Out And About

Here are Christine Hurt and Dan Gillmor on Frank Quattrone's imminent homecoming.

Culver City's municipal WiFi is blocking activities deemed to be infringement and porn using CopySense. Wow. Subpenas ahoy.

If I were L.A. Times writer Maura Dolan, I'd be pretty seriously ticked off. Here she writes this nice if late-to-the-party story (Blawg Review's Ed. had it on July 18, and Marty emailed the Between Lawyers the day before that) about Allison Margolin and her now famous YouTube video, but does it get any play in the blawgosphere? Not hardly. Why? 'Cause bloggers abhor (1) barriers to their readers' experience (site registration) and (2) link rot (the story's link will self-destruct when it slips behind the Times' archive wall). Or, maybe we just remember the crummy treatment the Times sent Kevin Heller's way.

"Straight Outta Lynwood:" Here's MP3.com on Weird Al's latest.

Lookee there, seems Grouper got grabbed.

Remittitur issued today in Apple v. Does.

Do the River feeds pages Doc is enamored of work on regular old smart phones too? Gonna find out. (Right in line with Doc's comments from the latest Gillmor Gang about "invention being the mother of necessity.") [Update:] Oh yeah, they work great. Here're Dave Winer's related post and about page, and a handful of additional mobile pages.

Today's New Blawg

It's not updated very frequently (calls itself a "blog magazine") but there's some great stuff over at the Economics and Intellectual Property blog, including this interview with Hal Abelson on "the responsibility that universities have to create, preserve and disseminate knowledge in the face of challenges from technology and increasingly stringent intellectual property laws."

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John Paczkowski: "Reason for leaving last job: Violated the privacy of 600,000 company customers."

Disruptions 2006 is called "Convergence 2.0;" agenda.

From the silver lining department, here's Joe Gratz,
OLGA Shut Down. Again.: "It was my outrage at this apparent injustice, in part, that led me to start learning about copyright law."

And from the Free Sushi department, here's Professor Lessig in Japanese at CNET Japan.

Since The House Is On Fire Let Us Warm Ourselves

If you haven't gotten yourself fired from a big law firm lately, what are you waiting for? In the last month or so, I've:

• Stumbled on the next great diet craze, the Getting Fired Diet™. Unbeatable formula for ridding oneself of the 10 or so pounds everyone's always trying to shed. Dr. Atkins, look out. (oh. yeah.)


• Been pleasantly surprised at all the great leads for new legal business that have been forthcoming (and am mostly just wondering what to do with them).


• Learned that after the initial gut-check, it's emotionally more comfortable to get fired than to quit. Unlike several years ago when I left a small firm at my own instigation, here there's no lingering sensation of remorse about abandoning something (and many someones).


• Learned too that it's harder to talk about getting fired in person than it is to do so on a blog, mostly because it's awkward for the other party to the conversation. Most people treat it like news of a death in the family — downcast eyes, some well-intended mumbling, and (as soon as seems decently possible), a subject change. I've enjoyed those who've offered a grin, high five, or some other form of less lugubrious response.


• Appreciated the time to finally make the "new" home office (which we built in order to make room for Tyler, but which I've never had time to pay attention to since he came along) livable and workable.


• Likewise appreciated the chance to do things like get the TiVos talking to each other and talking to the computer, reconnect the backup/firewire drive, think about putting Google reader on my phone (at this rate the only things I'll use my phone's browser for are Gmail and GReader), and the rest of the kinds of stuff you've been meaning to do if only you had a little extra time.


• Gotten down on my knees in thanks for and worship of Gmail.


• Been mostly thrilled to be free of the too frequently mind-numbing office email noise (but a little surprised to miss it a little, too).


• But above all: been grateful that in a little over a month's time, "Where Mommy go?!?" has been ousted by "Where we gonna go today, Mommy?"

photo by WadeB under Creative Commons