EdBlog

As my last post and the fact that I was in law school for the last three years probably make obvious, Sarah and I are each getting ready to take the Texas Bar Exam. For those of you unfamiliar with this 2.5-day (and typically extremely costly and agonizing) ordeal, a friend of mine has posted an excellent Texas Bar Exam Primer to fill you in on the joys of the exam.

Short version: you get a stack of books which weigh around 46 pounds and contain around 15,000 pages of text, all of which you are supposed to be familiar with; you spend a lot of time (hopefully too much, rather than too little) trying to comprehend it all; and you spend 2.5 days frantically reading questions that mostly bear zero relationship to your future professional activities and drafting semi-coherent responses. The best part is that you’ll read some question involving two marriages, three or four oil patches, a personal injury case, and a deadbeat dad, then get some nit-picky question about who gets the former family Honda’s left front wheel… “Explain fully.” (You can be sure it depends on whether or not the wheel was attached before April 1, 1971 or some such nonsense.) On the upside, you’re only shooting for a C (675 out of 1000 is passing in Texas, a fairly typical threshold), but that C requires a lot of preparation before it’s obtainable.

It is not a particularly fun process. You know it has gotten old when most of those 15,000 pages have one or more coffee stains and the covers are coming off all of your books (and to top it off, the practice software provided by your bar prep company is in your top-five-most-used applications list in Windows). The good news, though, is that most people pass, and after that, you’re generally done with your formal education and licensing procedures, the one exception being if you move under certain circumstances. Some poor souls - including some people I know - end up having to take more than one bar exam.

In any case, the exam is next week (July 29-31). I, for one, will be extremely glad it’s over.

For those who are suffering through this with us, here are a few handy resources:
Texas Bar Exam Primer (aforementioned post by a fellow Texan-lawyer-to-be)
Understanding Texas Bar Exam Scoring (official info from the BLE website)
Examiner’s Comments (commentary by the graders on common mistakes both by subject area and on particular questions)
General information from a current TX attorney about his experience and preparation

Posted in Law, Personal Life | No Comments »

A friend posted this sage advice to people about the take the bar exam, like yours truly: RELAX. Yes, it’s overwhelming. Yes, there is a huge amount of material, much of it obscure. But, you know what? If you study diligently, you will pass.

Relax. It’ll all be over soon!

Posted in Friends, Law | No Comments »

In my ongoing battle against comment spam, I have finally decided to write myself a WordPress plugin as an additional layer of defense. It’s called WRECK (Wordpress Regular Expression Comment Killer).

WRECK (Wordpress Regular Expression Comment Killer) is an extremely simple plugin for marking comments as spam if they match certain regular expressions.

DOWNLOAD: wreck.zip
Current Version: 1.0
Release Date: 7/6/2008

INSTALLATION: Just download and copy wreck.php to your plugins folder (wordpress/wp-content/plugins), then activate it in the plugins section of your WordPress blog.

LICENSE: This plugin is open-source (GNU General Public License), but I would appreciate it if you let me know of any modifications you find helpful.

SUPPORT: No formal support is provided, but I will take a look at any requests/suggestions/complaints you send me through my contact form.

NOTES:This plugin is very simple to use, but BE CAREFUL! It uses regular expressions to filter comments, so a badly written regular expression may block legitimate comments.

By default, only one type of comment is blocked: a comment containing only two lines, the first of which is bolded, with an elipsis (”…”) on each line. The author gets a lot of comment spam like this, which is the reason he wrote this plugin.

If you find this plugin useful, please let me know here. Please also let me know if you discover any useful rules or make any other modifications.

Enjoy!

Posted in Open Source Software, Programming, Site News, Spam, Technology | 2 Comments »

Matthew Harding, a former computer programmer, decided a while back to just travel until his money ran out. Eventually, he picked up a sponsor (now, why didn’t I think of this?) and started travelling the world. Fourteen months, forty-two countries, and all seven continents later, Matt has danced, on video, in more countries than most of us will ever see. This amazing - and surprisingly uplifting - video is the result:

There’s also a pretty amusing outtakes video here, or you can check out his entire site at WhereTheHellIsMatt.com.

Hat tips: Tim Challies, Bill’s Poker Blog.

Posted in Humor, Miscellanea | 1 Comment »

Sarah and I finally got our stuff delivered by the movers a couple days ago - it’s awfully nice to have more furniture than an air mattress and some household goods that aren’t single-use. We celebrated by going out for dinner at Pappasito’s. If you have never had skewered shrimp and vegetables where the shrimp are wrapped in bacon and stuffed with cheese and jalapenos, you are missing out. MMmmmm….

Posted in Personal Life | No Comments »

This post over at Get Religion got me thinking, and very confused. Apparently, in a recently released Pew Forum poll, twenty-one of those who call themselves atheists stated that they believe in God. Eight percent of atheists are absolutely certain God exists.

Now, I always thought of the word atheist as meaning what nearly any dictionary will tell you it means, something like “one who believes that there is no deity” (Merriam-Webster). I do think, as many people argue, that we should include in the definition the person who does not believe there is a deity, yet has not consciously chosen either agnosticism or actively to deny the existence of a deity. That said, it appears based on Wikipedia’s entry that the term is being used by at least some people somewhat more broadly, such that rejection of theism counts as atheism. That is, rejection of belief is treated is synonymous with disbelief (a logical fallacy; “I do not believe X is true” need not equate to “I believe X is false”). Apparently, some people are redefining the term so dramatically as to see belief in a singular God as compatible with rejection of belief in a god or gods.

I don’t understand. Anyone care to explain this to me? Are some people simply muddled? Maybe Steve Waldman at Beliefnet is right in saying, “Atheism has become a cultural designation, rather than a theological statement. Some are likely declaring themselves atheists as a statement of hostility to organized religion, rather than to God.” Thoughts?

Posted in Miscellanea | 2 Comments »

Techmeme linked me to this amazing Bill Gates e-mail rant. It’s gratifying to know that even the creator of the operating system finds it infuriating, especially when it just took me 10 minutes to reconnect my old laptop to my 802.11g (WiFi) network. I mistyped the WEP key, allegedly, either in the first box or in the confirmation box, upon which Windows repeatedly erased both entries and made me start over. Why hide my characters? I understand there’s a security value, but typing 26 hex characters blind is an error-prone activity; at least give me an option to show them. Why have two boxes? What possible reason there is that I would need to confirm a passkey when using it (as opposed to creating it), I don’t know. And the best question of all: why in the world did Windows forget the WEP key, in the first place? I did have to clone my PC’s MAC address to get my router to work with Comcast (thanks for making life that much harder, Comcast), but I didn’t think that affected the MAC address it uses internally to the network.

Posted in Human Stupidity, Microsoft, Technology | No Comments »

Lou Dobbs has, apparently, finally flipped. He thinks Bush should be impeached for the recent salmonella outbreak.

Hat tip: Power Line.

Posted in Human Stupidity | No Comments »

Redstate has a post by Pejman Yousefzadeh, Barack Obama: That Burkean Chicagoan, that I found very interesting and right on the money. I think Obama’s association with the University of Chicago has somehow been widely interpreted as a signal that he is actually somewhat conservative, or at least moderate, in a somewhat Burkean sense. This is ridiculous, for the reasons Pejman’s post illuminates, but for a few more, as well.

Part of the problem is the kind of thinking expressed by Cass Sunstein, soon to be of Harvard Law School. I have had one class taught by Sunstein, including Chicago’s famous “Elements of the Law” required 1L course, and have heard him speak many times. He is, of course, extremely intelligent and a very good teacher. Taking a class with him is like drinking from a firehose, but it is always informative, stimulating, and entertaining. His greatest flaw, however, and one I and many others have pointed out, is his tendency to rely on his own constructions of points of view and the corresponding arguments on an issue as though they are actually fair and correct. That is, Sunstein is very prone to say something like, “Imagine the following… Now, a conservative would say…” The problem is, he is very often wrong - and sometimes very badly so - on this type of construction. For example, when we discussed economic freedom (as in the freedom of contract principle from the Lochner era), Sunstein completely misconstrued both what conservatives at the time and today would say about it. At times, Professor Sunstein seems unaware that his ability to adopt another’s point of view and reason from it is imperfect, relying more on his constructions of a perspective than on direct statements from those who hold it.

As applied to the excerpt in Pejman’s post, I find this approach both telling and disturbing. If Barack Obama wanted the best possible arguments for and against the warrantless wiretapping of international phone calls, he could find a better debate at the University of Chicago Law School than Sunstein v. Sunstein. Nobody can fully understand the mindsets of both his kindred spirits and those he disagrees with; those who get even close tend to become legendary for their exploits. As much as I respect Professor Sunstein’s ability to summarize and analyze controversies, then, I have to say it disturbs me that Obama’s consideration of the counterarguments to his own position on such a hot issue is heavily informed by what a like-minded person says those counterarguments are.

Leadership is principally about making hard calls and inspiring others to enact them, occasionally getting one’s own hands dirty in the process. Making those calls requires managing scarce resources of time, manpower, and knowledge wisely. To extent time allows, this means a potential leader - especially a man who would be President of the United States - must hear alternative viewpoints presented fairly and by those who have thought them through most carefully. In other words, a liberal President absolutely must have some conservative advisors, and a conservative President must have some liberal advisors. Relying solely on one’s political affiliates for insight into one’s philosophical opponents is terribly unwise - it’s unrealistic, leads to false confidence, and is likely to make the opposition feel entirely disregarded and disrespected in the caricatures that result.

Posted in America, Burke, Conservatism, Election 2008, Law, Politics | No Comments »

The Associated Press wants to charge bloggers $12.50 to quote five words from AP articles. See this rate chart for the evidence. I’m not sure which is more frustrating - that the AP has so little respect for the value of a free exchange of information in a free society, that they have so little understanding of “fair use” in copyright law, or that at least some people, intimidated by take-down notices and the like, will actually pay for doing something they have a legal right to do. It’s kind of amazing.

Posted in Freedom, Human Stupidity, Law | No Comments »