor Volvo onto the flat bed, he says, "Hey, did you notice your rims are bent?" Sure as hell *both* rims are bent, too. Today sucks.
And I missed CivPro. I'm a nerd and I was actually looking forward to Civil Procedure tonight. It was deposition day.
*sigh*
Oh well, tomorrow, live blogging in almost real time from BlawgThink!
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (2)
November 9, 2005
BlawgThink 2005
I have been meaning to write about
BlawgThink 2005 for weeks now... ah, the joys of law school: copious amounts of spare time.
Anyway, I'm super psyched for this event. The speakers and attendees sound fantastic, featuring such blawg luminaries as Dennis Kennedy, Brandy Karl, Evan Schaeffer, Carolyn Elefant, Matt Homann, Ernest Svenson, Rick Klau. Matt Homann is even reviving his "Five by Five" feature at the conference with "Five by Five Live".
Although the tracks look interesting for the first day, it's really the second day--the open collaborative/brainstorming/freeform discussion that I'm really excited about. After the really great "Evening at Adler" (for Mac Developers) that I went to last month, I've been really excited about (1) how blogs can bring real people together to do real things; (2) how great it is to meet interesting and intelligent people and hear new ideas; and, (3) how great discussions/brainstorming can be for generating new ideas and motivating work on old ones.
With so many great legal bloggers assembled in one place, there's bound to be great stuff coming out of BlawgThink this weekend. And there's still space, I think, so if you aren't coming yet, sign up!
Posted by Dave! Permalink
New Blog: Stepfather of Soul
There's a new blog in the blogosphere: Get on Down With The Stepfather of Soul! This new blog comes to you from my friend (and former classmate) Jason Stone. Jason and I were 1Ls together and opponents for our oral arguments for Legal Writing. You couldn't ask for a better sparring partner. Then he up and transferred to Atlanta!
But Jason's new blog isn't a blawg, he's cooler than that... it's an awesome funk and soul blog and he's featuring podcasts! I just downloaded the first edition, and I can't wait to listen to some of the incredible stuff he's got in his collection. I suggest you do the same...
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (2)
November 8, 2005
Mouths Wide Open
This morning on NPR, I heard about the "Army Men Project" and I just had to know more. You need to know more, too. Visit mouthswideopen.com and Bring Them Home.
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (4)
November 6, 2005
St. Agur Blue Cheese
I'm a blue cheese fiend. When it comes to cheese, I say, "Bring on the mold!" Well today, my cheese monger did not disappoint. I asked for something "creamy and mild... something between a Gorgonzola and Roquefort" and she said, "St. Agur" without hesitation.
Sure enough, St. Agur is one delightful blue cheese. It hails from the Auvergne region of France, the village of Monts du Velay. It's a cow's milk cheese and fairly young, which yields a nice, smooth and mellow flavor, not as bold as an in-your-face Gorgonzola. I noticed just a hint of pepper but virtually no sourness... it makes a killer dessert cheese. And the texture is spot on... creamy, but not too soft, it just melts in your mouth. It has such a great balance of texture and flavor, I think even those who aren't as nuts about cheese as I am would love this one.
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (1)
November 4, 2005
Site Updates...
Well, I just moved my site to a new host. All in all, it was a prettys smooth and painless transition, once I got some of the database quirks worked out. It was pretty easy to restore the MT db and so far, everything seems okay. But as is always the case, I'm sure I missed something, so if you notice any problems with the site, archives, commenting, etc. please just drop me a line.
Posted by Dave! Permalink | Comments (4)
November 1, 2005
Bucheron
After yesterday's unfortunate cheese experience I decided to play it safe today, with an old stand-by goat's cheese, bucheron.
Ah, bucheron, you are almost chevre! It's a typical goat offering, nothing offensive whatsoever, just pure goaty goodness. It's actually a little bit more chalky than a chevre. And it's round! It comes in logs, and how can you not like that? So you get a nice little round of goat cheese goodness.
I actually think the flavor is a little stronger than chevre, but not in a bad way. It has a nice, citrus-like tang in the aftertaste which does remind me a bit of the precious Humboldt Fog which is always a good thing.
Yes, after the "cheese whose name shall not be spoken" this was a very nice retreat into the familiar.
Posted by Dave! Permalink