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Aside from Becky’s birthday, my favorite days are when class schedules are released. Which means that this past Friday was objectively awesome. Is there anything more intoxicating than trying to decide what one’s semester will look like? The feeling is bittersweet this time around, because I will be picking classes for the last time in law school. Still, I won’t let that ruin things. I love exploring the myriad ways in which I might compose a schedule. There are timing, credit load, and professor evaluation factors which require careful consideration. Often overlooked is the subtle interplay of the subject matter of the courses - if I take two “numbers” courses in a semester, will that overtax that half of my brain? Or will I enjoy benefits from the constant exercise?

The biggest trap for the unwary is overestimating how much you’re actually able to handle. In Spring 2009 there at least a dozen courses I am highly interested in taking. Realistically, I probably can’t take more than four of them and still able to absorb anything that I’m supposedly learning. But the temptation to load up is strong. I’ve seen many other people do it, and by this point in the semester, they almost always regret it.

I have until December 1 to “pre-register” through Columbia’s rather Byzantine system. Until then, I’ll be playing with my course-selection spreadsheet..

I recently caved and got an iPhone.  I’ve really liked having it so far, although I have experienced the unreliable 3G connection, poor battery life, and frequent application crashes of which others have complained.  I have to assume that these issues will be fixed via a software update in the near future, so for now I’m just enjoying the technological convergence.

Perhaps my favorite “feature” of the iPhone is having a decent (though some would call it sub-par) camera with me at all times.  What’s really cool is that the iPhone includes GPS tags for every photo that you take.  This allows you to create albums like this one of my recent trip to Golden Gate Park.  This is arguably useful, but it’s definitely really, really cool.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell, iPhoto lacks the ability to create these maps, either natively or through an iPhoto plug-in.  It seems silly that I need to upload my photos to the Web to accomplish this, and thus I hereby declare my First iPhoto Wish.

My Second iPhoto Wish also relates to the iPhone and a Web service which takes advantage of the phone’s capabilities even better than its applications do.  It seems to me that Photos is Facebook’s really killer app so far, or at least the one that draws the most eyes to the site.  I’m a fairly active Facebook user, and when I log in, what I’m most interested in seeing is the list of updated photos; it’s more interesting than, say, your recently-updated list of favorite music, or the non sequiturs on your Wall.  What makes Photos especially cool is its ability to tag friends in your photos.  At this point, I would go so far as to call it uncouth to not tag the people in your photos.  Unfortunately, while Facebook provides an iPhone application which allows you to directly upload photos from your iPhone, it doesn’t allow you to tag the photos with friends.  So, you need to upload the photo to Facebook (via your phone or computer), then log in with a browser to actually tag people.  This is silly (as is the ability to fulfill my First iPhoto Wish in an analogous way by viewing a map on Facebook) and should be corrected.

An alternative would to rely upon the iPhone’s Photos application to do the tagging.  What would be nice about that is that it would let you sync the tag information to your iPhoto library, which is helpful if you’re slightly uneasy, as I am, about entrusting your photos to Facebook.  The problem there is the iPhone and iPhoto don’t know your Facebook friends - they only know the contacts on your phone and computer.  Perhaps Apple could use the Facebook API to get around this limitation.

My Third iPhoto Wish is for the ability to assign photos taken on the iPhone to an album before syncing to the computer.  As I understand it, the current sync procedure is this: when you plug your iPhone into your Mac, iTunes handles backing the phone up and also syncing audio and video files, calendars, contacts, and applications, and also uploading photos to the phone.  iPhoto is used to download photos from the phone.  While this makes a certain degree of sense, it’s not terribly convenient when you’re like me and only take a handful of pictures per day.  I have to plug in the phone, wait for iPhoto to open, import the picture, assign it to an album (and tag the people in it, via the Title field), and then confirm the deletion of the original from the phone.  It would be much better if I could take a picture using the phone, immediately assign it to the “San Francisco” album, and just let everything be synced automatically.

November 19, 2007: Amazon releases Kindle e-book reader. CEO Jeff Bezos: “We . . . wanted to go beyond the physical book.”

December 13, 2007: Amazon announces it has bought one of only seven copies in existence of “The Tales of Beetle the Bard,” hand-written by J.K. Rowling.

So are physical books dead, or what?

Now that the year is more or less halfway over, I thought this would be a good time to post an update. I’ve divided this post into three sections to symbolize the tripartite nature of man.

On the work front: Work continues to be, on the whole, fantastic. That big criminal trial I wrote about earlier ended last week with a guilty verdict. Read all about it here (part 1) and here (part 2). I’ve been analyzing motions for attorneys’ fees and for remand to state court. Sometimes it seems that the lawyers who write these briefs just aren’t trying - they miss really important parts of the law, which is both frustrating (makes my job harder) and helpful (forces me to practice researching!). I don’t claim that my work is brilliant, but I’m impressed by how much I learned last year.

On the home front: The nice thing about this job is that the work doesn’t follow me home like it did during the school year. Unfortunately Becky usually works until around 8 or 10pm on most days, including Saturday, so that limits our chill times. We’ve been watching a lot of movies (Blockbuster Total Access is pretty awesome), and re-reading the Harry Potter books in preparation for July 21. Last Sunday I went to the Raging Waters waterpark with Dan and Eugene, which was appropriately infuriating (i.e., fun). Yesterday, because Becky was off, we went down to the San Diego Zoo. I’m not really a pet or animal guy, but this was pretty awesome (pics here). We have a few more things/places we’d like to do/visit this summer - a visit to San Francisco chief among them.

On the idea front: It seems to me that escalators run all day long, but a lot of the time there is nobody on them. Isn’t this a huge waste of energy? I’m curious to see if it would be possible to put motion sensors near the entrance area so that they only start running once somebody approaches. I don’t know if a) there are many escalators that are under-utilized (the ones in the courthouse are, which inspired this idea), or b) whether repeatedly starting and stopping the motor uses less energy than just running it non-stop. Somebody shoud look into this.

I wouldn’t go bragging…

As I’ve intimated said [UPDATE: Becky made me use a less colorful word] before, I’m using the Microsoft Word Notebook layout for taking notes in class, and for writing case briefs. It’s a fairly neat idea, and doesn’t require as much of a mental leap as does the transition from say, Word to OneNote. But, aside from the speed of running the application using Rosetta, I have a few other quibbles. It’s probably too late to have these corrected for the next version of Office for the Mac, but I’ll at least post them here and submit the product feedback to Microsoft for future iterations. And, if that fails, maybe I’ll make something myself one day. Without further ado, my bitch list:

• I need to be able to indent/outdent only one section at a time, regardless of whether or not there are other sections below it. The behavior that I’ve seen is that when you do move a section above, all sections below are automatically moved accordingly. Sometimes this is what I want, and sometimes it is not. I really would appreciate a way to pick between the two, perhaps with just another keyboard shortcut.
• Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, how about using the standard system ones that every other app uses? There aren’t too many offenders here, but there are enough to be annoying. For example, I instinctively press Command-T to bring up the font and text size palette. In Notebook Layout (and all of Word), Command-D does this. So when I press Command-T, I ended up changing the tab location. That’s annoying.
• Obviously there are design decisions to be made regarding how much “unique” functionality you want your application to have, as opposed to using “for free” functionality provided by the system frameworks (or, of course, user interface guidelines). I would differ from the MacBU team on the idea of the built-in spell-checker and dictionary, for example. Why not use the system functionality here? As for the former, I wouldn’t have to add my unwieldy surname to both the system dictionary and the Word one. As for the latter, it just seems redundant. Instead of having the Office team spending hour upon hour of development time reinventing the wheel, why not direct that time into something more useful, such as getting an Intel-compatible version of the application suite out within two years of the architecture’s public introduction?
• I’ll combine two complaints into one here, since they both relate to the tabs, or “Sections” on the right side of the Notebook Layout screen. Basically, they’re forgetful. There are two annoying behaviors that I deal with every single day. I have a tab for every week of class, just because it is an easy way for me to do a week-by-week review. So, let’s say I’m typing some notes in the week 6 tab. My professor asks about something related to default vs. immutable rules. I don’t remember what they are, so I do a search for the term, and the application highlghts the relevant text in my week 2 tab. So far, so good. Then I switch back to the section 6 tab, and I’m disappointed to see that I’m now looking at the top of the file, not where I was typing before. It lost my place. And I have to spend precious time trying to figure out where I was typing before, and praying that I don’t get called on, because I haven’t been paying attention for the last two minutes. So, cursor position is not saved between tab switches. Also, neither the cursor position nor the currently-selected tab is saved when the file is closed. When you open your notebook file, you are always taken to the very top of the first tab. I would argue that a more convenient result would be to be taken wherever you were last working. When you open a real notebook, you don’t turn to page one, then turn to wherever it is you were writing - you (try) to open right to where it is you want to continue writing.
• All I can say about the tables function in the notebook view is that something funky is up with it. It doesn’t work right.
• If you want to know whether or not you are in the “bold” text formatting mode, you need to have the Formatting Palette open. There is no formatting toolbar in the Notebook Layout. What a ridiculous waste of space. Because I can’t see my text at the size I would like to while at the same time having the Palette open, I’m forced to guess whether or not the next word I type will be bold or not. There is no visual indicator as there would be with a toolbar.

I don’t think any of these things would be terribly hard to fix, and they would save me a ton of frustration. So git-r-done.

Because everybody keeps asking (not true), here are my thoughts on Studio 60 that I shared with beejpost:

I really want to like it, but I think Sorkin has failed to expand his portfolio here. It’s just a mash-up of WW and SportsNight, but even more touchy-feely; I’m not ready to really care about these characters yet. There’s no built-in gravitas like there is with people working in the White House. And I feel like WW could deal in one episode with the whole range of issues (censorship, religious right, etc.) that S60 will be relying on for its entire existence.

BJ also added that Bradley Whitford’s character should be named Josh. Truer words have never been spoken.

I normally love Amazon, not only for their price but for their excellent customer service and their innovations in areas such as searching inside books and recommendation engines. It really bothers me though when I’m looking at a product page for, say, a computer, and instead of showing me a price, they tell me “To see our low price, add this item to your cart.” Their explanatory page for this behavior says:

The “click for price” message indicates an additional discount is in effect, and this discount is calculated in the Shopping Cart. You can see this price by clicking the product name and then selecting the Add to Cart button on the product information page. Please be assured that simply adding an item to your cart does not obligate you to buy it–you can always delete the item from your cart if you decide not to purchase it.

That’s crazy. It completely breaks the Web model of transparency, and adds extra steps to my browsing process (add the item to the cart, read the price, remove the item from the cart). Tssk.

From his May 3, 2006 column on the need for third party focused on our energy crisis:

Energy really is key to American renewal — from stimulating more young people to study math and science, to bringing down the trade deficit by decreasing our dependence on imported oil, to bringing down the fiscal deficit by raising gasoline taxes, to improving U.S. competitiveness by making us leaders in clean technologies, to restoring U.S. global respect by leading the fight against climate change, to advancing democracy by finding alternatives to oil and thereby weakening some of the world’s worst regimes, who are using their oil windfalls to halt the spread of freedom.

From the AP:

President Bush’s budget would cut money for education, the second straight time has he has sought less school spending after a first term of steady increases.

The Education Department would get $54.4 billion for discretionary spending in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. That would amount to a cut of $3.7 billion, or 6.4 percent, from this year.

When I first read this, I immediately thought of the hypocrisy of announcing major new education initiatives during the State of the Union and cutting education funding six days later. Then I realized that money probably isn’t the answer. I have neither the time nor the expertise in the art and science of education to really back this up in any empirical way, but it seems to me that schools with all the greatest technology and facilities aren’t necessarily any better than those without them. Certainly some minimal budgetary foundation is needed so that qualified teachers are attracted to historically sub-par schools. Before I start to sound like a Communist, I’ll sign off by saying that money isn’t the answer. Or drugs, for that matter. Don’t do drugs.

This is really unfortunate.

It reminded me of a scene in X-Men, though.