Discourse.net

Traveling Today

Drive to Sanford, FL, today, then take the Auto Train overnight to Lorton, VA, then tomorrow morning drive to Chevy Chase, MD.

The End, The Beginning

I taught my last class of the semester this afternoon. For several of the students it was their last class of law school, and they were more than a bit giddy with relief — demob happy. But we had a good class anyway, or because of it.

The end today for graduating students is really just a beginning of something bigger and longer and likely more important, which is why we call that ceremony coming up “Commencement”. The end today for me is just a turning of a wheel: I expect to do it all again next year.

But for one of my colleagues today, it was the final turn of this particular wheel. After 56 years on our faculty, here since September, 1951, Minnette Massey taught her last class today. It is very hard for me to imagine our University of Miami School of Law without this indomitable, outspoken, adorable, sometimes irascible, deeply decent, icon and pioneer of the Florida bar—one of the first women to do innumerable things in the Florida legal world. Minnette was Acting Dean for three years in the ’60s; I have to suspect sexism kept her from ever being appointed as ‘Dean’. She was a mentor to two generations of state legal luminaries, and the go-to person for local federal judges who needed special masters in complex cases, particularly before they had Magistrate Judges to do some of those jobs. Among Minnette’s many achievements is decades of work to fully integrate the bar, not least by mentoring students and young professionals. She’s not young, but no one who knows her thinks she had to retire. Minnette made it clear, however, that she didn’t want to be one of those people who waited until she had to be forced out: her leave-taking, like so much else in her life, would be her own decision on her own time on her own rules.

Everyone has a Minnette story or three. Here’s one of my earliest: back when I was in my first year of law teaching, with a full three months under my belt, I attended the AALS winter conference for the first time. I was teaching Civ Pro I in those days, so of course I went the to the meeting of the Civil Procedure Section, which happened to be a joint section meeting with the Admiralty section that year — the big case was Carnival Cruise Line, which was about the enforcement of forum selection clauses on cruise tickets. On the way into the room, I bumped into Minnette. I had planned to lurk in the back. Minnette steered me to the front row, greeting everyone in the room on the way, which left us craning our necks up at a panel on a raised dias. The talk began. The admiralty speaker was, from a civil procedure standpoint, somewhat obvious. And he was not brief. I was thinking how much better off I would have been in the back, but here I was in the front, with a senior colleague I didn’t know very well, she had said hello to everyone, we were very visible, there was no escape, we’d just have to look interested. “ISN’T THIS BORING?” Minnette said to me in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard next door. (I later learned that was her regular voice.) I wanted to crawl under my seat. But no one else seemed to mind. I suspect that everyone in the room just knew she was being herself: you always know where you stand with Minnette — she doesn’t play games, and no, she won’t suffer fools in silence, but you cannot be around her long without seeing how much she cares about people and about justice. Minnette doesn’t brag (much), so it takes somewhat longer to learn just how much she has given to others and to our law school. I will miss Minnette enormously — unless we are lucky and she again blazes a new trail, this time in retirement, and makes Emeritus status something that involves greater involvement in the law school community than has commonly been the case in the past.

Several of us snuck in at the end of her class this afternoon to join the standing ovation in Room 109, and formed an impromptu receiving line in the aisle as she left the room. When she came to Charlton Copeland, currently our most junior faculty member, she said, “It’s up to you now.”

Happy Passover

Happy Passover to all!

(automated post set to go up at sundown…)

That Was In Another Country

Robert Waldmann has a very good memory.

But the past is another country. And besides…

PS. If you were at that party, and by some miracle you happen to read this, get in touch.

Mail Is Down

The entire University of Miami domain seems to be having holiday troubles, and it’s taken my regular mail server down with it. UM is officially closed for the holidays at present, so I don’t know how fast the repairs will be.

If you need to reach me urgently…use the phone.

Or, there’s always my backup email address of myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com, but I don’t check that as obsessively as I do the usual account.

Update (12/21): It’s working now.

Work

An absolutely ridiculous amount of my time this semester has been eaten up by administration. In this post I’ll talk about two tasks, one small and annoying, the other large and on-going.

I have spent at least 15 hours this semester struggling with … cover sheets. Yes, as part of my new job as “Director of Faculty Development” I am responsible for ‘encouraging’ the colleagues to be more visibly productive by posting their work product online, especially at SSRN. SSRN encourages you to have standardized cover sheets if you’re going to have lots of papers online. Our IT people were unable to produce decent ones, so in the end I had to do it. But although mine were not as bad as theirs, they weren’t perfect either, and every so often I have to go fix some glitch they cause on documents created with some new wordprocessing wrinkle. Maddening.

The second task is much more serious. In what must count as a significant working out of my karmic debts, I was sentenced to the law school’s Strategic Planning committee. For various complex and political reasons, not least our desire to issue a report before we get too far into the ongoing Dean search, we’re trying to do a plan in about half the time one should. So we meet a lot. In fact, we meet three or four times a week, for hours at a go.

We will soon send a draft of our work to the faculty, which will no doubt provide feedback with gusto. Once we recover, we have to redraft and try to provide a final text the faculty will like. All by early December.

I don’t know exactly at what point our new plan, whatever it turns out to be, will become public, but I look forward to discussing its substance here once I am free to do so.

Drat.

I’ve been offered a chance to go to something really interesting far, far away at someone else’s expense.

And it looks like I won’t be able to do it: it’s happening the same long weekend as the AALS hiring conference, and I’m married to the chair of our committee. She has to be there, so I have to be here — although our kids are amazingly large to look at, they’re not big enough to be left alone for a night, much less for four days in a row.

Words You Don't Like to Hear About Your Air Conditioner

Words you don’t like to hear about your two-year-old central air conditioner in the middle of August in Florida:

“They’ve had all sorts of problems with that model. They stopped selling it.”

In DC

I’m in DC for a long weekend with family and may not post much.

It was interesting to arrive at National Airport, and be greeted by a display at the t-shirt store of a shirt that said something like, “I Love My Country, It’s My Government I’m Afraid Of.”

It wasn’t very pretty, but I was still tempted to buy it.

Durham

What is it about ICANN meetings and lost luggage? Last year an airline lost my luggage on my way to an ICANN meeting. And here I am, a year later, stopping off in Durham on my way to this year’s nomcom session … and a different airline lost my luggage.

I should say that Lufthansa’s way of dealing with it was pretty impressive. American Airlines was just short of surly at the airport, the news that there was no info in the system about where my bag was didn’t give me confidence, and now, well after the next flight came in, the online service still doesn’t show any info about my bag. This looks bad, doesn’t it?

Update (9:15pm): “Bag Tag Number(s): RDU AA xxxxxx has arrived and has been scheduled for pickup by the delivery service on Jul 07 at 11:00 PM local time. It will be delivered to the address you provided within approximately 6 hours* of pickup time.”

Where I'm Going

I’m going to have another little burst of travel: Saturday I’ll be leaving for the Durham, NC area to drop off a camper (the two-legged, not the four-wheeled, sort), Monday I’ll go on to Toronto to spend a packed work-week in a room with other members of the ICANN NomCom.

The NomCom’s proceedings are covered by promises of confidentiality, so I won’t be blogging about them — and if the meetings run late, which they likely will, I many not be blogging about much else next week either.

After that, it’s back home for the rest of the summer.

PS. No substantive posts today because I spent the WHOLE DAY in a meeting (but not about ICANN).

Long Journey Home

Flying from Istanbul to Manchester today; long frequent-flier-ticket layover until tomorrow’s flight to Boston, followed by long frequent-flier-ticket layover until evening flight to Miami. Many chances to lose luggage.

This is a fascinating city, but it feels like what we saved on the tickets we pumped into the Turkish economy in other ways.

Istanbul

We are enjoying Istanbul. Below is the night-time view of the Blue Mosque from the far corner of the roof terrace of our hotel, which hints at the grandeur of the best of the local architecture.

Indeed, given the number of mosques near here, we are well-placed to hear the muezzins’ calls.

More Travel

After that trip to the great identity conference in Italy, I spent a pleasant weekend at my 25th (!) college reunion. Then home for a couple of days, and now I am vacationing in the UK. Without luggage, which is still in Boston.

We used frequent flyer miles for this trip, which means we could add a second stop at no cost, so in about a week the family will go to Istanbul, which is a place I’ve always wanted to visit. Using the miles meant we had to take the flights available, and when you are a party of four, there are not many. So we are only staying five days, and then it will take us two days to get home.

Once I recover from jet lag, I hope to blog about my experiences with the passport office…

I will have some connectivity here in the UK, so I expect to post now and then. While I’m in Turkey, the site will be in the hands of a wonderful guest blogger, about whom more soon.

Called for Jury Duty

Approximately 300,000 citizens in Miami-Dade County are randomly selected by a computer each year to be summoned to jury duty for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida. Summonses are mailed to citizens who possess a valid driver’s license or identification card issued by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Miami-Dade County has a total population of about 2,370,000; of which about three quarters are over 18, so make that circa 1,778,000 adults. If 300,000 per year are selected for jury duty for the 11th circuit alone (ie ignoring federal court), then a resident’s chance of being picked in any one year is almost 17%.

Assuming the chance of being picked was a constant in the past, from an ex ante perspective my chance of NOT being picked 14 years in a row was, I calculate, just over 7%. I know people who’ve been called three times in that period, which the odds tables tell me would be around the expected mean, but I was the seven-percenter and never got called. Well, my luck (good or bad) changed this week: I have just received my first-ever jury summons.

It used to be that being a lawyer made you ineligible to serve in most parts of the country. That rule is pretty much defunct now, perhaps because there are so many lawyers it shrank the potential jury pool too much, perhaps because the bar is no longer a small club where everyone knows everyone and almost every lawyer would have to be excused anyway.

Like most lawyers, I actually find the idea of serving on a jury somewhat appealing: it’s a way of seeing the legal system from a perspective that is usually inaccessible to us. On the other hand, if I’m not going to be selected, I don’t find the idea of going down to the court house and sitting around all day in some horrible room with a TV blaring to be at all attractive. And realistically, that’s the most likely outcome: as a general rule, lawyers don’t especially want lawyers on their juries. On the other hand, I know of at least two colleagues who have sat on juries, so it’s by no means out of the question.

The date they picked for me is on a day I teach, so I’m going to apply for a postponement to May, one which the form suggests is routinely granted. Miami-Dade has a one-day, one-trial rule: you turn up once and either you are picked on that day or you don’t have to come back until your name comes up again. I’ll report back after it’s all over.

An American In Paris

My father is having his 80th birthday today, and has taken himself and my mother off to Paris to celebrate, which seems like a pretty good idea (except that the rest of us have to stay back here and work or go to school).

I hope you have better things to do today than read this, but just in case, Joyeux anniversaire dad!

A Day In the Life

Got up at 6:15. Our carpool leaves promptly at seven AM and I’m driving today. Traffic seemed a little lighter than usual. I have this hypothesis that early traffic is lighter on overcast days, because some people count on the sun to wake them up, and on rare shady mornings they oversleep. But it’s sunny today. Maybe I have to alter hypothesis to include cold days — when it’s cold (under 60) people maybe huddle under the covers a bit longer. The radio said it was about 55 when I woke up, which counts as arctic in these parts.

Home, pick up kid #2, make the shorter run to his school. After finishing the school run by 8:05 I have a little time to glance at the papers and review a bit of the reading for this morning’s seminar.

From 9 to 11 I (co)teach our seminar on law and games. We’ve been reading about identity and the presentation of self and about the ways in which the gaming experience might effect players. The students in the seminar are great, as usual, and we have a very spirited discussion of the reading, notably Tracy Spaight’s article “Who Killed Miss Norway” (which appears in Jack M. Balkin & Beth Simone Noveck eds., The State of Play: Law Games and Virtual Worlds (2006)) and Nick Yee, The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play, 1 Games and Culture 68-71 (2006). We don’t get through them all; next time we’ll take up, among others, the other two articles I liked most from this batch, Gunther Teubner, Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law, 33 J. L & Soc 497 (2006), and Sherry Turkle, Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self, in Handbook of Mobile Communications and Social Change, James Katz (ed.) (forthcoming). Of these, the Teubner article is the most difficult; there’s a lot going on there, much to think about, although I wonder if it coheres.

Then for almost an hour I meet with a student who has come by to find out why he did relatively poorly on his final. It always amazes me how rarely students do this. And to the extent that people do look at their exams, it’s more likely to be a B+ that wants As than a C or C+. And you almost never hear from the D’s. How are you going to improve if you don’t look for feedback? Admittedly, it can be a painful experience for both sides: the student must revisit something that is not a happy-making event, and the prof has to be the bearer of unwelcome news, which typically includes several of: you missed this issue, you misread that question, you left out these cases, you recited facts but didn’t give any analysis, I couldn’t figure out what you were saying here, and on we go. I commonly recommend Fischl & Paul’s Getting to Maybe for several of these problems, but it’s not a panacea. On his way out, meaning I think to be kind, he asks if I might have gone to school with his father, who also went to Yale college. Turns out that the father graduated in 1965 — when I was in kindergarten. It seems that, at least to this user, my presentation of self in real life adds about twenty years…

At noon I go up to the faculty conference room where I’m giving a talk to faculty and staff on various tricks you can use to get more out of your computer. Most of it is about firefox plugins. It’s amazing how much more efficient one can be with a few of the right tools. Talk starts at 12:30, finishes before 2:00.

Back to the office. Read some email. Nothing urgent, for a change. Work on putting together a list of possible visitors for next year. Although it’s still unclear how many new people we’ll actually hire next year, it’s certain we’ll be under full strength due to leaves and such so we have the luxury of thinking about who would be interesting and fun to have around — subject to the very real constraint that it would be a lot better if they happened to to teach in the areas we have needs. I’m chairing the committee that has to come up with names, which is fun but not as easy as it sounds. (If you are a law prof reading this and fancy a semester in a tropical paradise, please do get in touch ASAP.)

Home, where attempts to work are undercut by the need to try to ensure that homework gets done. Today’s first distraction is the need to celebrate the winning of a science prize by the homework-avoider-in-chief. The second, later distraction, is a long fruitless hunt for a lost notebook. (It is later found at bedtime.) Eventually I give in and glance at the New Yorker.

Then it’s time to prepare for tomorrow’s administrative law class. I’ll be finishing a somewhat whirlwind introduction to formal adjudication under the federal APA, subject of course to the Due Process clause of the Constitution. The class is at 8am, and the students who trek out to it three times a week seem like a serious bunch — but I also get the sense that several of them feel pretty lost. Now, in one sense that’s actually a good thing: this is a confusing subject, one composed of a series of interlocking parts that only start to make sense once you’ve seen them all. Thinking that you get it at this early stage would most likely be the result of a false sense of security, or shallow reading. Then again, it’s not much fun to be confused, nor is it all that much fun to be the source of confusion. So in addition to re-reading the cases and working in summaries of the latest decisions, I try to tweak my recycled notes from last year to include more explanation, but that is constrained by the need to stay on schedule and the fact that the courts keep on deciding new cases which refine rather than replace the old rules. The early morning hour has resulted in a dynamic in which students are not asking enough questions. I’m going to have do something about this. The first step is setting up panels of people to be called on — I don’t much care for cold-calling after the first year. But it might even come to that in the end.

End the working part of the evening with another bout of administration, compiling a list of possible names for an academic center I’ve been helping to organize. It’s hard to come up with something that accurately describes it, has a catchy acronym, hasn’t been used elsewhere, and works in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Finish with some time reading blogs, email, and writing this.

Not exactly a typical day, especially in that I gave a talk and didn’t do any academic writing, but that was today.

Roof!

Back in October 2005, we had ourselves a little hurricane called Wilma. It beat up my neighborhood quite a bit, although of course what we suffered was nothing like the damage to people in New Orleans and Texas under Katrina.

It turned out that we lost a large number of roof tiles in Wilma, a galling loss as the roof itself was only a few months old. It also turned out that we were not alone -- the whole county seemed to have damaged roofs. And then it turned out that there was a shortage of roofers. And of roof tiles. And in due course I discovered that we had the rarest roof tiles in South Florida -- indeed, it seemed in all of America. They're barrel tiles called Altusa Fume, and they come from Venezuela, and it seems for a while there was some problem getting Venezuelan goods into the USA. So no roof tiles. Or no roof tiles unless you wanted to pay for a bale of them even though you only needed under a hundred.

Every so often I'd call the roofing company and get various sorts of promises, all of which involved calling me back at some point and all of which were religiously broken. At first I understood - they were fixing roofs with leaks, not just those with damaged tiles (which in addition to being ugly increase the chances of further damage and leaks in the next storm). We went through an entire hurricane season with the broken tiles -- but fortunately no hurricanes. Meanwhile the contractors were all off doing new roofs which, I gather, pay better than repairs.

But now I'm here to tell you that the age of miracles is still upon us (or is it perhaps an age of new construction downturn?) : a roofing contract appeared in the mail last week. I sent it back, and yesterday we had a real live roofer putting real new tiles on my roof.

And now it's all fixed.

Happy Thanksgiving

Expect little or no blogging this extended vacation weekend as I try to sleep away this bug that just won't quit...

Scholarly Agenda 2.0

I recently applied for something which required an up to 500-word statement summarizing past, present and future scholarship. The trouble is, I HATE writing self-assessments. I had to write one for my tenure file years ago and found it excruciating -- and it took me over a week. This time it was a little easier -- if only because I only had 24 hours to do it before the deadline.

Here's what I wrote. I think it's true, although there's a lot more I would have said if I'd had more words to play with:

I started teaching expecting to be a somewhat traditional scholar of US administrative law. Although I still teach the course with great pleasure, and occasionally write in the core of that subject, my interests soon grew to include the rapidly developing issues created by advances in computer technology and especially the Internet. Today, while still at heart a public lawyer, I find myself to be one with a particular interest in governance problems concerning information, and information systems. These complementary interests underlie the majority of my work to date, and are themes in my current and future projects.

Much of my recent work has concerned governance issues raised by information technology. This includes governance of the Internet by its users, self-governance by means of new technology, governance of online activities (including e-commerce) by the operation of private law, and especially regulatory initiatives by public bodies, both national and trans-national, that seek a role in either Internet regulation (e.g. the domain name system, which is the Internet's plumbing) or seek to regulate the things that people do online. My background in administrative law has proved surprisingly useful for this, as it gives one a grounding in standards of fairness and regularity against which to measure these new and ever-evolving regulatory processes. It has also made me conscious of the need for equivalent rules and norms (and avenues for individual redress) to constrain and govern new trans-national rulemaking processes, particularly those designed as public/private hybrids.

The regulation of information technology is perhaps just a special case of the regulation of information. I continue to write about privacy, particularly the ways in which new technologies may threaten or enhance both the individual's and the state's control of information. Thus, current projects include work on privacy in public places, and a forthcoming project in which I hope to set out an optimal set of rules for as privacy-friendly an ID card system as one could hope for in the United States. Ideally, the next stage in this project would be to broaden it to include a comparative dimension.

The ways in which we use information and information technologies also have implications for the smooth functioning, and perhaps even the nature, of self-government, both on the small-scale of affinity groups, clubs and on the larger scales of individual participation in national and even trans-national lawmaking. NGOs are using the Internet to organize their participation in matters ranging from UN sponsored conferences to trade negotiations. Localities are experimenting with a range of devices that allow citizens more direct participation in what were formerly bureaucratic and administrative decision-making. These are, potentially, tools for a new type of self-governance, and as they mature they may require not just amendments to our ideas of how administrative law works, but to more fundamental concepts about how we organize democracy. I intend to take part in those debates, both as a participant, and as a scholar.

17000Hz

They say you stop hearing high-pitched noises as you age.

I top out at 17,000 Hz on this test of high-pitched hearing. Encouragingly, my nine-year-old tops out at the same level. Then again, this may explain why he never seems to hear me...

[Slight caveat: it's possible my soundcard and/or speakers max out before 18000 Hz, which could also explain why we don't hear anything on the high ones.]

The Home Network Takes a Dive

The home network's access to the outside world croaked this week.

Monday saw intermittent failures ... resulting in hours of fruitless debugging on my part ... followed eventually by total DSL or router collapse on Thursday (it's not the switches -- the computers see each other just fine). After plugging a laptop right into the modem failed to get a signal, even though all the right lights on the modem were green, Bellsouth decided that the problem was my aged Alcatel 1000 modem, and offered to send me a replacement Westell if I'd just agree to keep paying them for another year. Yeah, like any addict makes plans to cut off his supply...

The "new" modem came late Friday. It's a tiny slip of a thing compared the Alcatel behemoth. Only it wasn't a new modem, it's refurbished. And there's still no signal -- only this time the DSL light blinks instead of giving the steady green one requires. Another call to BellSouth revealed that they failed to ship me a line filter which it seems that a Westell requires to operate (but the Alcatel 1000 does not). So, more promises to send what's needed -- although not until late Tuesday.

As a result, posting may be light for the next couple of days as the kids are home and I'm not going into the office much.

So, if you are trying to reach me by email, please be patient. Or just pick up the phone?

An American July 4th

My holiday, which began yesterday, has not started well. The last of the last-minute pre-departure things on my list was to bring in the wooden rocking bench that usually sits on my front porch. I have to bring it in because it could be a danger in the event of a hurricane while we are away. So I remove the cushion on the rocker, and reveal ... a whole lot of bugs. It's termite swarming season in Florida, and I have a sick suspicion I know what these are. So I call the bug people, and ... they're closed for July 4. But I'm not taking that in the house.

But it gets worse.

We were scheduled to leave Miami on American airlines on a flight to Boston with a tight but tolerable connection to a flight to Manchester, UK.

A few minutes after the Miami flight was due to start boarding, the gate staff announced that there was an air traffic hold in Boston and that we'd be so late there was no point boarding. Probably very late. There, I thought, went the connection. But a minute later they countermanded that and said we should board after all -- the pilot had accepted an alternate route.

So we boarded, pushed back a little late, the pilot came on and said that the new route would delay us about 20 minutes, we'd be 40 minutes late in all. That meant a sprint in the airport, but it was do-able. And we did it.

We boarded the second flight, taxied out to the runway....and the pilot came on to say there was a problem with the temperature sensor on the engine, and we'd have to go back for repairs. So we limped back to the gate. And waited for the ground crew. Then waited for them to report.

And after an hour or so, they did: we weren't going anywhere. So we all exited into the terminal. By now it was well after 9pm, so Boston airport was basically closed. There were no open concessions. There were no more flights out of Boston to anywhere. There were only a few gate staff there to rebook and hotel us all. And I'm traveling with two tired (but so far well-behaved) kids.

By about 11pm I had made it to the head of the line. And I'd started only about a third of the way into it. I'd had the sense to book new seats by phone, so I'd gotten three of the last seats on July 5th's flight to Manchester -- 24 hours later. We got our hotel vouchers, $45 in meals which were supposed to feed three people for three meals. And we went to claim our luggage, which had been offloaded from the plane.

Two of our bags were there. One was not. No explanation as to why. No one authorized to go hunting for the missing bag (mine, not the kids). So after a dispiriting search and queuing for surly baggage service -- did you know only supervisors are empowered to give you a toothbrush? -- we made it to the airport hotel around midnight. Only be told they only had smoking rooms.

The kids' room wasn't that bad. Mine smelled like the inside of a cigar. I didn't sleep much, and I'm still having nasal flashbacks.

The next morning we go back to the airport to hunt for the missing bag. In due course -- without setting any land speed records -- the day crew admits they might have an idea where in the bowels of the airport it is hiding, and go off to find it. And they do. So now I have to take this bag back to the hotel to join its brethren, and then the kids and I can play tourist in Boston for half a day.

Which we do, and which isn't bad, but would be a lot more fun if any of us had any energy, or if the kids didn't feel they were losing a day with their grandparents. The kids are being great, but it can't be easy for them. I did manage to contact the bug company, and they're going to survey us for termite infestations. They did say that even if there are termites on the bench, those guys won't move to the house any time soon, as they'll have plenty to eat. I guess that's reassuring, in a way.

And now I'm back at the Boston airport, posting this, ready to try again. The folks at check-in assure me it's a different plane, so maybe we'll actually get there this time. If I don't post for a while, that's a sign we made it.

Wordpress Designer Needed

I am involved in a non-profit project that wants to set up a very distinctive wordpress blog.

The ideal theme would have a great and appropriate logo. It would work with a text-rich site (either one-column with something cute to attract notice to a few fixed links and elements or more likely two-column). And it would make extensive use of WordPress 2.0's ability to build a theme customization panel that allows on-the-fly theme customization so we could, for example, have a suite of similar looking blogs with different colors and perhaps type faces. Advice on suitable color combos for the first half dozen variants would also be welcomed. The programming work (installation, plugins) is covered; what's needed is design work by someone used to making themes for WordPress.

Of course, being non-profit, the project's funds are...limited. But not zero.

If any readers have experience in this sort of work, or can recommend someone experienced (and public-spirited when writing bills), please contact me via email.

We Are Not Alone

It seems that other people have domestic debates a lot like ours.

My English Wife Sent Me This

According to a UK government report, entitled "Sex, lies and money. Research reveals finance is the new taboo,"

One third of women are dishonest to their partners about their credit card spending habits (33%) compared to 29% of men admitting not always telling the truth.

Is she trying to tell me something? Or does she suspect?

Life's Little Mysteries

Why did someone from the Czech Lands call my cell phone three times in quick succession this morning while I was teaching, but leave no message? The number doesn't work when I try to call it back...

Wilma Aftermath: Grasping at Straws

FP&L says that 172,300 customers in Miami-Dade still lack power, which makes about 18% of the 956,500 affected by Hurricane Wilma. In other words, 82% of customers in Miami-Dade have their power back.

But we still don’t.

As the Miami Herald reports

In Coral Gables, about a quarter of residents are still using flashlights, candles and generators -- and the percentage has remained the same for three days, said City Manager David Brown.

''The percentages aren't going to change that much anymore because the pockets are so little,'' Brown said. ``When you go and turn on 25 residents, it doesn't change the number on 5,500. Unfortunately, when you've been without power for many days, tempers start to flare, frustrations start to rise.''

FPL Vice President Geisha Williams acknowledged that progress was becoming piecemeal. The work is now down to blown-out transformers and downed wires, especially in small neighborhoods.

''It's slow and it's gritty and it's tough,'' she said.

The good news is that yesterday at about 6pm, an actual FP&L truck parked on my street and actual FP&L employees got out to look at the damage behind the house across the street.

Then they went away.

Wilma Aftermath: Still Waiting

More than three quarters of the residences in Miami-Dade county that lost power during hurricane Wilma had it restored by last night, according to FP&L.

Ours is not among them.

Good News (Sorta)

No, no, not the indictment (full text). It's never good news that our government is run by liars and crooks.

FP&L have advanced their estimate of when I get my power back from Nov. 22 to Nov. 15.

I feel like I should feel more grateful.

Wilma Aftermath: Suspended Animation, Active Worries

We’re fine, but we’re in a sort of suspended animation. There’s power three or fewer blocks in every direction, and even for one or two houses on my street. But the rest of us are left in limbo, watching food and gas supplies dwindle.

FP&L, the local power company, has promised that all those of who live in Miami-Dade north of Kendall Drive (the group I’m in) will have power by ... November 22. Yes, by Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, although there is apparently no shortage of gasoline, there is a very great shortage of gas stations with power. And without power they cannot pump the gasoline. Knowing that our pre-hurricane hoard of gas -- which runs the generator which keeps the fridge going -- was due to run out Wednesday night, I went off in search of gas Wednesday morning. All I found was gas lines. The first one was short, but only because it was a flash crowd; there was in fact no gas being pumped. The second one was ten blocks long. The third was almost as long, and the station had run out but expected a new delivery ‘soon’. The fourth was again ten blocks or more. I gave up and went home. By Wednesday night, an hour before curfew (curfew runs from 8pm to 6am), the line at the closest station was only about fifty cars, and took maybe forty minutes; I got home with minutes to spare. But I got my twenty gallons, and I’m good to go for another three days or so. I expect that by the next time I need gas, there will be a lot more stations open so the lines will be shorter.

A more pressing problem may be food, although risk-averse legal types that we are, we have several days worth of pasta, rice and the like, even after we finish eating the frozen stuff. Most of the local stores are running on generators and selling mostly dry goods at present. It would be nice to find a source of milk and bread, but I can’t complain compared to many. Plus the Miami Herald reports that FP&L will be prioritizing stores starting today, now that they’ve gotten the hospitals and other first responders sorted out. (A longer-run problem may be laundry; but I’m sure there must be a host of machines somewhere in the student dorms.)

The schools claim that they will reopen Monday, and that is the university’s current plan as well. The remaining issues are whether the roads will be sufficiently clear, enough traffic lights will be working to make the journey safe, and especially whether gas supplies will be plentiful enough to allow people to commute.

It also seems as if the weather, which has been unseasonably dry and cool -- the mid-70s -- will revert to normal, starting Friday, and climb to the mid-80s. Plus it will rain a lot, topping up the humidity. So it’s going to get much more unpleasant in the house, and the fridge will have to work harder, making greater demands on the gas supply.

In fact everything is fine, and our discomforts are in the grand scale of things quite minor. But it is surprising how much time coping requires.

Wilma Aftermath: Deja Vu All Over Again

Trees down everywhere. Several side streets blocked by trunks. Most houses in the neighborhood lost at least some roof tiles, but no one near us appears to have major damage. Power has been restored east, west, north and south of us -- but not to the few streets surrounding me.

It was a ferocious storm, and we didn't even get the worst of it -- that was probably in Broward, one county north of us. From about 7am to 10am yesterday, we could every so often hear a tile being ripped off our roof, often ricocheting from the top floor down to the overhanging roof below (and doing more damage). It was all too easy to imagine the roof being peeled off, Hurricane Andrew style, if things got worse. It's very hard to describe the sound of your roof being dismantled by a storm. Something between an angry giant flicking at it, and near-misses by something a bit more powerful than small arms. In retrospect, the house held up fine, but as this was the first serious test of our new roof post-remodeling, during the event we were more than ordinarily stressed out of our minds.

In the bright light of day, our damage is no worse than many other people's (whether, with a brand new roof it should be less is a question I don't know how to answer yet). And the weather is nice and cool today, so we don't have the sweltering problem we had the last time the power was out for days, plus the generator runs longer on a tank of gas since the fridge has less work to do.

I'm writing this from the office - which has power - but don't expect much more from me until things get closer to normal.

Wilma Update

Michael and his family are fine, but they lost power early this morning. So no blogging for now. The phone works: "We're watching the storm go by," Michael tells me. "It's very blustery out there."

Where to Get Your Donuts in Ohio

There are not that many Froomkins in the USA: Indeed, I recall going to an exhibit of a Social Security computer as a kid in the late 70s, where you could run your surname through the system and find out how many SSNs had been issued to people with the same name, and the total was something like 17. (That doesn’t count alternate spellings, of which there are many, for what is basically a transliteration from Russian.)

Over at froomkin.com we’ve collected the information we could about Froomkins ‘round the world, and it’s not a long list.

What are the odds, therefore, that there would be two people named “Michael Froomkin”¹? And that the other one would make the best donuts in Ohio? In 54 varieties?

No one makes creme sticks like the Froomkins, loyal customers insist.

Michael Froomkin, president of the company and son of co-founder Berkeley Froomkin, acknowledges that health concerns have hurt business over the years but he can’t say how much.

“People still like doughnuts,” he observes. “Doughnuts are still a staple breakfast item.”

Plaza Donuts, founded by brothers Irv and Berkeley Froomkin, who operated three Youngstown coal yards, opened its first store in Akron. Two years later Plaza opened its second store in Sharon, Pa., and 1963, the company opened its store in Liberty — still operating today and where its business offices are located. Of the first three stores, it’s the only one still operating. The other four are in Boardman, Girard, Niles and downtown Youngstown; all are supplied from the Liberty bakery.

The business remains a family affair. Irv’s sons, Craig and Howard, serve as vice president and secretary-treasurer, respectively. From time to time, both founders come in to help out, Froomkin says.

¹ OK, technically “Michael” is my middle name, but despite naming me “Andrew” my parents (and everyone else) have called me “Michael” since I was born. Go figure.

I was forced to throw in the “A.” when the nice people at the DC Motor Vehicles Office refused to give me a driver’s license in a name that differed from y birth certificate; then I needed a signature on checks that matched by driver’s license…

And indeed, it seems I’m just “a” Michael Froomkin instead of “the” only one.

Annals of Uncommon Household Accidents

Today an elderly but sizable orange juice can -- part of our hurricane supplies left over from yesteryear -- exploded at 6:20am while we were rushing to get the kids ready for school.

This makes an impressive mess in the cupboard and all over the kitchen floor.

Empowered!

The electricity went back on around 6:45 pm. So far the temperature in the house has dropped about three degrees, down to 88 (31 Celsius). I guess there is a lot of specific heat in all those books we used to line the walls.

I think it may take a couple days for my brain to cool down to a functioning temperature. A good night's sleep would help too.

Hot

Still no power. The house is now thoroughly saturated with heat and humidity. The books are curling. We are drooping. The generator made strange I-think-I'm-gonna-die noises (like before it runs out of gas, but the tank was full) until we gave it a three-hour rest. During which the freezer temperature rose six degrees.

Much of the area has power now, but we're in the middle of a big dead zone running from at least Blue road north of us to US 1 south, and starting at least at 62nd Ave to the west, running to the university to the east. Even the traffic lights, repaired most other places, are dead in this area. Occasionally we see a power truck rolling by, or doing something mysterious and ineffectual on one of the larger streets. The only cheerful note has been a tree trimming crew coming down a street, surely a precursor of the electric crew, right? Right?

In past storms, FP&L has had a pretty nifty system by which you called their computer, and they told you how long it would be before you had power. This time, perhaps due to the size of the damage, they just said "90% of customers will have power by Tuesday; the remainder by Friday." Today's paper said they were going to get more specific, and give us predictions on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Well, if so, the prediction for my neighborhood is grim:

This is Monday's update on restoring power after Hurricane Katrina.

Power in your area will be restored by the end of the day on Friday, or sooner.

This is the most current and complete information available for your area.

Of Envy and Gratitude

Anyone who doubts the idea that perceptions of one’s wealth and well-being are strongly influenced by interpersonal comparative factors need only contemplate the position of someone remaining without electricity while much of the surrounding county’s power is being restored. It is very hot and humid in our house.

On the other hand, I did see a power truck go by a few hours ago.

Then again, one always remembers how much worse it could be. I hope somehow it misses New Orleans. (Steve, we're thinking of you.)

Meanwhile I've relocated temporarily to my nice air-conditioned office in order to write tomorrow's 8am lecture.

Powerless

Like most of Miami-Dade, we got sucker punched by Hurricane Katrina. Several factors combined to make us overconfident: First, the track showed it going far enough north of us so that we'd only get tropical storm force winds ... and we know we can handle that. Second, we had four false alarms last year, each characterized by hysterical warnings to prepare, all of which resulted in us hunkering for naught. Third, and no doubt following from the second, the media played this one very low key. Fourth, having gone through Andrew 14 years ago, a strong category four hurricane, or maybe even a five, the sound of Katrina, a 'mere' category one, just didn't get the panic juices flowing.

It should have.

Katrina went south of the predicted track. The power went out about 8pm on Thursday night. The morning after revealed a scene of devastated vegetation only slightly less than after Andrew. Roads were blocked in every direction. Between here and the law school, for example, about a block and a half, the road is blocked by two gigantic fallen trees. We escaped quite cheaply, losing our favorite frangipani tree. Unfortunately, it landed on the neighbor's car. Fortunately, the fall was broken by an intervening hedge, and the car has at most a scratch.

Caroline and I had a hard time after Andrew, or at least as hard a time as you could have when you hadn't lost your roof. We had arrived in Miami only a few days earlier, had no hurricane supplies, not even a candle, and no idea where to go to get food or ice. The entire neighborhood was without power for two weeks; four lucky homes, of which ours was one, were without for five weeks. At night we would lie exhausted, overheated, by the open window that rarely vouchsafed a breeze but certainly carried the enviable and very loud noises of next door's generator.

It's not as bad this time: we have hurricane glass instead of those beastly metal shutters, plus after we had kids we bought a generator, and consequently we are able to keep our food from spoiling. There's ice. There's a light in the evening. We cook with gas. We can even run (one) fan. And if I manage to post this, we were even able to get the modem and router to wake temporarily.

Florida Power and Light says that 90% of the homes in Miami-Dade lost power. Of them 10% got it back by last night. They predict that 90% of those who lost power will have it back by Tuesday night - still more than 72 hours away - but that the remaining 10% may have to wait as long as Friday. Meanwhile it's unclear when the schools will reopen (the paper suggests it may be as soon as Monday). And if I can get online, I'll find out more about whether I need to get my lecture ready for 8am Monday.

I imagine there won't be much blogging until the power comes back.

Or Even Yesterday?

The first of many senior moments:

Self, for it is he: Yes, lots of cultural references get lost in class. For example when I talk about Nixon, to a good chunk of the class it's as much history as if I were talking of Ulysses S. Grant.

Youthful colleague: I wasn't born yet at the time of the Nixon administration.

Self: Might as well shoot me now.

Youthful colleague (twisting the knife): I wasn't even born in the Ford administration.

Obligatory link to David Bowie, Young Americans.

Incidentally, am I wrong to read significance into the shift from Young Americans to I'm Afraid of Americans?

Thank You Jon!

Jon Weinberg has done a terrific job as a guest blogger (he even fought the spam, which decided to try to flood the blog while I wasn’t looking). But I’m home, so the data/ink (or is that data/electron?) ratio will now go down to its usual level.

I hope to write a bit about my trip soon, but my first priority is to get some sleep. Then shop for food…

A Note From London

As it happens I am in London, spending an evening between planes on my journey homewards. I am watching coverage of the mostly failed bombing attempt today in London on the TV in an airport hotel. That was not the plan.

I had a very much better plan. I had a ticket to see the great Michael Gambon as Falstaff in Henry IV, part II this evening, at the National Theater. And I wasn’t inclined to let a bomb threat campaign stop I think that the terrorists win if you cower at home. Seeing the TV news presenter read a government statement asking people to go on with their daily lives clinched it. Michael Gambon here I come, I thought, as I set out to brave what I imagined were the London crowds. But first I had to get to London from Heathrow.

The problem was that London transport is basically shut down. For a while there, I thought I had a Plan B - I figured out a route from the airport with the help of the excellent London Transport Real-Time Map. The Piccadilly line that takes you from Heathrow to central London was (and is) shut. There is an express train from LHR to Paddington – but given my late start, no obvious way to get from Paddington to the show in time. Surface transport would, I imagine be at a standstill, queues for taxis very long, and it’s a bit far to walk in the time I had available.

So the plan was to eschew the express, take the local train about half way to Ealing, and switch to the central line, which seemed to be working. I went back to the airport, bought a ticket from the vending machine for the London Connection to Ealing Broadway, and descended to the platform. No trains showing on the departures board. A small hand-lettered sign revealed the reason: no trains today beyond Hayes due to “technical issues”. The nice but harassed lady at the station duly refunded my ticket.

It seems even when you don’t want to let yourself be defeated by terrorists, you can still be defeated by British Rail. Then again, it’s probably a mercy. By the time I got back to my hotel, the Central line seemed to have been stopped too.

Phrasebook Greek

One of the things I’ve done to prepare for my trip to Greece is dig out the Greek phrasebook I’ve been storing since my previous trip, almost 20 years ago.

I’d forgotten quite how horrible and useless the Institute for Language Study’s “Vest Pocket Modern Greek” was.

Here are real, honest to goodness, phrases that they provide. While reading these, keep in mind that there are only about ten phrases per page, and the phrase section of the book runs under seventy pages. And they still decided to include these.

• What a fool!
• Alice is less diligent than Barbara.
• The girl with the big brown eyes was elected the queen of the ball.
• My brother-in-law has a new truck.
• I have never gone bankrupt.
• Just continue your work. Don’t look at the camera.
• I appreciate truth.
• What is faith? It is life’s foundation.

You have to wonder what sort of traveler they had in mind. Apparently, one who needs to say, “The beautiful Greek girl didn’t come to see us.”

Why I Write 'Legal Scholarship'

The question is posed:

PrawfsBlawg: Why I Write. (No, Really, Remind Me Again — Why Do I Write?): I want to ask the question: why do we write? This is a surprisingly difficult question on which I’d be curious to hear from my fellow bloggers (or blawgers, or…forget it). Let me limit it to the question, why do we write legal scholarship?

You could say that before I got tenure, I wrote for tenure. And there’s a grain of truth to that; I certainly made it a goal to write so much that the faculty — which claims to hold to a norm that you should not vote against a person unless you have read all their writing — would find voting ‘yes’ to be the lesser of two evils.

But by now I have had tenure for some time, so I don’t really have to write. Failure to write at all would cost me some respect — unless it’s for good cause (say, service to the community or intense involvement in pro bono litigation). That said, law teaching is a surprisingly monastic life. I don’t actually spend much of my day talking to anyone. And Miami is far enough away from other places where people do what I do that getting to them is an Event. And rare. So respect or its lack actually has little implact in my daily life. So that can’t explain why I write several times as much as the uncertain minimum needed to avoid the cold shoulder.

Is it for money? Legal academic writing is unpaid. If a keynote address pays anything over expenses, it’s a memorable payday. It doesn’t happen very often. I once scored in the low four figures for a speech and a paper and thought it the most amazing thing. At the margin, in some years, the Dean has a very tiny amount of discretionary money to throw towards people who he wants to reward, and writing is one thing he says he wants to reward. Although, 102% or even 104% of a salary that is increasingly behind the norms of the trade is still a salary that is falling behind the norms of the trade — and when coupled with increases in health insurance costs, one that may be losing real buying power. So I guess I’m not doing it for money. Or if I am, I’m an idiot.

So why write then? I think it varies. Let’s look at the last five years or so:

++Some articles I wrote because I wanted to understand something, and only writing it down would make it clear.

• ICANN & Anti-Trust , 2003 ILL. L. REV. 1, (with Mark Lemley).

• The Death of Privacy?, 52 STAN L. REV. 1461 (2000).

(Almost everything fell into this category in the early days — I’m not sure if that’s because Internet law was new, or because I was, or both. But my digital signatures and certificates work, and also my crypto work, generally fell in this category. And, my next big project does too…)

++ Many articles I wrote because the idea seemed cool so I wanted to share them, and/or I wanted to work them out on paper to better understand them..

• Virtual Worlds, Real Rules, 1 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 103 (2004) (with Caroline Bradley).

• Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace, 116 HARV. L. REV. 749 (2003).

• Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow’s Economy, in INTERNET PUBLISHING AND BEYOND: THE ECONOMICS OF DIGITAL INFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 6 (Brian Kahin & Hal Varian eds., 2000), (with James Bradford DeLong).

• Semi-Private International Rulemaking: Lessons Learned from the WIPO Domain Name Process, in REGULATING THE GLOBAL INFORMATION SOCIETY 211 (Christopher T. Marsden ed., 2000).

++ Some articles I wrote because I was angry and wanted to fix something.

• ICANN’s UDRP: Its Causes and (Partial) Cures, 67 BROOK. L. REV. 605 (2002).

• Wrong Turn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route Around the APA and the Constitution, 50 DUKE L.J. 17 (2000).

++ I wrote an article because someone attacked me, seriously mis-stating both my arguments and the relevant law.

• Form and Substance in Cyberspace, 6 J. SMALL & EMERGING BUS. L. 93 (2002).

++ Some articles I wrote because someone I like asked me to and/or because it was the price of admission to a conference where I got to meet nice people and learn interesting things…

• When We Say US™, We Mean It!, 41 Hous. L. Rev. 839 (2004).

• Commentary: Time to Hug a Bureaucrat, 35 LOY. U. CHI. L.J. 139 (2003).

• ICANN 2.0: Meet the New Boss, 36 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 1087 (2003).

• Anonymity in the Balance, in DIGITAL ANONYMITY: TENSIONS AND DIMENSIONS (C. Nicoll et al. eds., 2003).

• Internet’s International Regulation: Emergence and Enforcement, in EVOLUTION DES SYSTEMES JURIDIQUE, BIJURIDISM ET COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL / THE EVOLUTION OF LEGAL SYSTEMS, BIJURALISM AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE (Louis Perret & Alain-Francois Bisson eds., 2002).

• The Collision of Trademarks, Domain Names, and Due Process in Cyberspace, 44 COMM. ACM. 91 (2001).

Which motive produces the best articles? That’s perhaps not for me to say.

Lloyd Cutler

Former Clinton Counsel Lloyd Cutler Dies at 87
When I worked for Wilmer, Cutler in London I had the privilege of working for "Lloyd" as he wanted to be called (not that we younguns ever quite did) on a pro-bono matter. Lloyd Cutler had drafted the firm to help him in connection with an international project to advise Czechoslovakia, which was trying to draft a new constitution. (We were too late -- they cut the deal that doomed them to split two days before we made our presentations.) I found a very impressive and decent man, with a dash of the Washington fixer.

The Washington Post quotes its former ombudsman as describing him as "a corporate godfather by day and Sister Theresa by night." Sounds about right.

Lloyd Cutler worked on many good causes, and as one of the US's equivalent of the 'great and the good' performed many public services. His greatest achievement may be the institution he left behind. I don't know whether it's still as true today, but the Wilmer, Cutler I worked in was an impressive and highly decent place, a Washington institution, a litigation powerhouse at once intellectual and moral, with an intense commitment to public service. Not many firms manage that. Not many people can help create something like that -- and then let go at the right time.

I last saw him here in Miami in January 2003, when the National Research Council's CSTB Committee on "Privacy in the Information Age," which he chaired, held a meeting here. He was older, and moved less surely, but the fire (and the growl) was still there, undiminished.

Happy Passover

Happy Passover to all!

Email Issues (Tempory)

For what seem good and sufficient reasons, my normal email account at UM will be down for the next couple of days, starting immediately. In theory everything will forward to gmail, but my experience is that this never works right, plus gmail randomly flags real mail as spam (and piles of spam as real mail). And gmail feels so slow compared to PINE.

So if you really want me to get your email between right now and Monday, don’t send it to my university address, send it to the address described cryptically in a form I hope foils spammers.

Visual Travel Records (2)

And also via Ed Bott, here’s the world version via the visited countries project:

PS. Several other cool-looking projects also from Douwe Osinga.

Visual Travel Records

Thanks to a trackback from Ed Bott, here is a visual presentation of the same data as in the last post:

Have I Really Never Been to Ohio?

As far as I can recall, I’ve never been to Ohio. Somehow, that seems like a strange gap.

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

Of the places I’ve lived in the USA, my favorites are easily Chicago and Washington, D.C., although I also had a very good time in Boulder, and New Haven wasn’t that bad either. And if the circumstances were different I suspect I’d like Northern California a lot better next time. I have somewhat mixed feelings about South Florida: there’s lots to like, not least the intellectual strength of the Miami faculty, but there’s stuff not to like too. For one thing, it’s a long plane ride from all the other places I like.

That's A New One

I’ve been called many, many things in my life, but “whimsically surnamed”? That’s new.

My. Goodness.

One of my pronounced character traits, some might call them obsessions but what do they know, is a certain devotion to comparison shopping. It started with computer equipment, even involving a two-year subscription to Computer Shopper in its big fat heyday, but now extends to quality and price comparisons when buying pretty much anything other than dinner for two that costs more than about $50. One of my wife’s few imperfections is making fun of this noble devotion to social wealth maximization in which I do my bit to ensure that we have the toughest most competitive market for everyone’s enjoyment.

I can sort of understand how this predilection might have seemed mildly annoying in days of yore: trooping to stores to look for models that were randomly in stock, perusing out-of-date Consumer Reports for reports that proved to be on models no longer sold, well, it took time, and sometimes we needed it now. Here as elsewhere, however, the Internet changes everything. Comparison shopping online is much efficient, although no faster since if the ease of information acquisition increases geometrically, the amount of information (and mis-information) increases exponentially. So it still takes a little while. But it’s more fun. And I can do it late at night.

All of which is prompted by the observation that the vacuum cleaner is dying.

So as I’m starting up another round of happy hunting, I find this description of a vacuum cleaner, yes a vacuum cleaner, that kinda makes you want to run out and try one, and kinda makes you want to hide under the bed:

My. Goodness.

I am not the world’s best housekeeper. My roommate graciously lent me his Eureka so that I could deal with a few trouble spots in my part of the house, the most significant of which was a green area rug that had never been vacuumed. I have a cat that likes to spend a lot of time on that rug, so I had forgotten that it was originally green and not a muddy greyish color.

I plugged in the vacuum, puzzled over it for a bit, mashed the handle release, and turned it on.

The monster surged to life and immediately began pulling me across the rug. I should probably mention that I had unwisely opted to put this rug on a hardwood floor with no backing, so it wasn’t long before the vacuum was dragging me and the rug around the floor. Don’t ask me how it did it; maybe it was using The Force ™. All I know is that this thing wouldn’t stop. I finally managed to pin the rug in a corner and drag the cleaner across it. The vacuum growled in what I can only hope was anticipation, and with each pass of its mighty brushes the color and majesty of the original rug (purchased for $20 from a guy selling them out of the back of a van four years ago) came to light.

When the vacuum stopped dragging me over the rug and I finally managed to shut the beast down, I was aquiver with awe (or maybe it was fatigue - the monster’s a heavy one). I could look down and see, for the first time in years, the rich emerald tones of my cheap geometric carpet, long hidden under a protective layer of cat hair and tracked-in leaves from my front yard.

My roommate had not lent me a mere vacuum cleaner. He had given me Excalibur.

Problem is, the darn thing weighs 21 lbs, and we’re used to a much lighter canister model. And with the addition to the house, we now have stairs. Plus we have wood floors, tile, and area rugs. This monster sounds as if it might swallow the lighter rugs whole…

EFF Names Advisory Board

I’ve joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s first Advisory Board. There are some amazing people in the group—it’s flattering to be in such good company. My only worry is that California is a long way away…I think I’ll be doing a lot of phone conferences alas. Media coverage at The Register (blush). Full text of EFF’s press release below.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is proud to announce the formation of its first Advisory Board, a group of legal and technical experts who will assist in shaping long-term strategies and goals for the civil liberties organization. The Advisory Board will meet regularly with EFF staff and Executive Board members to offer guidance and outside perspectives.

“EFF is thrilled to have such wonderful thinkers, activists, and community leaders joining us,” said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. “We look forward to working with them and benefiting from their wisdom.”

Added EFF Executive Board Chairman Brad Templeton, “This is an exciting time in EFF’s history. We’re bigger than we’ve ever been, and we’re able to take on many new cases and issues. I welcome the Advisory Board’s help in shaping what EFF will become as we move forward.”

The Advisory Board brings together a broad range of backgrounds and points of view.

Ed Felten is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and author of the highly respected tech policy blog, “Freedom to Tinker” (www.freedomtotinker.com).

Michael Froomkin is a professor of law at Miami Law School and an expert in Internet law and constitutional law.

Paul Grewal is a partner at Day Casebeer and an expert in high tech law. He is admitted to practice before various federal courts, as well as before the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Jim Griffin is the CEO of Cherry Lane Digital, a company dedicated to the future of music and entertainment delivery. Griffin also founded the Pho list, where thousands of members meet to discuss digital media.

David Hayes is a partner in the Intellectual Property Group at Fenwick & West LLP and is an expert on copyright law and digital media. He has served as counsel for a number of precedent-setting software copyright infringement cases, including Apple v. Microsoft and the Napster case.

Mitch Kapor is one of EFF’s founders as well as the founder of the Lotus Development Corporation. He is also founder and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).

Mark Lemley is a professor at Stanford Law School and is director of the Stanford Center for Law, Science and Technology. He is the author of several books and has testified before Congress and the FTC on patent, antitrust, and constitutional law matters.

Eben Moglen is a professor of law and history at Columbia Law School. He serves as pro bono General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation and co-wrote the GNU licenses with Richard Stallman.

Deirdre Mulligan is an Acting Clinical Professor of Law at the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley. She focuses on the interplay between politics and the Internet and was previously on staff at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Michael Page is a Partner at Keker & Van Nest LLP, where he focuses on intellectual property litigation. He has represented numerous high-profile clients and recently won a California Attorney of the Year award.

Michael Traynor is a partner at Cooley Godward LLP, where he specializes in intellectual property, business, and First Amendment litigation. He is president of the American Law Institute and has argued before the US Supreme Court.

Jim Tyre is an attorney and EFF fellow who has represented free speech interests for more than 20 years. He is a founder of The Censorware Project, which provides public information about censorware products.

If You Have To Think That Hard Maybe You're Not Doing It Right

Yet another reason I’m glad I’m happily married: I have no part, or even interest, in this debate.

Today's Discovery

Universities don’t cut your nominal pay. They just raise the cost of health insurance.

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (III)

We’ve been having some substantial work done on our house, which means that between periods of frustrating inactivity it is overrun by armies of sub-contracted workers. Last week it was painters.

The sign gets a reaction from these transient visitors. By and large the sub-contracting bosses are not very pro-Kerry, although at least around us they profess to not be very pro-Bush either. And our general contractor says he may vote for Nader, or may stay home. At first I thought he was saying that to tease us, now I think he means it.

Several of the workers’ cars have Kerry stickers.

The head painter, I’ll call him ‘Ernesto’, mentioned in imperfect English that he’d seen our Kerry-Edwards sign. Ernesto told us with quiet pride that this was going to be his first chance to vote here since immigrating from Honduras.

His first US vote ever would be cast for Kerry, Ernesto said. ‘Bush has not been good,’ he explained.

A few days later, Ernesto waved a bunch of Kerry-Edwards signs from the back of his truck: all his friends are getting them.

London Theater Update

It’s been slim pickings at TKTS, maybe because I’ve been showing up too early. Show up at or before 10am opening you don’t have to wait very long, but there’s less choice I suspect than if I showed up at noon and queued a long time. I would have loved to see the new David Hare play, but it’s not on while I’m in town.

So last night I saw Jerry Springer: the Opera. I am more of straight theater kind of guy, but I’d read about this and, well, I guess I’m glad I saw it. I’ve only ever seen about five minutes of Springer in some hotel somewhere, and I was fairly disgusted. The show is pretty smart about walking a line between joining in with Springer and condemning him. It revels in his horribleness while at the same time inviting you to revel too while at the same time marking an ironic distance. That’s clever. And uncomfortable. It’s a somewhat well, not raunchy but defiantly rude show. And it’s a real spectacle. The use of the audience as a modern trailer-trash manipulated Greek chorus is clever.

Jerry gets sent to visit hell, but the permanence of his stay is left ambiguous.

I left wondering what on earth Springer himself thought of it.

Apparently he liked it

“I ‘m honored to the point that I realize that I’m the only human being on the planet earth that’s an opera,” Springer says. “There have been others, but they’re dead.”

This evening I saw an RSC production of “Twelfth Night” set in an Indian milieu. It did the play no harm, allowed the addition of nice costumes and some good physical jokes, and thus distracted a little from the play’s utter implausibility. Orisnio was a drip who mostly didn’t speak loud enough. Viola played the role very straight, which mostly was not too good except in her scenes with Olivia, who was generally magnificent…topped only by the Fool who kept stealing the show. On the whole a good production of one of Shakespear’s weakest plays, but not in the same class as the History Boys, or the RSC production of Coriolanus I saw the last time I was in London, which I’m sure is the best Coriolanus I’ll ever see in my life.

Tomorrow it’s back to the National for “A Funny Thing Happened”.

Blogging may be sparse until I get back to the US late on Tuesday. Or, if we go on campus to watch the election returns with the students, maybe not till Wednesday…

Signage Update

Called home yesterday evening (London time) and among other things learned that the ‘Morales’ family (read about them here) now has a Kerry-Edwards sign, bringing our street’s total to four!

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (II)

In Part One I described the first day of our ownership of a Kerry-Edwards sign. In this part two, I report the sign’s untimely demise.

Orcinus reports there have been a number of violent incidents around the country in which people with the temerity to display a Kerry-Edwards sign have suffered for it. My story is much tamer: someone took the sign a day after I put it up.

I called the cops to report a theft, thinking that if this was not a unique event, it would help build a record of it. This being Coral Gables, a cop was dispatched within minutes to investigate the theft of a $5 sign. Unfortunately, we’d been out much of the day, and couldn’t even tell him about what time it likely happened. The cop was very polite. I got the sense he had views about the election and was disciplining himself not to utter them; he was professional enough that when he left I wasn’t even sure which side he was on. (Just in case you are thinking white male Florida stereotyped cop, forget it: this was a trim, no-accent, black man I’d guess in his 30s.) His main advice was that if we got another sign, not to put it on the swale (the strip of city-owned land between the sidewalk and the street), but rather on our property. Material on the swale, he instructed us, can be considered abandoned and thus anyone can take it. (My own opinion is that this rule does not apply to yard signs that are clearly fixed in place, even on the swale, but why believe me, I’m not a member of the Florida Bar. Anyway, it’s the law on the ground that counts.)

So we went to get another sign. This was not easy as there was a national shortage of Kerry-Edwards yard signs. But we got one, put it up, and it’s still there. Unfortunately, the shortage is so acute that the Kerry folks wouldn’t even sell me a spare for me to give to Ms. ‘Morales’ across the street (see part one).

Meanwhile, however, the street has sprouted two other K-E signs … and one Bush sign.

My Ballot Was Delivered

As I’m returning too late next Tuesday to vote, I voted absentee. It’s a very long ballot, with many constitutional amendments (most, but not all, bad ones) and bond issues (hard choices - they lump good projects with bad ones to make several choices very debatable); I predict very long lines at the polls. I paid extra to have the ballot “tracked” when I mailed it, and the USPS gave me tracking number 0302 0980 0000 2813 9838. According to the USPS web site,

Your item was delivered at 12:13 pm on October 26, 2004 in MIAMI, FL 33102.

That doesn’t prove they will count it of course.

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (I)

We live less than a block from campus, only a few blocks from where the first presidential debate was held. So the day before the debate we decided we needed a Kerry-Edwards yard sign. In an earlier post I described how I found the local Kerry-Edwards office. I went there the morning of the debate, and they gave me a yard sign, with the metal mount, saying it was just about the last one, they were going fast. We installed it as soon as we got home. That afternoon, returning from collecting the kids, I saw our neighbor from across the street, whom I’ll call Ms. ‘Morales’.

I should explain about the ‘Morales’ family. Viewed from across the street, they seem to be your typical Coral Gables residents—a very successful Cuban-American couple, a few years older than us, one college-age son. Mr. Morales is an accountant, she’s a not-quite-full-time Realtor.

(I will never forget one of my first encounters with Mr. Morales back in 1992. Having just arrived from London, we moved into our house a few days after Hurricane Andrew, at a time when there was no electricity anywhere in the neighborhood, roads were impassible due to trees down, and everything was in confusion. Our house was basically untouched, but theirs sustained severe damage. Despite this, we were more disoriented than they, in part because we were not used to the heat and humidity, had no clue where anything was, no emergency supplies, not even a candle or flashlight to unpack by when it got cool enough at night to actually move.

Despite their own serious damage, the Moraleses made every effort to be helpful. When the radio started warning about not leaving damaged houses unattended due to the danger of looters, Mr. Morales come over to comfort us. We had nothing to worry about, he said. He had an arsenal in his house, and was keeping watch on things. Any looter came by he was going to shoot him. The idea of an amateur, armed with an arsenal, poised for looters across the street scared me much more than the remote prospect of the looters themselves, though I understood that Mr. Morales meant his remarks to be friendly.)

So anyway, Ms. Morales made polite conversation about the construction on our house (which proceeds, but not fast enough). Then she came to the point. “I noticed you have a new sign on your lawn.” Uh-oh, thought I. She sees it all day out of her window. This isn’t going to be good.

Then she floored me: “Where can I get one?”

It seems the Moraleses, perhaps because of the college (ie draft!) age child, are now virulently anti-Bush. They voted for him in 2000, and boy are they sorry. She is angry about the war in Iraq, Ms. Morales told me—and she looked the way I feel, shaking with anger. And they’re angry about the new rules that restrict travel to Cuba, and limit helping any but the closest relatives still there. They’re very very anti-Bush; they’re voting Kerry.

Of such things are victories made.

(This is the first of at least three stories I plant to tell over the next few days about my Kerry-Edwards sign.)

Next: Someone steals my sign two days after I put it up.

This Explains EVERYTHING

Indiana University study: having children significantly lowers parents’ IQs.

Update: Alas, it’s a spoof.

Email double whammy

Item: the email server at work has not delivered ONE SINGLE email to me in almost 48 hours. Not even spam. There appear to be up to 140,000 queued messages for the faculty sitting on it. The nice man from IT promised on Monday he’d fix me by yesterday. We met today and he explained it would be 48 hours to fix anything and a complete sort-out could take a week.

Item: Gmail, which I am using as a temporary replacement (the interface drives me nuts) decided at some unknown point in the I-hope-recent past that much of my real mail should go to the spam filter, so now I have to search through up to 20413 pages of spam (100 entries per page) looking for the real mail.

Bonus item: I have a cold.

My E-Mail Is Hosed

My email at U.M. is 98% hosed. Random emails get to me quickly—but not many. Other ones get to me a day late. Many seem to bounce; for all I know some vanish. Outgoing mail from my UM account is also delayed or vanishing.

This is, to understate, very frustrating.

And the soonest I can hope for a fix is next week, since the entire IT dept. is doing things for student accounts this week.

If the fix doesn’t come next week, I’m moving my center of email gravity to something private.

Is This What I Have to Look Forward To?

Brad’s eldest is 14 years old, and guest blogs this evening, telling tales (well, a tale) on dad: The Rice Incident (Not Condoleeza).

My eldest is almost 11. Is this what I have to look foward to?

(See also Children Who Blog, although they don’t much these days.)

June 23, 1989

Today is our 15th wedding anniversary. We’ve known each other 20 years, more than half our recalled lives.

According to the Chicago Public Library, for the 15th, if I wanted to follow convention that would require either crystal (traditional) or watches (modern).

Nope. Not want I wanted to get or give.

So much for herd behavior.

Actually, the more I look a the whole list of traditional and so-called modern traditional gifts, the more repulsive (and arbitrary) it seems. “Furniture”? “Silver holloware”? (I had to look it up.)

Where do these silly lists come from anyway? Department stores?

One Obstacle to Using Gmail

The school’s email is working better today, but I’m wary. Very wary.

Gmail seems like one possible solution to my email woes. I was sent an offer to join a few weeks ago, but dithered so long over choosing a screen name that the offer lapsed. Now I’m re-motivated, and Constantin Basturea kindly sent me a URL to activate an account. But now there’s a new problem: I just read the license terms.

If you read the program policies to which assent is required (along with the privacy policy and terms of use), you find in there a representation that I do not think I can make in good conscience. I’m asked to agree that I will not,

Reformat or frame any portion of the web pages that are part of the Gmail Service

The trouble is, like everyone else I would plan to view my gmail through a browser. Sometimes it’s in a small window. Sometimes it shows text only and no graphics, sometimes all sorts of odd things happent to my desktop, some of them even intentional. Sometimes I have small text, sometimes bigger. And let’s not even talk about the ad blocker…

If this were a prohibition on publishing Gmail content to others in a transformed form, that might be less of a problem, although you have to wonder what this means if I forward the text of an email—do I have to include the ads? What if I only quote a paragraph in a paper I’m writing? But the text quoted above reads as a limit on how I display it to myself, and one which it may be impossible for me to comply with since all browsers “reformat” web pages according to my and the programmer’s instructions.

I would communicate this concern directly to Gmail, indeed in further correspondence no-good-deed-goes-unpunished Constantin Basturea even gave me a URL to use to submit the query…but it requires you have a gmail account to write to them.

So If I Don't Answer, Call Me

My e-mail account at work, to which all other email is funneled, is very seriously messed up.

Three facts:

1. A student tells me she’s been ‘e-mailing me all semester’ and justifiably complains that I didn’t answer. I try to answer student email as top priority, but have no recollection of any of the email. Nor is any of it in my extensive saved mail file.

2. An invitation to a major conference I’d really like to go to was e-mailed to me several weeks ago, I never got it, and they assumed I was not interested. I heard about it by accident yesterday.

3. Today, email both to and from me is taking random numbers of extra hours to turn up, sometimes in double digits. If it does turn up.

Some Observations:

● Numbers one and two may be due to my roll-your-own procmail spam filters. But I’m getting well over a thousand spams a day and have to do something. I’ve asked the law school to upgrade the Unix box to a version of Perl that’s less than four years old so I can install something like Spam Assassin, and they are working on it. No ETA, and if experience is any guide they’ll roll it out about a week before (or after) it’s obsolete.

Received: from spitfire.law.miami.edu (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by spitfire.law.miami.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id D9F065C7118
for ; Wed, 16 Jun 2004 08:01:02 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from smarty.dreamhost.com (smarty.dreamhost.com [66.33.216.24])
by spitfire.law.miami.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB0005CA84D
for ; Tue, 15 Jun 2004 21:48:43 -0400 (EDT)

● I may need to find a new, commercial email host or change to gmail.

● WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN MISSING?????

● And last but not least, how come no one picks up the phone anymore if e-mail isn’t being answered?