Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

24 Aug 2007, 14:19 p.m.

Switches & Junctions

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2007 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I finally hounded Leonard into moving to a reliable (read: commercial-grade) hosting provider. So now I can link to funny entries on his blog with confidence that you can click through and read them.

I got to hang out with some friends this week -- surprise, surprise, not all of it was in the context of D&D. For example, Michael and I made a creative writing pact to force ourselves to get some short fiction out. And I ran into Stuart at Columbia and he introduced me to his boss/collaborator, Tim Wu (dumpling madman).

It was an outrage. To my friends' embarrassment, I stood up and shouted at our waiter:

"What are these?"

"Dumplings," he said.

"These," I said, "are not dumplings. The skin is too thick. The meat is too small. It's been cooked too long. The folding is done all wrong." My friends begged me to stop, and the manager threatened to call the police.

All that net neutrality stuff is just a smokescreen. Wu's a single-issue lawyer and he's on a Christopher Kimball-esque crusade against bad dumplings.

Luis Villa, whom I've met a total of once but whose blog I'm still reading, reminded me that, oh yeah, Wu's a law celebrity. And that AltLaw is really tremendously cool. The ordinary layperson probably does not know that private corporations have this weird de facto monopoly on court decisions and thus on legal research. "Doesn't the Government Printing Office print everything so you can get at it?" I vaguely wondered when I heard about the troubles people have in getting to cases without Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis. No! So, go Project Gutenberg, go Open Library, go MathWorld, and in that same vein, go AltLaw.

Comments

Riana
25 Aug 2007, 2:27 a.m.

Next time you see Tim, tell him I thought his "iPhone hearing" testimony was witty and thought-provoking, and not at all overly verbose!

Also, I had lunch with Danny and Seth the other day, and had I thought to command them to do so, I am sure they would have said to tell you "hello"!