How is it already the end of December? On a personal note, I am glad to say that I met my major goals for this year– it sucked less than 2005. And that applies to blogging, as well. While I’m not winning any awards over here, I managed to get name-dropped in the NY Times, which at least gave me something to talk about at my high school reunion. That was only one of a few interesting posts. Here are the topics I discussed and some of the best posts:

Communications Law Issues

Indecency Regulation

Some of these include more than superficial analysis. A rarity for this blog.

• Senate Indecency Hearings Part 1, part 2 (1/19, 1/22)
• The Indecency Standard (3/24)
• The Profanity Standard(3/24)
• Are Indecency Regulations Obsolete? (3/28)
• Chilling Effects from Broadcast Indecency Regulations? (3/28)
• Indecency Update (6/14)

Internet Discrimination and Network Neutrality Regulation

• Some links on network neutrality (4/4)
• Three Things About Network Neutrality (4/17)
• Save the Internet (4/23)
• Why Oppose Net Neutrality? (4/27)
• Neutral Planet (5/3)
• Your Neutralness (5/4)
• Broadband Here and There (5/16)
• Neutrality in the News (5/31)
• A series of tubes: the song: the story (7/13)
• Neutral Policy (7/26)
• Helping or hurting your cause? (8/1)
• PBS looks at neutrality (10/11)
• Internet access and monopoly power (11/30)

Copyright

• Copyright Fraud and Misuse (7/17)
• Baseball stats in the fact-based community (8/10)
• Answer: B. Copyright Infringement (8/25)
• Everything Old is New Again, in Bb (8/30)
• Calling Elvis’s Ringtone (which features the best case summary EVAR!) (10/17)

• Fair Use

  • House Fair Use Hearings (3/30)
  • Satisfying the 21st Century Consumer (4/3)
  • Thoughts on Fair Use (5/4)
  • DRM and Copyright’s fuzzy bounds(6/28)
  • Clean Flicks (7/12)
  • YouTubing (7/12)

• Copyright and Search Engines

• Perfect 10 v. Google (2/27)
• Caching and Copyright(4/24)

Information Literacy

• The Problem with Wikipedia (4/19)
• Wikiality (8/2)
• Long Tail, Decline of Filters, Information Literacy (8/9)

Trademark and Reality TV

Did any other site on the web have more comprehensive coverage of the Supernova trademark lawsuit? If not, I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of.

• Reality TV and the Law (7/26)
• Like two stars colliding… in a courtroom (9/13)
• Unfortunately, the lawsuit is more entertaining than the band (9/20)

Miscellany

• Trends: IP Disciplines (6/15)
• Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars in Hoboken (8/8)
• Great headline, lame post: Weezer to Bud: Say It Ain’t So (10/5)
• Is Apple’s success causing labels to go DRM-free? (12/8)

Virtual Worlds

I’m late to the party on the property and virtual worlds party, but it’s an interesting topic:

• Second Life (10/3)
  Let’s Go: Virtual Worlds (10/16)
• Copyright infringement and the collapse of virtual economies (11/16)

What’s Next?

So, what’s on the horizon for next year? My goal is to integrate blogging and music better along with my professional life. I’m not yet quite sure how that plays out on this blog or in my life. As I intended to do last year, but managed only in unrealized fits and starts, I suspect that it involves taking these topics beyond the blog, probably by writing scholarly articles intended for a real publication or participating better in real life activities here in the city (particularly as far as teaching information literacy issues). The problem, of course, is doing it in a way that doesn’t result in scattering myself even thinner across more unrelated activities.

The rumors of this blog’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. It’s just pining for the fjords.
Instead of posting Linky Links, I’ve been playing around with del.icio.us for now.

Why has this blog sucked more than usual lately? A few reasons. Mainly, getting back into searching for a job after the bar exam redux is difficult. I realized that I turned a year older and am much less of an adult than I thought I’d be at this point in my life.
I recorded a podcast about the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Orphan Works and then realized that everything I said was incomprehensible, because I had been using a bad microphone cable. Oops.
But also, because I have been working on a few different nascent web and law projects. In addition to a lot of time getting reacquainted with Movable Type, I have a legal pad full of outlines and notes for writing a book version of this site, with everything that the blog lacks– organization, a thesis and structure. Not necessarily groundbreaking, but it could be mildly interesting.
On with the show and out with the programming notes

Mar. 15 (next Monday), I’m sitting in with Hieronymus Bosch on saxophone and keys. Come by and enjoy some rock and mixed with a little bit of roll. 9:45 pm at Continental (25 3rd Ave.). There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but this is a free show– there is NO cover charge.
Other upcoming gigs I will be playing with them are Saturday Apr. 3 at Galapagos (7pm) and Friday Apr. 9 at Luna Lounge (9:30 pm). The Luna Lounge show is also free.
Mar. 16 (Tuesday), The Walk-Ons are playing at Acme Underground (7 pm).
Mar. 23 (Tuesday), Lawrence Lessig on Free Culture: Creativity and Its Enemies at the 92nd St. Y (8:15 pm).
Apr. 12 (Monday), The Mets home opener at Shea. This may be the last time the Mets are in contention.

Where did 2003 go? It seems like just yesterday was the middle of the summer, and now we’re on the doorstep of 2004. While I sit around and wait for OS X 10.3 (Panther) to finish installing on my laptop, I can revew some of my favorite posts from this past year, in no particular order:
Songs:

• Evidence Hokey Pokey
• Contract for our love

Best open offer:

• Your Logo Here (There are still many opportunites for sponsoring AndrewRaff.com! Right now, I’m looking to fill the Official Summer Employer spot I have open.)

Photos:

• Apples
• A nice day
• Washington, DC
• Blackout

Photos of NY landmarks celebrating notable anniversaries:

• Central Park’s 150th
• Brooklyn Bridge turns 120

Relatively substantive analysis:

• Vote NO on Question 3
• Spam and the Spamming Spammers who Spam Us
• Spam Sucks
• Dollars, Cents & Downloads
• Fun with Jurisdiction Online

Best Movie Criticism:

• One Word Review of The Matrix Revolutions

Best post where I acknowledge that I own Meco’s Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk:

• On the Record

Fun with Numbers:

• There’s one for you, nineteen for me
• Skiing is Safer
• Tuition
• Working hours

Two favorite uncategorized posts:

• Do you want to work with this guy?
• Tenet takes the blame

This year in review isn’t quite as much fun as my 2002 year in review, probably because I posted links off on their own this year and did not include them in this review. Feel free to review the 1466 Linky links I posted since March.
I’ll be back next week. Have a happy new year.

Well, my brief is done, and it’s perhaps the single worst piece of $#@! I’ve ever written. I never got into the zone writing it. (Researching, yes. Writing, no.) Overall, it has no flow. Fortunately, I’ll have another chance to submit a revised version for a grade, but I think this is the version I’ll be arguing for moot court.
In general, I can’t seem to write anything of substance. I started a piece for the return of BRR, which I haven’t done anything with in a couple of weeks. I have some thoughts about Iraq outlined that I’d like to finish while they’re still relevant, but I can’t seem to wrap them into complete and coherent ideas.

If you sent me email this morning (between about 9am and now, 1:10pm) at andrewraff.com, I never got it, due to a change on the server. My email should be working now. It may be time to switch to a different webhost…

At the end of the year, what better way to find something to post than go through and find this year’s greatest hits and trends.
Best titles:

• Dis is where we get bling-bling on da blog, dawg
• The web’s sleazy underbelly and safety turtle
• Greenwich Threatened by rampaging Scientologists
• Attention: Sybwa yanno untsmint saren otclear
• Gr33nSp4n 0wnZ U

Comment of the year:

• But where’s the alcoholic robot?

Most interesting discussion:

• On legal research

Best research:

• Tenafly Eruv
• Official Stuff

Best newspaper article quoting me:

• I’m an other expert

Proof that I am smarter than the average bear:

• Mac users are smarter
• Bow before your super-intelligent musical overlords!

Most interesting thoughts on the music biz:

• Who’s afraid of the big bad web?
• Money for Something

Site of the year:

• Mixerman’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi

Most Fun with studies, surveys and statistics:

• More U.S. homes have outhouses (671,000) than TiVos
• SandwichTrak
• Slicing into a Share of the Deli
• Sports fans and Alcohol
• Procrastination and beer
• British Pub Anthropology
• Suprise: Russians like Beer, too
• Foreigners on Moscow

Best advice:

• Cheney’s Advice?
• How to surf for porn at work

Items most lost in translation

• Engrish
• Lost in translation

Only ten posts reference the Simpsons. I thought I had more. Four posts mention hobbits, dwarfs and midgets. I did link those in the original version of this post that disappeared somewhere during the handoff from NetNewsWire to Movable Type. Oops.

Since the tenative agreement between the MTA and TWU fortunately kept the subways running, exams continued to tick along today. It was mildly surreal leaving the law school after the torts exam to the scene of transit workers marching from MTA headquarters towards the Brooklyn Bridge with at least 5 news helicopters hovering overhead.
Now, only the final stretch looms (3 down and Con law to go.) At this point I am very anxious. I realized that I didn’t get around to addressing some issues in today’s torts fact pattern that I would have liked to and that I didn’t address the ones I did in sufficient detail. I realized that some of my answers for Civ Pro were conclusory and lacked enough explanation. and that I wrote from Crim Law probably lacks cromulency. But I can’t evaluate how much these errors might have affected me. In all these substantive classes (except for Civ Pro), there has been no feedback to date. Furthermore ,in these classes (except for Civ Pro), the entire grade rests on this one exam. These first year grades are then overemphasized when interviewing season rolls around next fall. I may have dug myself into a deep hole and not know it yet. Unlike undergrad, where I could generally tell how I did on a paper, or even the LSATs last year, where I walked out and knew I didn’t do so well, I can’t really evaluate how well I did on these exams. (Speaking of interviewing, I need to get started on finding something to do for this summer, since I have yet to get any non-negative response from my early inquires.)
While doubting whether I am on the way to suceeding in law school, I stopped by the old employer’s holiday party last week and spent some time with people not completely absorbed by exam season. I’ve been wondering if I would have not only better quality of life now than I do if I wasn’t in law school, but if my quality of life will not be noticeably better after law school. I also noticed that there’s a different vibe between the co-workers and the 1L’s, a manifestation of the collective, cooperative ethic rather than latent (and outright) competitiveness.
While it may be too late for other law students this semester, don’t forget that one can use The Simpsons to illustrate principles of tort law. See Bart Gets Hit by a Car (part of Season 2.)

One advantage of not being able to fall asleep is that it frees up time to do things you’re putting off so that you can sleep. For example, putting up my freshly revised, career center approved resume on the web. Get your own law student for summer indentured servitude.