my next obsession

I've been to Podcasting University, and I have seen the future. My future.

As someone who speaks for a living, albeit not on radio, I certainly have developed a voice. Can the Internet absorb one more lawyer who speaks entertainingly? Sure it can. And my followers don't need expensive equipment to tune in to my frequency.

Thanks be to Denise Howell for alerting me to the fact that podcasting even exists.

buying art for the office of the future

Here's a great concept from the town of Spokane, much in the news and reviled of late. Artocracy.org provides good art in the $20 to $50 range. The deliverable? A .pdf file, printed out on the buyer's color printer:

"All works of art on Artocracy.org are made up of print-ready PDF files. Purchasing art is simple. Once you've decided on a piece to purchase, you will be directed through the e-commerce system. When the purchase is finalized you will receive a link to a downloadable PDF. We leave it to user discretion as to how and where the final piece is printed."

What is particularly interesting to me is that the works offered on site are created specifically for the digital format. Although most of the art in my office was created by my daughter and me, I'm tempted to spring for one of these and commander a color printer here. Other digitally savvy alternatives apparently considered yet by artocracy would be to offer artists' work specifically in black-and-white or for display on a single computer monitor. We'll see if this business evolves or dies.

this one's for susan shulenberger

My law partner took this photo with her digital camera on vacation while scubadiving, and emailed it to me. I think it will make the site look pretty.

on a roll

I have just used the word lacuna in a piece of legal writing, for what is probably the first time in my legal career. Now my joy is complete. The only thing that would have been cooler is a reference to lacunae.

ping! ping!

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

st. andrew's face transformer

You can upload anyone's picture and morph his or her face. All you need is a .jpg or .gif file, and there are many options to choose from. You can make someone look like a drunk monkey, for example. No immediate application to family law that I can perceive, but I can see applications for police sketches of suspects, for sure.

My personal preference, when I am annoyed at someone, is to morph his or her name. One can do this manually anywhere, for example, when sitting waiting to be heard on the motion calendar, but I like the ability to set Anagram Genius to "rude."

time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future

Google has assembled twenty years of Usenet posts into an historical archive. Some time ago, in fact.

my name turns up in the strangest places

Yes, I actually said this. And I don't mind at all that the subject of my quote picked it up and put it on the portion of her website describing her autobiography.

The interesting thing is that this quote first appeared on an amazon.com Listmania list on Becoming a Swan. Which is not associated with my full Real Name, including my middle name.

Interesting. Someone had to kind of piece my background together. I do that kind of stuff all the time, but it's kind of sweet that someone is doing it on me.

loosen up, guys

Here's a Big Firm about two blocks away from me venturing into the world of blogging by addressing electronic discovery.

Content rating: Too early to judge, given the length of time since rollout. Already, however, it shows potential for an 8, although I don't care for the number of posts pointing to sources which require subscriptions for access.

Style points: zero. Dry, dry, dry. The posts vary depending on the tone of the topics summarized. The posts on news articles are punchier than those summarizing reports on rule changes. That tells me that these posts are simple summaries rather than independent content.

The site lacks permalinks to individual posts, so I can't give examples by direct link, but compare the 1/7/2005 post "Microsoft Corporation Comments on Proposed Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure" (can't you feel your eyelids drooping?) to the 12/27/2004 post "Taking The Fear Factor Out Of E-Mail" (eyelids pop back open).

Extra credit for: knowing what RSS is.

Could be improved by: matrix code wallpaper.

essential technical information

I can't think of law without thinking of caffeine for some reason. And without the web I would have needed to compile my own chart.

a better blog title than mine

I know that's hard to believe, but check out Blonde Justice.

She may even be funnier than I am, but it looks like she works the criminal defense beat. So there's room in this tent for both of us.

i know i'll get in trouble for this one

Look, guys. The press is running amok about Judge Paul Bastine's decision to deny poor beautiful Shawnna (hereafter, "PBS") of Spokane County a dissolution until her pregnancy is over. From much of the reporting, which has been picked up verbatim by, for example, The Legal Reader, he sounds like he was really crazy, but only to people who don't know the actual law. There's no link to technology here, folks, except my use of it now in a probably doomed attempt to spread knowledge and thereby dispel ignorance. I know from experience that the latter does not necessarily follow the former.

Here's the deal.

1. Washington state doesn't have "divisible divorce:" that is, you have to deal with everything all at once, property, kids, child support, debt, the whole meal deal. There are limited exceptions but you have to follow procedures that PBS's lawyer didn't.
   
2. Washington state has a presumption that a child born within a couple of hundred days after the conclusion of the marriage is a child born OF THAT MARRIAGE. Proving otherwise takes more than commonsense assumptions.
   
3. Judge Bastine's actual oral decision, the transcript of which I'm still trying to snag, indicates that he addressed the following issues:

• when you obtain a default decree or judgment you cannot be granted relief different than that sought in the petition. Civil Rule 54(c). The petition recited that PBS was not pregnant. In order to finalize a decree that dealt with the new baby, she'd have to reserve the husband with a new petition alleging the pregnancy. He needs to be put on notice that there may be a child that, his or not, is still presumptively his. No indication that this PBS's attorney did this, though she's had plenty of time since the pregnancy became known. This is important because, absent taking some court action with respect to this dissolution, the husband could find himself down the road paying child support for a child that is not his and as to which he received no notice when he got the divorce petition in the first place. This is not a Good Thing.
  
• Washington's statute on disestablishing paternity of a child (remember the presumption I cited a moment ago?), RCW 26.26.550, allows the action to be commenced before birth, but specifically states that the action cannot be completed until after the birth of the child.
  
• Therefore, in this case PBS was unknowingly trying to disestablish paternity in direct contravention to the statute.

Now, the Stranger article, waxing somewhat hysterical, says that "the Dissolution Act doesn't say anything about pregnancy." Um, no, but every first-year law student learns about a doctrine of statutory interpretation called in pari materia, which just means that different statutes on the same subject have to be considered together, even if they're enacted at different times. The Stranger is a great publication but they don't know dick about family law.

Oh, and what makes me think I do? Well, I'm a Washington attorney who has practiced family law for a number of years. And it's not just me who thinks this.

Let the flames begin.

resistance is futile!

It's official. I have ditched Timeslips Ten-point-infinity and moved on to Billing Matters, which is tightly integrated with Time Matters, which is now owned by Lexis, which is now owned by Reed Elsivier, which for all I know is a participant in the New World Order. At the very least it participates in the New Word Order created when one gets used to "natural language" searches instead of the elegant austerity of logical connectors. Those same connectors made me the terror of my eighth grade math club and served me well in the early days of Lexis (back when they were Mead Data Central). Oh, sweet bird of youth!

Review of Billing Matters: very steep learning curve. Great program, once you get used to thinking like a relational database. And I thought it was hard thinking like a lawyer! Now, for a dissenting opinion check with one of my partners, whose Time Matters data ended up in a twist and eventually plunged like Lucifer from Heaven, taking her computer with it. She ended up ditching BM and migrating to Timeslips. The moral of the story I guess is to maintain meticulous database hygiene. Not that she had, like, an unkempt database or anything.

sometimes the old remedies are the best

Some of you may recall the saga of the Trail King Drop Deck Trailer regarding which I filed an action in replevin late last year.

I am pleased to report that my client has her trailer back in her possession (I barely restrained myself from titling this post The Return of the Trail King). And I got it the old-fashioned way.

I settled the case.

striking a blow for professionalism

Resolved: to stop borrowing the CD player of the hapless associate in the office next to mine, who has been stuck Bates-stamping documents since I lent my Bates stamper to her boss yesterday. She needs the tunes more than I do. I do question why she has to stamp things when we have a copier that ought to print ditigal Bates stamps on the copies but...maybe no one here knows how to do that.

My erstwhile assistant managed to talk me out of ordering the Hello Kitty CD boombox I had my heart set on, so I settled on a sober (by my standards) blue-and-chrome unit.

It's just no fun being a grown-up some days, is it?