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.

More on More on NENPA awards

As a follow-up to my post last week, More on New England Newspaper & Press Association, the site has been updated. Winners are listed here.

Dept. of big thoughts

On Friday night, the six of us went out to dinner. Mike and Lynn and Adam and Jennie joined Sandra and yours truly.
The official reason for the gathering was a birthday celebration. Jennie's was last week and Lynn's is in the week ahead. The real reason, though, is that Sandra and I couldn't remember the last time that the six of us had a chance to talk at length, undeflected by children or parents or cats or dogs.
For three hours we talked. A surprise thunderstorm flashed and rumbled through town and we kept talking. It was good. We generally do a pretty good job of staying in touch and see each other on holidays. Nevertheless,  a bunch of stories can sink below the noise level of daily living. It takes the question "What's the latest on ...?" for us remember that something reached a de facto conclusion a couple of months ago, but we'd not said so out loud.
So, the stories of projects and work and kids and parents present and gone filled the hours. It was very good.
In 1997, Sandra and I put together a 10-year mission statement for us. We pinned it to a bulletin board in our home office. As we shuffled stuff in the house this past year, we moved that bulletin board and realized that it was time to update the statement. We got a lot of things right through those years, even though almost nothing that we'd came out as planned. We expect a similar result for our new mission.
We told the others about our updated thoughts. Then, at the end of the dinner, with our napkins on the table, we wrapped up this rare time with a brief reflection of our dreams.
All of us have reached a point where our dreams are not for ourselves but for the next generation. And, even in that, our hopes for our (grand)children were not that they'd do certain types of work or achieve certain levels of prosperity or fame, but their characters could flourish.
My mother would say that she was planting winter wheat, that the harvest wouldn't come during her lifetime. This dinner gathering is part of that harvest. It's a good yield, for sure.

Winter doesn't forget us

After several days of near-spring, winter arrived again on harsh winds, spinning snow in sudden squalls.