ndmckinney|net

I’m upset with the folks as Lifehacker. Apparently, I’m not good enough to comment on their stories, so I’ll post it here.

Lifehacker has a story about how to turn your iPod into a backup drive. I suppose they think they’re being clever by using the iPod’s “Enable disk use” feature. Since thousands of iPods are lost or stolen every year, your backup simply becomes an image of all your sensitive documents.

Way to go, Lifehacker. You’re encouraging people to make identity theft easier.

I’ve more or less declared victory in the war on blog spam. Using some nifty filters, I’ve been able to catch automated posts on my site and prevent them from being posted. Like email spam, I’m having a hard time figuring out what the point of it all is.

I have two theories why people write bots to scour the net looking for blogs. The first is pecuniary. If there wasn’t money to be made, I doubt many people would spend the time and effort to write these programs; there certainly would not be the continued battle against filters and other preventive means. The second is for spite. For some reason, there is an entire subset of society that enjoys nothing more than to disrupt normal behavior and functioning. However, given that the links connect to other spam sites, it seems unlikely that disruption is the sole reason for blog spam.

I’m curious about other experiences people have had in dealing with blog spam. Feel free to post. Hopefully, you won’t be caught up in my spam filter.

I’m over half way through my law school experience. This time next year, I’ll have my J.D. and begin preparing for the bar exam. It’s too early to think about the bar, but I can think about a few other things that I’ve learned so far:

• The UCC isn’t that hard to learn, except for Articles 1-9.
• The majority of people I know go to law school for one of four reasons: chicks, money, power, or chicks.
• Divorce lawyers are definitely only in it for the money.
• Lawyers teaching each other ethics is a bit like children making their own dinner the day after Halloween.
• If a judge says he’s using a “sliding scale test”, what he means to say is that he has no idea what he’s doing and is just making up an answer he likes.
• International law is international, but it sure isn’t law.
• First year law students sure like to whine about how hard they’ve got it.

I think next semester should be an interesting experience. European law schools are quite different from American law schools. More importantly, I’m looking forward to getting out of Baltimore for a while.

I received my MPRE results today, and I’ve scored well enough to practice law in any state. This will be useful when I leave Maryland, which does not require any ethical examination prior to becoming admitted to the bar.

My friend Brandon does point out that the passing score is so low that the real purpose for the exam is unclear.

I find a lot of funny yet obvious legal statements through my studies. I suppose this is the proper forum for this sort of thing. Todays OLSD:

“Buyer has two primary obligations in a sale contract under CISG: to pay the price, and to take delivery of the goods. The former duty is the more important of the two.”

Ralph Folsom et al., International Business Transactions § 1.17 (2001), discussing the obligations of a buyer under the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

Maybe it’s not that funny. I’m tired from studying, so everything is funny. Everything except Ziggy comics.