Spring Brings in the New

As you can see, I have been updating the look and feel of this blog recently. As I was thinking about what blogging means and about the phenomenon of social networking websites, I though I should spruce up this blog a bit. I promise that I will return to thoughts about law school and that no amount of cool widgets and profile features can make up for lack of interesting writing (or can they?), but in the mean time there are some cool new parts of law-new-view.

1) My Library: you can scroll down and check out the books that are in my personal library. Besides my bicycle, my books make up probably my biggest asset. When you are twenty-nine and this is the case, it does indicate something about what I have been doing with my time. There is a cool site, Library Thing, that allows you to catalogue all of your books, and in my little spare time I have been slowly building my online catalogue. Right now I have pretty much only made it through my German books, so it will give somewhat of a skewed view of the kind of books I spend most of my time reading, but then again, before studying the law, I did receive a Masters in German Literature and Philosophy.

2) My Profile: For a while I was afraid to put too much personal information on this site, and although I hear that big law firms will Google applicants and search for them on Myspace to find out if that person has a juicy personal life that would conflict with the values of a firm, I don't think I have said or will say anything that I wouldn't feel comfortable with an employer knowing (with one disclaimer, if you right now are a future employer, I don't always write my posts were perfect grammar or impeccable legal logic, but that is not for lack of the capacity to do so). Secondly, I think I was just nervous about having that much public information about myself accessible to anyone who could access it, but after I began to see just how much social interaction actually takes place on the web these days, this did not seem to be such a big deal. Call me old fashion, but I am still part of a generation of individuals that worked on Comador 64's, Apple IIe's and had a non-html "pine" e-mail account all through college. I didn't exactly come-of-age in the internet era, unless we consider my current focus on career, health, and greater personal relationships a coming of age. I did start out on a whole new path when I came to law school last fall, and this does feel like for the first time in my life I have a long term goal, a direction, a focus, and a chance to have a few greater assets than some bookshelves full of books (not that I don't value what I got from the books, but, god, what I wouldn't give to go on a trip to Mexico at the end of this semester. Would I give all my books? All? Couldn't I keep just a couple? OK. Anyone want to trade? I keep a dozen books, you back a week's getaway in Mexico, and you get all the rest of the collection? It could happen. . .check out what this guy traded for one red paper clip!)

3) Finally, I am testing out a new function that allows me to post comments as a MP3 files from any telephone. I can't quite picture a situation where I would use this feature, but you never know until you have it.

So that is what is new around here, as well as law school, which is on the verge of getting very busy. We just were assigned our fourth and final memo, finals are about a month away, I am only about halfway through outlining, and I am sure we will be learning new material right up until the end. I may not have time for all of this fun stuff, but I will try and keep you updated during the last push to the end of the semester.