Today's New Blawg

Michael Lowe is a criminal defense attorney in Dallas, TX, and writes Dallas Lawyer. Michael does a good deal of expunction work (see Texas Expunction of Criminal Records):

Upon the petition of a criminal defendant, a court can direct certain law enforcement agencies to destroy all records associated with an arrest and subsequent prosecution. Many times the court will specifically direct law enforcement agencies to destroy jail records, police reports, prosecution reports and court files. In addition, a successful expungement petitioner, can legally deny ever having been arrested for or charged with the criminal offense for which he is receiving the expunction.

This process was a new one on me. Thanks Michael, for the enlightenment, and I hope you keep blogging in connection with your practice.

[Feel free to insert Bush joke of your choice here.]

Another Assault On The Gene Pool

Congratulations!! to Heather at Held In Contempt, proud new mommy-blawger.

(Baby gear with a sense of humor: "Mommy, when I count the sheep do I include the clones?")

Call Your Mother!

Recipe for keeping the kid's grandmothers-to-be happy:

• Take one Mac running OS X and the current versions of iSync and iCal.


• Create an iCal "Birthdays" calendar, with alarms, listing all those occasions the forgetting of which will have you paying in blood for years to come.


• Fold in one Bluetooth enabled phone (make sure it's one with calendar support).


• Sync lightly for 1-2 minutes.

And Voilà! You have a phone that reminds you to call your mother on her birthday (and reminds you to shop, if you set the alarm far enough in advance and/or add a "to do" item).

Caveat: my own mother was appalled at the suggestion I might actually require such a reminder. May my careless indiscretion help you avoid such pitfalls. (Hopefully, the business utility of such a system isn't lost on you either...)

Today's New Blawg

Andis Kaulins is a busy man. He's a lecturer at the University of Trier Law School in Germany, and "the Best in the World – Ever" at decipherment of ancient records. I'm also a fan of his photo/bio pages. Andis writes LawPundit ("Law is a Seamless Web"):

Did you know? The father of "markup languages" Charles F. Goldfarb, was a graduate of Harvard Law School. No wonder the web works. The dynamic field of law, always populated by many gifted multi-talented generalists, is a kind of "living" seamless web. It is a web which continues to expand and grow in the internet age on the World Wide Web (WWW). The increasing number of blogs related to law as a discipline are a part of this development. One court is already using a blog to improve its flow of information. See Rory Perry's Weblog.

Welcome, Andis! (Should you ever be passing through southern California, I'm about to embark on some serious closet cleaning and there are some ancient artifacts that could require your attention.)

Waiving The Broadcast Flag

Please see Donna Wentworth, Cory Doctorow, EFF, and Digital Consumer on the broadcast flag proposal currently pending before the FCC. Then see Senator Ernest F. Hollings' request that the FCC act "absent legislation" to implement the broadcast flag. Then see Leo Laporte's comment, "Even Microsoft is against this one." Then do what comes naturally.