MarcFriedenberg.com

A few things have happened in 4+ months since I’ve last posted.  In no particular order (other than chronological), they are as follows:  First, I finished up 2L year.  I feel no particular sense of relief or joy about this; the year was uneventful and at times downright boring compared to 1L.  Does this come down to UCLA v. Columbia, or is it an inevitable part of the law school experience?  In the fall I’ll be externing for Magistrate Judge James Francis in the Southern District of New York.  I’ll also be doing research for Prof. Clarissa Long.  The rest of my schedule isn’t set yet, but it’s already shaping up to be a fairly solid semester.

After school let out I had a great time working at Quinn Emanuel’s New York office.  The work was interesting, the people were friendly, and the summer events were just good, old-fashioned fun.  I have a lot to say about my experience there (all of it positive), so I might save it for another post.

After New York, we had the firm hike in Switzerland.  This was my first trip to Europe, and it was an absolute whirlwind.  We left Wednesday evening and arrived Thursday morning.  On Thursday I was way too tired to do much of anything other than to rest for the hike.  On Friday morning we took a train up a mountain, got off (the train), and started hiking.  Five or so hours (and a rainstorm or two) later, we were done.  It was pretty intense, but the scenery was beautiful.  The rest of Friday, and the better part of Saturday, were spent in the hot tub at the hotel.  Evenings were spent at Black & White, a dance club about which nothing further need be said.  Like all good things, our Switzerland trip had to end, and so it did, early on Sunday morning.  I got back to New York Sunday afternoon and slept for 15 hours or so.

The next day I flew to San Francisco.  I arrived fairly late so had only enough time to meet my roommate and then crash.  I started in Quinn’s SF office on Tuesday, and have already been given some interesting assignments.  After my first day we went to a German pub and then had dinner in Chinatown.  On Wednesday we went to a party at a partner’s house in Marin County.  On Thursday we saw a partner’s band play at a local bar, and on Friday we were in Napa all day (after that, I saw The Dark Knight and then did some karaoke in Japantown).  This weekend was a little slow (pretty much all I did was go on a historic walking tour of some parts of the city), and then yesterday I went to a bar and then a really good pizza place.  So, it’s been a lot of fun.

I’m working until Aug. 22, then sticking around until Aug. 30 for some additional sightseeing.  Becky and her family rented a house here for that week, and we’re also going to go to Sonoma for a few days, so I’m really looking forward to that.  Also, my family is coming out the week before.  I’ll still be working so I’ll only be able to spend the evenings with them, but I’m excited for them because they’ve never been to California.

I’m very much open to suggestions for things to do in my remaining time in San Francisco.

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.

The semester is drawing to a close. Surprisingly, I don’t have all that much left to do, at least in terms of classes. Piano and colloquium are officially over. In 440W I have a brief, stress-free group presentation to give. My image search engine is due on Thursday, but I’ve had so much fun working on the darn thing that I’m already 99% done. I have only one final, in accounting, and I do need to study quite a bit for that, seeing as my second exam grade was sub-par (I’ll just say I beat the class average of 66, but not by a comfortable margin.) Luckily the new material for the final is a rehash of what I did in finance last semester. Other than that, I’ll be working on the thesis, finishing up work at the Solutions Institute, and working through some Cocoa tutorials.

Winter break promises to be pretty cool. Becky and I are going on a tour of the White House and then a bit later we’ll be heading down to Florida to spend a few days with my grandmom. I’m also going to do whatever I can to get two tickets to see Penn State in the Orange Bowl, which luckily enough is on the same day as my arrival down there.

My computer setup at work features two 17-inch monitors, for a total of over 3.5 million pixels. That’s a lot of space. The menu bar is always at the top of the right-hand screen. If I’m working on the left screen and I want to access the menu, it’s quite a hike. Thus I propose that somebody write the following program for me: Move the menu bar to the top of whatever screen contains the mouse pointer. It would also be acceptable if the menu were mirrored on both displays, and I’m fairly certain OS X doesn’t offer this capability natively. I can wait up to two (2) weeks for you to complete this assignment.

Today I’ll be working on refining my final presentation. I’ll also be trying out a new last-minute contender for the project management crown. Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with one of the webmasters at the Lab to tackle gForge, hopefully for the last time. Wednesday I have an exit interviews and some evaulations to fill out, then the presentation. Thursday will be largely filled out with an elaborate “termination clearance” process, requiring me to visit such exotic locales as the COSMEC Custodian, Materials and Instrumentation, Special Security, Drafting Records, Tool Crib, Distribution Office, and the EH&S office. I’ve never interacted with anybody from any of those places, but I still have to go and have them sign off on papers saying I don’t have any of their property or other obligations.

Becky’s flying up tomorrow. We’ll be poking around town for a few days, then driving back home Friday morning probably. After that it’s right off to North Carolina.

Yeah, picking on the Boston accent is easy. Fact is, though, that I adore it. Here are my three favorite examples gleaned from 10 weeks in the city.

Cashier

“That cake you’re buying is wicked sweet.”

Woman in store

“I’m in Tahget.”

Man at work

“I just installed After Dahk.”

You can’t make up stuff this good.

All sorts of things have been ending lately, some too early and some too late.

I’ll be finishing up at the Lab next Thursday. I have a final presentation to deliver and a technical report to write. I also need MUCH more feedback from my users.

Does anybody have any experience with dotProject or more.groupware?

The elderly woman who serves as the cashier in the cafeteria where I get breakfast is as sweet as the morning dew, but if you try giving her a twenty dollar bill on your $1.85 meal, she will rain hellfire upon you.

I’m not trying to be mean, but I just had to post this final part of an email I received from one of the college recruiters at the Lab:

Additionally, we will be hosting a farewell breakfast for all summer students on Friday, 12 August from 8:45 until 10 a.m. on the patio of the main cafeteria. Details to follow.

Thank you and please us.

After doing a few days of research on the available tools, I have narrowed my areas of focus down to only a handful of serious contenders: Drupal, Twiki, and gForge. My plan for the next several days is to install these applications (and possibly b2evolution and PHP Nuke as well) on Linux-based virtual machines that are being provided to me. I am also reading “Learning Perl” by Schwartz and Christansen, because Twiki is written in Perl, and frankly it’s about time that I learned that language anyway. So far it seems like a pretty cool way of doing things (the string manipulations are much better than PHP’s, the code is shorter, the number of modules available seems much larger.) Hopefully I can take some of this knowledge and use it not only in installing Twiki, but also in modifying it if necessary or for my own future applications.

Today I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on a VMWare virtual machine. It’s pretty neat how some of the work I did last summer with L’Oreal has come full circle here at the lab.