divine angst

If you watch only ONE disaster movie this fall, make sure it’s Locusts!

Via Tom at Inter Alia I see that Google now has a means of allowing you to track all of your searches (as long as you are logged in, which shouldn’t be a problem if you have a Gmail account).

I think this is a really cool feature. I can log in from any computer and retrieve any search I’ve done in the past.

Except for one little problem.

When I’m using Safari and I command-click on a link, it won’t open in a new tab. I can right click and select the “Open Link in New Tab” option, but otherwise, it just loads in the same window. That is mightly sucky, particularly on my laptop, where I don’t always have a mouse plugged in and rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts.

A friend of mine called me last night, just to “check in” since we hadn’t talked for a while. But it only took three or four minutes of conversation for the real reason for the call to come out—she’s planning to apply to law school.

So we talked about the LSAT and commuting and having babies in law school, about career paths and priorities. And it inspired me to write a little advice for the “non-traditional” law student.

First, I’ll clarify that, by “non-traditional,” I mean anyone going to law school to pursue a second career. I think that’s a pretty fair definition. I feel mostly non-traditional because I’ve been working on a particular career path for five years now. My friend is non-traditional because she’s been in her field, doing the same kind of work, for nearly eight years. Stag and CM are non-traditional by this means, too. If you don’t like my definition, fine, then pretend I’m just talking about second-career law students.
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Isn’t this just like the movie Dave? Or, sort of like?

Ah, San Antonio. If this guy gets elected, I’m going to make fun of him every time I go visit my relatives there.

A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin

This is the third book in the series A Song of Fire and Ice. I like these books—the story is interesting, complex, grand—but these books also frustrate me.

Most of my frustration is due to the architecture of the novel. Each chapter tells a part of the story from the perspective of a different character. When the plot is moving quickly and characters are converging, this is a very Good Thing. But when characters are far away, only moving toward a destination or an event, this is annoying. No chapter is long enough to satisfy me, and when it ends, I’m left wanting more of THAT character and not the character forthcoming.

Swords was pretty slow, then, for me, for the first half or so. There’s a lot of traveling going on, a lot of political intrigue without much action. Only in the second half of the book do the storylines start to really come together as characters and plotlines converge. The second half was a fast read for me, and I breezed through it in the Orlando airport and on the two planes we took.

I will recommend this book—or, perhaps I should just recommend the series. Martin has really created something terrific. I just wish his chapters were a little longer, or he tinkered a bit with their order, so the slow parts would flow more readily.