Let me join the fray in wishing everyone a Merry Christmas!It was a surprisingly busy semester for me, with job interviews and journal work taking up most of the first half of the semester, and exams (and studying) taking up the latter part. It was a good semester on the whole, but I’m glad to be done.I’m back in Raleigh now. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone over the break and hitting up Mac’s New Years Party!
If you’re at all like me, then YouTube has become a staple for you, not just for video, but for music. Whenever I want to listen to a song that I don’t have, my first stop is YouTube, and there’s almost always some kind of video that has the song (usually a music video). This is great, if not a little heavy duty.
No more. I recently discovered Songza, which is basically a front-end to all the music on YouTube. The interface is much cleaner and there’s no video to distract you! You can even create playlists. The name isn’t my favorite, but at least it’s not SongTube. What can I say? I’m a minimalist and this site caters to my needs.
Rather than explain what I’ve been up to for the past year and some, I’m just going to start afresh and start blogging again. Suffice it to say that my first year of law school was busy, but not too horrible, and this past summer I worked at the Brennan Center’s Democracy Project doing voting rights work (which was awesome).
We’ll see how this goes.
I’m here!
I’ve been here for a week actually. I ended up choosing to go to NYU for law school, so I will be here for at least three years. It was a tough decision, but I’m very happy with this place.
I’m living in a high-rise in Greenwich Village, one block off Washington Square Park. So far, things are great here. The City is everything I expected. There’s so much going on in the Village that I haven’t yet had any occasion to leave (but it’s only been a week). My dorm is a little small, and the bed is horrible, but it’s otherwise a nice place. It’s a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen and bath. I’m finally feeling a little settled, though I still have to go out and get some groceries. I have a glorious view uptown of the Empire State Building from my window.
We started class last Wednesday, as well. I’m very intimidated by all my classmates; each one is extremely accomplished. It’s a very diverse group of people: from all kinds of backgrounds and places. I’m excited to be working with all of them. There are around 450 people in my class. We are split into 4 sections, and I have all my classes with those 110 or so people.
We have to take 4 classes: Contracts, Torts, Civil Procedure, and Lawyering. Contracts has only half of my section in it, and we are split into 4 lawyering groups, so I have 28 people in that class (which is basically a legal reading and writing type of course).
So far the work load is manageable, and the courses are fun. We’re thrown right into things in all cases. It’s difficult to explain: my classes are very intense, but fun, rather than draining. There’s a lot of energy in and outside the classroom, but everyone is laid back enough to take it easy. Classes are still in the early stages though, so we’ll see what things are like in a couple weeks.
My Window:
More pictures to follow.
Some of the hardships I recently faced in the wilderness:
Despite all that, the backpacking trip Ben and I took this weekend was awesome. He can corroborate all that.
We went to Doughton Park, which is a park run by the National Park Service off the Blue Ridge Parkway, at the north end of NC (milepost ~240). We were worried that it might be a disappointing area, but it turned out to be a very lush region that was very representative of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There’s only one place you’re allowed to camp, but there’s enough hiking to make for a good 2-4 day trip. The park adjoins Stone Mountain, as well, so I’m sure the serious backpacker could find even more to do.
Both of us were fairly out of shape, but we did some pretty good hiking in the area, and caught some beautiful views. As with any trip with Ben, most of our conversations involved either calculus or bathroom humor, with a heavy weight towards the latter. Pictures to come.
Also, the night before we went to Doughton, we stopped at Ben’s parents’ mountain house, which was nearby. It’s a pretty nice place. I suggest we all crash it.
Update: I’ve put photos up.
I really love OSX. There are some features that I feel are missing. I was just planning on listing the things I’d like to see. If you see anything here that already exists, please point me to it!
One thing I hear from a lot of people when I complain about Safari in particular is that I should start using Firefox. It supports most of the features I want. I have tried FF as my main browser many times, and I always end up going back to Safari. The interface is so much nicer and cleaner, and the hotkeys work just like the rest of the system. In addition, KHTML’s output is nicer, in my opinion, than Gecko. I’ve tried Camino, but rather than make Gecko wrap in a nice Safari-like interface, it manages to take out the useful features of Firefox and make the Cocoa interface look ugly, in my view.
Leave a note with your own wishes or with notes about the above.
For the past few years, I’ve been using Menalto’s Gallery software to display the photos on my website. After months of struggling with the newest versions to get them to look how I want and have the features I want, I’ve given up. I’m pretty impressed with the interface and features that Flickr has, as well as the API they offer. So I’ve decided to use the FAlbum plugin to Wordpress to display my photos on my site from Flickr.
I haven’t decided what to do with my old gallery. Right now it’s still up, in a general state of disrepair. I’ll probably transfer over a lot of my photos to Flickr slowly, but I’ll also likely still keep the old gallery up.
Falbum is a decent plugin. I made some serious changes to it though. I’ve emailed the developer to try to submit my patches, but he never got back to me. For the curious:
There are a few bugs left in there, and some features I’d like to add. If I were doing it over again, I’d remove a couple features from the plugin, but it seems other want them, so I just worked around a few bugs they introduce. The main bug is that the default flickr query for photos only returns a maximum of 500 photos, so those people with more can run up against pagination and display problems. I’m sure my code is a little buggy too, so let me know if you run across anything nasty.
I was hoping to create a cleaner patch and send it back to the developer. In the meantime, if anyone wants to get the patch, just leave a comment.
Last week, Ben and I took a road trip up to New York City. It was awesome. I wanted to go up to visit the schools — Columbia and NYU — but I’ve also wanted to go up and see Chethan for a while now.
I don’t really have too much to say about the trip that Chethan didn’t already cover. Suffice to say that we had a lot of fun together, and C’s friends seem like a fun bunch. It was great to hang out and just chill, and since none of us was that serious about doing the tourist circuit, we were able to relax and have fun. I mainly enjoy experiencing places as most people would — just walking around the town, riding the subway, eating at the corner pizza place, and so on — so this trip did not disappoint. Make no mistake though, Chethan’s room is tiny, as it most housing in Manhattan.
As for my school visits, I was not disappointed. I spent about a half day at Columbia, toured their beautiful campus, toured around the law school (which is outside the campus), and sat in on a class. The self-tour was a bit limited, and I left feeling the place was a lot smaller that it probably really is. The class discussion was a lot more interesting and animated than at Carolina; the students seemed to take things seriously, but still had time to crack jokes with the prof. No socratic method — people were volunteering answers, for the most part.
I spent a whole day at NYU at an admitted students’ day. They had events planned for us all day. I sat in on another class there and got the same basic outlook as the class at Columbia — the students were interested, and the atmosphere was laid back. I met a lot of potential fellow classmates as well. I probably got a much better view of NYU because it was an organized event, but I really liked the vibe, both of the school, and the Greenwich Village area in general.
Right now I’m leaning towards NYU (the fact that other schools haven’t gotten back to me makes this a lot easier to say…) The general idea I get both from my visits and from talking to people involved in law is that NYU, as the underdog, is seriously committed to continuously improving. That’s not to say that a school like Columbia isn’t top notch, but Columbia has a name and a prestige that has a long Ivy pedigree, and I feel like that leads to a slightly different attitude. That aside, NYU has a focus and a strong reputation for public interest, and that’s the area I’m seriously looking towards. The fact that I loved Greenwich Village doesn’t hurt. Until I send my deposit in though, everything is up in the air.
I’ll post some pictures soon. I didn’t take too many though, so don’t get too excited.
Many of you know that I had some hiccups with the US mail recently — I was expecting a letter in the mail and it never arrived. I spoke to someone on Friday who promised to resend the letter, this time over UPS with 2-day shipping. So I call home today expecting to hear that my package had arrived, and my parents inform me that not only do I have a letter delivered by UPS, but I also have a very similar package from regular US mail. The contents? My original letter, dated March 1.
Classic.
Oh well. I can’t complain too much. I got into NYU — twice.
Update:
So I lied. I went home yesterday and looked the mail myself. The UPS letter, which my parents opened for me, had a copy of the original letter (with a giant COPY stamp on it). The other letter was a different mailing that happened to arrive on the same day. Still. Odd coincidence, but not as good of a story.
Well, it looks like I haven’t written for almost 4 months. Where have I been? I got sidetracked. Also, I took a few trips (one to California, where I visited Martin at Stanford and attended a conference in San Jose, and another trip to Boston, where I visited Mayank and attended a conference with Mark about the GPL at MIT). Most recently, I’ve been focusing on applying to law school.
Writing a personal statement is an excruciating affair. It’s 2 to 3 pages about yourself, and it has to be pretty close to perfect. I had trouble figuring out what to write about, and then once I did I spent another couple weeks of nonstop editing to get it to flow well. Anyway, about $600 later, I’ve sent almost everything in. Now I just have to wait. I’ll hear back in April.
What else have I been up to? Well, a couple of weeks ago, I went to the Emerging Issues Forum. This is a conference run by a group out of NCSU that is chaired by Former Governor Jim Hunt. The Forum is a place to discuss issues of special importance to North Carolina.
This year’s topic was “Financing the Future”, essentially, tax and revenue planning for the future. I decided to go because I thought the list of speakers was amazing: people like Paul Krugman, Bill Richardson, Mark Warner, Steve Forbes, and so on. What I didn’t think about was what the attendees would be like. It was definitely a who’s-who of NC politics and business interests. The talks were very interesting. I took copious notes. I tend to think about these issues on a more national scale, and it was enlightening to hear what people at the local level had to say.
I’ve waited so long to write about it that I don’t have anything really interesting to say, so I’ll just leave it at that.