Work: the great escape

And so the last couple of days have been like this:

• Writing a script that will read an Excel spreadsheet of 400 entries, permute the entries, and run five or so Google queries, all without running afoul of Google itself. (I've not launched the script so I don't know if I'm heading for trouble.) This is for an search engine optimization (SEO) assignment so that we can tell if what we're doing is making things better or worse. 
• Preparing my classroom materials for the intellectual property course that starts this Tuesday. I spent close to a couple of days trying to locate a chart that would show me the major U.S. legislation and court cases associated with copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I found lots of information, but nothing in chart form. I've cobbled together something for the class and will work on it more later in the spring.
• Preparing my material for the third class on social networking. This one is the center of the course, where we explore the our notions of villages or communities and see how social networking is changing those ideas.
• Took a test in real estate law on Wednesday. Did ok. The items I got wrong were mostly the result of not reading the questions carefully.
• Started research on a paper about legal writing. The idea comes from a blog piece I wrote last year, Parallel Eagles: Colorless green citations sleep furiously, and enhanced by Yale Law Journal essay, The Bluebook Blues, by Judge Richard Posner. The basic idea is that much of the work and expense in legal writing is driven by requirements to match arcane rules for references that add little value to content. I'll have more to say about this later.

While I've been immersed in this work, the world has managed to keep on its entropic course without my help. Libya is in revolution, New Zealand is shaken, and Firehoses of Crazy have been turned on again in Washington. I'm glad to have done my part.