From Abovethelaw (via Lafsky) comes a flyer about a “professional clothing drive” for law school students:

The Duquesne University School of Law is holding a Professional Clothing Drive for Law Students.

We are accepting gently worn professional clothing* for 1st Year Law Students preparing for the Oral Argument Program in the spring and all Law Students preparing for job and internship interviews.

Clothing can be dropped off at the Main Office of the Law School between the hours of 8:30 am and 8:00 pm (Monday through Friday) and 9:00 am to 12:00 pm (On select Saturdays please call for dates). A receipt will be provided for your tax-deductible donation.

* We are accepting business suits for women and men as well as shoes, ties, belts and accessories.

As Elie Mystal at Abovethelaw puts it:

It’s the footnote that kills me. Ties, belts and accessories. You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, are there really law students running around in desperate need of a freaking interview-appropriate handbag? Are there guys who got through four years of college and into a law school without owning a basically acceptable tie? My ties suck, I don’t really want to spend the money on a really nice one, at least not in a world where I need to update all of my Rock Band peripherals. But I go on television with my crap-ass ties. Call it an overdeveloped sense of pride, but I’d be horrified to accept a tie upgrade in a clothing drive.

While I think Mystal’s response is hilarious and worth reading, I have a little bit more sympathy. If you’re already sinking in $150,000 into a law school education, you might not have enough money to spend on nice clothes. I’ve been in a variety of professional settings in my life and I don’t exactly have a dazzling array of suits in my closet. Still, I do agree that the ad raises the question: What the hell were these students doing (in life) until now?

Despite the financial horror that this flyer portends, I’d still like to attend law school some day, but given the current economic climate, I think I chose my current Masters program wisely.

Update: I’m reminded of this conversation I had with Jesse Thorn from Sundance this year:

Some software developer got so tired of repeating the same old arguments to climate change skeptics that he created a Twitter bot to do it for him:

Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it. It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

You can actually follow this bot on Twitter and test it out if you’re so inclined (via Jeff).

One week ago, I announced that I’d be moving all my Twitter content to my blog. There were many reasons for this, but the biggest one was that I wanted to permanently own all the content that I created, rather than surrender it to a third-party (Twitter). In order to drive traffic to my blog, I used TwitterFeed to auto-post a link to every blog post onto my Twitter account. I plan on doing this until my blog gets enough organic traffic where I no longer feel this is necessary (That could take awhile…).

Now that I’ve been doing this for about a week, I have some interesting results to report from my experiment. Here are my main findings:

Fewer posts – Blog posts, even extremely rudimentary ones, take a LOT more time than tweets to produce. Moreover, it’s virtually impossible to create a blog post on the go, whereas with my iPhone, I could easily find an article on the go and send it out to Twitter. As time goes on, I will have to find a balance between which articles require a quick tweet, and which articles deserve the fuller attention of a blog post.

Fewer retweets – Because many of my tweets no longer link directly to the source material, the number of retweets that my tweets receive has plummeted. On any given week, I’d usually have at least one tweet that got a few dozen retweets; not so anymore. I’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done about this, but on a personal level, I’d rather have a few retweets to my own content than a ton of retweets to someone else’s content. Anecdotally, I believe that retweets have very limited ability to drive more follows to my Twitter account, so I don’t know that I’ll miss the retweets too much, but who knows what other consequences losing retweets may have.

Better analytics – Because I have Google Analytics and Site Meter, I can see what people are clicking on, and what content attracts people more. There’s also a much greater capacity for discovery, in that people can click around, check out older posts, etc. This is much less likely on Twitter.

MUCH better comments and responses – People’s comments on my blog posts have been great so far! And when people are not limited to 140 characters, you can really have meaningful interaction and discussion in a way that’s impossible on Twitter. When you have to put a good 5 minutes of thought into what you’re writing, I think the discourse improves.

Miscellaneous – It’s a lot easier to link to blog posts than to tweets, so I’m getting a lot more inbound links via my blog than via Twitter. Moreover, I suspect people think it’s more meaningful when you praise their work in a permanent blog post rather than an ephemeral tweet, so it’s been gratifying to see that in action.

I feel better about myself as a person and a writer – Impossible to quantify, but still true. 

T-Mobile just launched an ad in which they claimed to have the country’s “largest 4G network.”

Cute. One problem, though: T-Mobile’s network is not technically 4G. According to BGR, the International Telecommunication Union has already issued an official definition of 4G: 

In this context, here’s what you need to know: for a service to qualify as 4G, it must deliver peak download speeds of approximately 100Mbps in high-mobility environments (cell phones) and peak download speeds of approximately 1Gbps in low-mobility environments. Current technologies such as WiMAX, LTE and HSPA+ certainly do not meet these criteria.

It’s going to be years before cell phone companies have the capacity for what the ITU has deemed “4G.” So with the holiday marketing season upon us, companies will do anything they can to get an edge, even if it means using the term “4G” in a way that renders it completely meaningless.  TechFlash puts it best by saying that “rather than suggesting its rivals back down from their 4G claims, T-Mobile has decided to join them.” BGR suggests that lawsuits will follow, claiming false advertising, but don’t expect any telecom companies to change course: “Settling will be infinitely cheaper than rebranding. They’ve made their beds.”

Kirby Fields has written a heartwarming essay on his family’s attempt to attend Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity:

There was a point at which I became acclimated to being smack in the middle of 200,000 people. There was a point at which “This is the rally” became “This is the rally.” I can’t pinpoint the moment exactly, but I know it was a result of me relaxing into the experience, like I was settling into an unfamiliar drug. I caught what I could. Kid Rock was announced. This is so Stewart can say he included the right, I thought. I recognized Sheryl Crow’s voice. And when I could barely make out Stewart and Colbert’s climactic debate, I didn’t for a second think, “I’m missing it”. All that stuff on the stage. That was just to get people’s attention. Those of us in the crowd that day, we were the important part. I wasn’t missing it. We were it.

I know I’ve been blogging about this a lot, so I feel like this will probably be my last post on the subject. Still, I loved Fields’ piece so much I just had to share. Related note: Here’s my friend Linda, describing what it was like to ride a Huffington bus to the rally.

Laura Miller at Salon argues that NaNoWriMo is a colossal waste of resources, plus advocates for readers as the source of hope for our future:

Frankly, there are already more than enough novels out there — more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it’s our job to do so…Furthermore, I know that there are still undiscovered or unpublished authors out there whose work I will love if I ever manage to find it. But I’m confident those novels would still get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth. Yet while there’s no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant — publication by a major house — will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

Devin Faraci and I have sparred online on numerous occasions, but I’ve always found my in-person interactions with him to be agreeable and engaging. This evening, he was in town to help out with Drafthouse Films’ first movie, Four Lions. Luckily, I had a chance to catch up with Devin in his hotel room and chat extensively with him about a variety of topics, including his new website and the future of online film journalism.

There were a number of issues on which we both agreed:

• The current market cannot sustain the glut of current online film websites. Eventually, only a few will emerge as the most prominent and worthy of attention.
• Writers should try to avoid writing for free for someone else, whenever possible. There are a variety of reasons for this, some of which Devin discusses.
• As geek culture has gone mainstream, the place of online film websites has gotten extremely murky.
• Film websites will need to do more than just rehash news from other film websites in order to stay relevant and interesting.

Here’s the audio of our chat: