Recently in Life Category

This is Madeline.

She arrived the evening of December 5, and since then has been keeping everyone up nights with her entertaining (?) antics.

Seriously, she's a pretty cooperative baby so far, as they go. Having to feed her every 3 hours for a while is just part of the drill. We're very happy she's here, and she seems to be okay with it, too.

I've installed Movable Type 4 on the server that hosts this blog. In the process, I dumped my semi-custom template set and went with a MT default template and style. I've learned to leave template and style design to those who have the time to do it right. I'm also going to go with a sans-serif typeface for a while, since I've been very serif-oriented for the last five years. Now I just have to write something.

This site is also at "www.mcfp.org" now, but blog.tph-lex.com will still work, too. (Two names, one place.)

In other news, my wife and I are expecting a baby (our first) in December. It's a girl — the sonographer had a very high level of confidence in reaching that conclusion, and looking at the monitor, I had to agree. We're both thrilled. And excited. And, of course, anxious about what life will be like after mid-December. In the meantime, there's a lot to do!

What comes to your mind when you hear the word "success"? "Success" is a concept that has given me some cognitive dissonance over the years, because I didn't really think much of "success" as such until I went to law school and the word was everywhere. And I resented that to some degree, because the message that we students got (and to varying degrees perpetuated) was this: "Success" means some combination of the following and the more the better: achieving a certain GPA or class rank; getting a clerkship; getting a highly-paid associate position in a large firm; and eventually becoming a partner in that firm, obtaining a high-profile government or corporate position, or becoming a judge or law professor. Although some allowance was generally made for the fact that not everyone shared those goals, acknowledgments that those paths aren't for everyone usually seemed to me to carry with them a hint of disdain.

It's relatively easy to think of success in terms of what one might call "public" career achievements (i.e. visible accomplishments in a particular field). But those kinds of events are not sufficient, nor in every case necessary, to what I would call success "in the broad sense" — a life well lived. It is one thing to be successful at something and quite another to be and feel successful in more general terms. One can be very successful in the deployment of one set of skills and yet relatively unsuccessful in the broader sense and unhappy in life.

Maybe the reason that notion of success is not given much airtime by career services offices in law schools and elsewhere is that it is simply outside the scope of their advising capabilities. They can provide some guidance on how one might think about career decisions in the broader context of one's life, but their expertise relates to job placement much more than to career counseling. So they talk about what they can help with and refer everyone with bigger-picture questions and concerns to books. Just a hypothesis.

Seldom do envelopes marked "Important" actually contain something important. Even less so when they're marked with flashy colors. Even less than that when they sport return addresses in Wilmington, Delaware or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

I'm not very fond of New Year's resolutions. On one hand, I don't see a reason to wait until the new year to adopt a goal. On the other, I find that when I try to come up with resolutions, I tend to pick things that I'm unlikely actually to accomplish. (I suppose that says something about my goal selection technique.)

But 2006 was a fairly difficult year for me, so it seems worthwhile to spend a bit of time looking back while also looking forward. 2006 showed me some of the limits on the amount of work I can do and the amount of stress I can handle before health problems start to show up. I tried to burn myself out in the spring and summer and am still feeling some effects. I also discovered that some of that stress is internally generated, so I'm trying to train myself out of some of the habits of mind that create that stress or amplify what stress is already there.

So what's in store for 2007? Hard to say. But here are some— well, I like to think of these as guidelines. They're too open-ended to be resolutions.

1. Try less hard. What's that? You read correctly. No, I'm not talking about doing less; I just plan to spend less energy thinking about trying hard at something and focusing more on doing whatever it is that I'm doing at the moment. This means avoiding those habits of mind that seem like they would help one get things done but turn out to be sinkholes for energy. Better to put that energy into the activity at hand instead.

2. Maintain variety. I know people who draw almost all the fulfillment they need from legal work and don't need a lot of other activities (or rest) to sustain them because the activities involved in their work provide adequate sustenance. They can go from phone calls to meetings to research to drafting to a lunch conference to more phone calls to more drafting and still have energy at 8 p.m. I respect those people, but I'm not one of them, which is why you'll never find me practicing law with one of the national über-firms. I admit it. It takes more than the daily activities of law practice to keep me going.

3. Be healthy. I already eat a pretty healthy diet, but I need to get more exercise and rest.

4. Read and write more. This is entailed by item 2. It's been months since I read a novel — longer since I read one I hadn't read before — and there are several non-fiction books that have caught my attention as people posted year-end lists of book recommendations over the last few days. Add to that my recent rediscovery of SSRN, which in the last few years seems to have received lots of work from articulate people with interesting things to say about law. I've now got a healthy stack of printed material to read, even more in the form of PDFs, and soon even more in shipment. I'm trying to make sure that I include some fiction book purchases to keep a balanced diet.

4(a). Start blogging again. Done.

4(a)(1). And keep it up. This seems, from past experience, to be the challenging part. I haven't selected a particular theme and don't plan to, but I have decided that I'm usually not going to write about real estate or what it's like to be a real estate practitioner in a Denver firm. That's partly because that would cut a bit close to writing about my job (a big no-no for an employee in most fields) and partly because I spend enough time thinking about real estate already. (See item 2.) I may write about law practice in general from time to time, but I will avoid writing about my own practice. I hope that instead the blog will become an outlet for some of my other interests and thoughts within and apart from law.

"Books should be like super-coffee, a wake-up slug to the brain. And David Foster Wallace is a controlled substance."

Link: NPR - David Lipsky

A few days ago, Bruce MacEwen wrote,

Another set of firms … will also embrace the reality that the highest form of human happiness comes not with work alone, but with work and with love.

The good news is that those of us blessed in work and in love are often the most productive and creative as well. This is nothing more than centuries-old wisdom, but some of us lost sight of it at the end of the 20th Century.

I quoted him here. Stephanie West Allen picked up on the posts, reviewed some of the common traditional senses of the word love, then wondered, "If we love our clients and the people with whom we work, what type of love is it?"

I didn't read Bruce's words as suggesting that the love to which he referred would necessarily come from or be attached to the work. I feel strongly about the work that I do, the company in which I do it and the people that my work serves, but I would hesitate to use the word 'love' for that set of emotions. I thought Bruce was referring simply to having the time to cultivate one's relationships with family and friends. His point is still important: a person who has meaningful, caring relationships is more likely to be happy and thriving than a person who has fewer (or no) such relationships, but who spends endless hours working and gets paid buckets of money to do it. People who are concerned about how their work affects their quality of life as a whole human being still value professional achievement and working relationships, but they are willing to make some economic trade-offs to preserve their other relationships and other things that they value.

In drafts of this post I sought to explore further the theme that "quality of life" is not just about time spent at the office versus time in other activities. I quickly discovered (or not so quickly, since I had planned to be falling asleep by now) that I wouldn't be able to cover that territory and do it well. At least, not tonight.

So that must wait for another day, but meanwhile, consider these recent posts:

Rees Morrison: All management expresses values ("managers express values, explicitly or implicitly, as they exercise their power and decide on courses of action")

Arnie Herz: Law firm reinvention: nurturing the partner-associate relationship (law firms where partners hoard work and don't delegate don't do themselves any favors by it in the long run)

Ernest Svenson supported Mitch Landrieu's candidacy for mayor of New Orleans. When Landrieu lost, Ernie wrote this essay about the election, Landrieu, and life post-Katrina. Ernie observes:

It's important to understand the subtle (as opposed to obvious) differences between tragedies and miracles. Tragedies, especially while they are unfolding, are easy to capture on film and that's one thing that makes them easier to focus on (which is not helpful).

Whether Mitch Landrieu is the mayor is not as important as our willingness to believe in miracles. A miracle doesn't depend on an election. Miracles happen when people consciously will them to happen. Mitch reminded me that miracles are out there and they can happen, but we have to have the right attitude.

Ernie recorded the essay for WTUL.

It sounds like an obvious statement: the more tasks you try to focus on at once, the less effectively you are likely to perform at any one of them.

Denise Howell linked to this Hewlett-Packard UK release about a study it commissioned that suggests that constantly interrupting one's thinking to review and respond to e-mails yields a decrease in one's "functioning IQ." According to the study, it's not just bad — it's worse than pot.

That reminded me of the recent Newsweek article by Steven Levy on "Continuous Partial Attention."

It also reminded me of the admonition by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done and elsewhere that interrupting oneself to respond to e-mails tends to result in less productivity rather than more.

I should probably dig up that book and have another look at it.

Over the last few months, I've gotten the impression from reading legal weblogs that quite a few older lawyers who struggle to understand what motivates the newest generation of lawyers. I don't know if it's true. I see the phrase "work/life balance" bandied about a lot (though no one quite seems to agree on what it means), and I've sometimes seen that phrase used disparagingly, as if to say, "If you want to have priorities elsewhere, I wouldn't want you to work for me." I don't generally meet this character in my daily life, but lots of people are telling me he exists (it's almost always a 'he') even if the stereotype that circulates is a bit of a caricature.

Bruce MacEwen has been posting about this issue periodically, most recently with a post titled "Can We See the Log in Our Own Eye?"

I'll make no pretense of being able to speak generally about what my generation wants. Over-generalization is seldom useful, and I'd guess that most of us don't know at this point what we 'really' want (will we ever?). But I can say that there are many in my generation who insist upon trying to be not only good lawyers, but also good, well rounded human beings. They find great value in the former enterprise but find that value dramatically diminishes when it detracts from the latter enterprise. This does not mean that attorneys who think this way view their professional work as trivial. In fact, as David Maister points out (picked up by Michelle Golden), they yearn for meaningful and challenging work, and they recognize the importance of that work. What's more, they can do it well; after all, their value systems don't make them inherently less capable. Like anyone else, they want financial security, too. They're just not willing — perhaps not able — to make that work the only source of value in their lives. Even financial security yields diminishing returns when traded off against other human needs.

Bruce concludes:

I believe firms may increasingly find themselves in two camps.

• One set of firms will cling to the "safety" of tradition, keeping associates in the dark, as the second-class citizens they are presumed to be, pointedly oblivious to "work/life" issues, letting the fungible young things sink or swim in the deep end of the pool they're being paid well to inhabit.
• Another set of firms will embark on the adventure of embracing this generation of graduates as true professional peers and colleagues, every bit as ravenous for challenge, stretching, and unfamiliar new assignments as we were— and will also embrace the reality that the highest form of human happiness comes not with work alone, but with work and with love.

The good news is that those of us blessed in work and in love are often the most productive and creative as well. This is nothing more than centuries-old wisdom, but some of us lost sight of it at the end of the 20th Century.

Where would you choose to work?

I spent a while this afternoon sitting. Law practice is one of those jobs that can easily take over the mind, and one can spend even one's scant "free time" designing part of a contract, composing and rehearsing arguments, mentally cataloging information gathered or needed for some purpose, and amending or reshuffling multifarious checklists. Some people can thrive on just that. I can't, and fairly often I like to spend a bit of time focusing on nothing other than my immediate surroundings, giving no mental energy or room to the question what happens next, and setting aside for a while all those mental checklists. I try to do this most days on the bus ride home, and sometimes that's not quite enough.

Today's weather might have been just about perfect for late spring. Mostly sunny, with broken high and mid-level clouds and cumulus a few thousand feet up (not so perfect, then, if you like to fly light aircraft). Eighty degrees. The trees are in full leaf now, and the leaves of the thirty-five-foot (give or take) cottonwood in our backyard twisted gently in the slow breeze. Sweet smells floated to the window of this upstairs bedroom-turned-office from our flowering shrubs, some relative of honeysuckle I've yet to identify. Kids biked up and down the side street and around the cul-de-sac at the end.

I spent a few minutes watching the leaves of the cottonwood and didn't see the darker clouds approaching from the west. The temperature dropped a few degrees, the wind kicked up suddenly, and soon I had to shut the window to keep the raindrops out. I kept watching the leaves, which at first shook and shuddered under the early raindrops and wind, then bent over to drain off the steady rain.

Steady, but brief. The breezes relaxed after just a few minutes, a single, distant, elongated rumble of thunder signalled the end of the rain, and the sun almost immediately returned. I opened the window. The leaves of the cottonwood shook off the rainwater in fat drops. Only about ten minutes had passed.

A little while later, I heard the sounds of a sporting event -- soccer, perhaps, or maybe baseball -- echoing from the park nearby. From time to time I heard cheers accompanied by the muffled, muddy harshness of a voice on a loudspeaker. By that time I was no longer sitting and had turned once more toward work, but I still took comfort in the refreshing sounds, smells and warmth of a spring weekend afternoon.

(Photo July, 2005.)

I like Denver, but I start to get a little stir-crazy after a few months in town without a break. One of my college friends' family owns a condo in Dillon, and this weekend six of us gathered there to hang out and relax. It was a very welcome trip. My wife and I got to visit two friends we only get to see about once a year, and two more that we hadn't seen since 2001 (but they've recently moved to the Denver area, so we hope to see them more often).

It was wonderful to get out of town to spend some time with great friends, but there was a cloud on my mood that has intensified since we returned to Denver.

For the last couple of years, the mother of one of my wife's students has been living with an aggressive form of lymphoma. On Friday night, she died. I only met her a few times, but I've come to know her, her husband, and their two children a bit through stories related by my wife and through their telling of their own story on their blog (I'm omitting a link since it isn't really meant to be a public blog). I've had lots of feelings about this transition and about the rest of their journey over the last year or so, and I know I've been learning something important about humanity from them, but at the moment I can't put any of it into words.

I haven't posted here in months. I've been focusing on other things. In May I started a new job. In July my wife and I bought a house. Many weekends of working on the house and yard ensued, interspersed with big projects for work.

I don't know that my schedule is going to get any easier to deal with, but I'm hoping to have time enough to write a little more often.

In general, life is going pretty well for me. I've had a good year, yet one that's been salted with plenty of reminders not to take good things for granted.

On Monday, I'll begin orientation as an associate attorney in the real estate practice group at Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP in Denver. I've written here even less frequently than usual recently because I received the offer only this past Monday, and I've been scrambling to get life in order and prepare for the transition.

I'm excited. The people of the real estate practice group (and others from the firm whom I've occasionally encountered) have all given very good first impressions. The firm has a strong professional reputation, and seems also to have a good reputation as a firm to work for. And for me, it's an opportunity finally to focus on transactional work instead of litigation, working on sophisticated projects with people who have a lot of experience with the kinds of work that they do.

I will probably continue to write here, but only very lightly at first. I expect to have a very busy summer. When I do write, I intend to avoid writing about anything having to do with my law practice. In particular, I don't plan to write about any specific working experiences. I do not plan to write about real estate law at least for a long while. (I haven't written about it before, so that's no big change.) I'm making these decisions entirely on my own initiative.

I used to use my time on bus rides to free-write short essays about what I saw on the bus and other stories of living in the area. I never posted them here. If I find myself doing the same sort of thing once I'm a regular bus rider again, maybe you'll see some of those sorts of things on this weblog.

But for now, I'd better get back to work on all of the tasks I've got lined up for this weekend!

Three years ago this weekend, on a dismal, chilly, rainy Sunday afternoon, I graduated from law school.

Congratulations to all the people who are graduating this weekend.

I took a walk today through the open space near my apartment. I saw prairie dog pups for the first time.

Flickr photo set here.

Do you ever have dreams like this? I had one almost exactly like it the other day.

My wife and I spent some time on Saturday evening driving through neighborhoods in our general area to get a sense of how they're laid out and what kinds of lots and houses they include. This is the very beginning of a house-search that we hope we'll be able to press forward more decisively in the next few months.

Right now I'm still in the "wow, everything is really expensive" stage. I'm told that might not end. The Denver area has relatively high property prices compared to the midwestern prices with which I'm more familiar (and more comfortable).

I've also been taking some time to read up on a few topics I haven't recently been following and to brush up some skills that might have otherwise been falling out of practice. For example, I spent a while on Saturday reading sample land survey field notes, decrypting various parts of the official BLM survey manual, and reviewing the Colorado laws on the conduct of surveys by registered Professional Land Surveyors.

Exciting times, let me tell you.

Actually, these are potentially exciting times, but I don't know yet whether certain possibilities are going to pan out. I hope to know more later in the week.

Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo are strung in a line along the "Front Range" of Colorado, abutting the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and connected by Interstate 25. Colorado enjoys some of the greatest numbers of sunny days of anywhere in the United States, but the weather patterns can change dramatically over the course of a few days.

For example, here between Boulder and Denver, the temperature rose to 70 degrees today, and once morning clouds had burnt off we were graced with an afternoon sunshine. But the National Weather Service has also issued a Winter Storm Watch, because Saturday night's forecast calls for four to eight inches of snow, with more on Sunday and possible storm totals of a foot of snow.

They predict that the temperature will be around 60 again by Tuesday or Wednesday. I suppose that's the good news. It's also good news whenever we get more moisture, but at this time of year I would prefer rain. It takes up a lot less space and doesn't require such chilly temperatures.

I moved here in the middle of May, 2002. On an eighty-degree day, my wife, a friend, and I hauled furniture from our rented Budget truck up the stairs to this apartment. A few days later, I awoke to discover two inches of snow on the ground. The apartment complex's automatic lawn sprinkler system was running according to its schedule, and its black sprinkler heads peeked out over the snow, dutifully watering it.

Arnie Herz writes about "positive psychology" and its management theory analogue, "positive organizational scholarship." The notion of positive psychology comes from, among others, Dr. Martin Seligman, former president of the APA. There's a Psychology Today article about him and others working in the area of positive psychology. Here's a quote that sums up why you should have a look.

Why do we only focus on negative behavior patterns, rather than learning to nurture our children's--and our own--untold strengths? "There is a misguided emphasis in psychology on finding the problem and correcting it." …

The overall goal of "positive psychology" is to enhance our experiences of love, work and play. It is a psychologist's "birthright," says Seligman, to explore optimism, love, perseverance, originality, responsibility, good parenting, altruism, civility, moderation and tolerance. "This is a revelation for a group that has focused on dysfunction, illness, healing and coping strategies," which are just a small corner of the mental health field.

It is no surprise that in the psychological literature over the last 30 years, there have been 54,040 abstracts containing the keyword "depression," 41,416 naming "anxiety," but only 415 mentioning "joy."

Well-being is something more than just surviving, merely coping.

Others are trying to apply the same kinds of principles in the study of businesses and other organizations. Arnie linked to an interview [S.D. Bernstein, for the Mich. J. of Mgmt. Inq.] that discusses the topic from that perspective.

It's been a beautiful spring weekend here in Denver — sunny, with highs in the 60s and 70s. There's some much-needed rain in the forecast for mid-week. Wind, cold, and rain are in the forecast for Tuesday. As luck would have it, I've got an interview that day. Will it be my ill fortune to get drenched on the way to the interview?

A year ago today, I was spending a weekend in the office preparing to second-chair a two-week arbitration hearing. That was the case for which I worked four weeks of long days with no days off. The arbitrator eventually returned a favorable but relatively undramatic award. I don't have a very clear memory of the first half of 2004, apart from transcripts, exhibits, pleadings, and letters. I came to the conclusion that that's not much of a life.

Two years ago today, I was preparing to start a new job the next Tuesday.

Three years ago today, I was working my way through my last semester of law school. (And how wretchedly it dragged on!)

I think this is the first time I've had coffee at 1 a.m. I pulled a few all-nighters in law school (and one in college), but I wasn't a coffee drinker back then. I'm not really one now, either, but here I am, working on a mug of coffee. I'm eating some ice cream, too, and imagining that I'm just having a nice late dessert with coffee.*

My wife has been visiting family in California this week. She was supposed to arrive in Denver at around 11:30 tonight, but some flight delays interfered with her connection in Phoenix, so now she's been routed through Las Vegas and is arriving sometime between 2:40 and 3:00 a.m.

I hear the Denver International Airport is pretty quiet at 3 a.m.

* (I was, after all, ordered to do my best to eliminate the ice cream before my wife returns from California. I haven't quite achieved that, but I have made significant strides — or "scoops" — toward that end.)

There are not many advantages to a lack of steady work, but I sure am glad I don't have anywhere to be in the morning.

Update, 2:10 a.m.: Flight tracker websites, including the airline's own, show that the flight is now delayed until about 3:10 a.m. Their on-time rates for my wife's flights this week are nearing 0%. Yikes. I wonder what their on-time rates are like when the weather is bad.

I've been taking advantage of my free time to get organized. I'm trying to manage things using the system in David Allen's book Getting Things Done. I discovered David Allen through weblogs and his approach seems to be very popular in the tech community (this Scoble post links to several "GTD" related posts).

It's only been a few days, but I'm pleased with the results so far. One thing I'm trying to learn to do is to limit the frequency with which I check my e-mail. (See this post on Merlin Mann's excellent weblog 43 Folders.) Since, oh, 1995, I've been in the habit of being constantly connected to e-mail while at a computer. I had my mail clients set to check mail every three to five minutes. This meant that e-mail regularly interrupted my workflow. I've pushed the frequency back to about once every 20 minutes. In fact, because I'm now more focused on what I'm doing, I often don't notice when an e-mail arrives until I decide that it's time for a break.

I haven't tried to manage what I do this way in the context of a busy office yet, and it's probably a great luxury that I can start out without having to do that just yet. I feel good about this, that it could have a very good long-term impact. I feel that I've definitely used the last week well.

But I'm not yet to the point where I trust the way I've organized things enough for me to relax about what I have to do next on each of my projects. That's supposed to be one of the big payoffs of the Getting Things Done system. I seem to have freed up my mind to fret about and plan things that don't really need to be addressed, at least not yet. I need to learn at a more habitual level that when I've put those things down on my "someday/maybe" list or my "waiting" list, I can just let them go for a while.

Scheherazade Fowler offers this entry to her readers as a love letter.

Scheherazade professes to be a "recovering lawyer" in Portland, Maine. She's a wonderful writer and I thoroughly enjoy her weblog, especially her descriptions of Maine that remind me of the several years I lived there as a child.

I'm glad to see more discussion about work-life balance out there, even if right now my balance is skewed because I need more work (at least, work of the kind that pays). In any event, Arnie Herz (Legal Sanity) noticed that the Center for Creative Leadership has three short articles on work-life balance.

You Know You're Out of Balance When...
Balance: Choose It or Lose It.
Seeing Balance Through Their Eyes.

For another worthwhile post on this kind of topic, check out "Defining More" at Sam Decker's Decker Marketing site.

What would happen if you were four years old and saw a commercial on the television for the very first time in your life? The author of Outer Life describes here how his son reacted.

When my wife and I returned to Colorado from Wisconsin a few weeks ago, I felt for the first time since moving here the sense of returning home. I've long considered Madison, Wisconsin my hometown; I was born there, I lived there until I was four and again from twelve until I went to college, and I went to college and law school in the Midwest. I moved out to the Denver area in 2002, following my then-girlfriend (now wife). I liked the mountains and the fair weather, but parts of me missed the midwest. The near-constant Colorado sun seemed just a bit too sunny, and the green of a midwestern summer overwhelms the drab greenish-brown of the Colorado plains and foothills. And, of course, many of my closest family and friends still live in the midwest.

But this time, somehow, Wisconsin felt more alien to me. Its oddities, the things that fuel Wisconsin stereotypes, stood out more awkwardly — like Packers jerseys and larger, more vaguely Germanic- and Scandinavian-looking people. The sun seemed unusually faint and buried in clouds.

I'm still getting to know Colorado. And I still harbor some dismay at the fact that visiting any of our friends and family elsewhere requires an inconvenient and expensive trip. It helps to be reminded, though, that I feel this is the right place to be right now.

Cell phones make it possible to worry more often when people don't answer the phone, because there are more phones not to answer and many more places not to answer them.

Not getting enough time with my fiancee, the lack of any sign of any other social life, and the overarching stress at the office that keeps most people there from ever smiling might be more tolerable and less of a tumbling trajectory toward burnout if I found the work itself intrinsically inspiring or motivating. However, that's not happening. This is definitely trouble. But this all in turn raises the question how one figures out what one really wants to do and finds a way there in a lousy economy with $60,000 worth of educational debt.

Yes, I am alive. Alive and working what seem to me to be rather long hours considering the paycheck that is, compared to those of my colleagues downstairs and across the street, rather short.

Discovery is highly unpleasant.

More on this later, perhaps, if I can catch my breath at all this weekend.

Tomorrow I'll begin working as an associate attorney for a small downtown Denver law firm with a general practice focused on business and notable emphasis on contract, real estate, municipal, and zoning. There will be a lot for me to learn and do, so I expect that the already rather thin blogging going on here will become even more sparse, at least for a while.

Wow, I need to go get another suit... or two... and more shirts... and ties... and more nice-but-not-quite-suit clothes... and all the other things that have been on hold for a while... (after all, the air conditioning is out in the car, and warm weather will be coming soon). I think the first paycheck or two are pretty well accounted for already. If I have time for any shopping, that is!

I'm excited about the job. I know there are a few large learning curves ahead of me, but learning is part of the reward of this work.

We're back in Denver and recovering from a weekend of visiting with friends we hadn't seen in a long time, including a busy day of skiing at Steamboat yesterday. That was my first time skiing on a 'real mountain' instead of a hill in Wisconsin. We enjoyed a gorgeous landscape, warm weather (a high temperature mark of around 40F), and better snow than I'd ever skiied on before -- though that wouldn't take much. I hadn't skied in 12 years, so I spent a while trying to get back whatever 'ski legs' I might have had as a teenager. I only had one rough fall, though, and the ill effects of that only lasted a short while, though it led me to appreciate my helmet. Next year we'll have to get into the mountains some more. It's just another thing we'll have to add to the "when we can afford it" list.

I've been busy lately, and I'll be out of town this weekend, so blogging will be light. I mean, even lighter than usual. I decided to apply for a position that required me to prepare a second writing sample, so I've been working to excerpt a second piece on copyright that I wrote last spring. I've found quite a challenge in pulling together short writing samples, because the topics I've researched in the last year haven't lent themselves to brief yet thorough explanation. The excerpt I eventually pulled together covers cases that applied the four-factor fair use test in U.S. copyright law, and I may eventually use that as the basis of a post on that topic here.

I know, I say I'm going to post a lot and then I don't get around to it very quickly. I haven't dropped the Creative Commons licensing topic, though. I wrote and nearly completed a major revision of my earlier entry. It came out very long and looked too much, well, like a lawyer wrote it. So, I'm rewriting it again. I'm trying to find the balance between offering detailed explanations and boring people to death, trying to find the right level of abstraction.

Following up on my post the other day: I don't think the merger clause creates a parol evidence problem when an author specifies outside the license text what works the license will apply to. The parol evidence rule, at least in a majority of states, doesn't apply to contemporaneous writings. Adding a limitation to the license's scope outside the license text still seems to conflict with the express language of the merger clause, but there's nonetheless an ambiguity about the scope of the license that needs to be resolved, and a contemporary writing on that very topic offers good evidence for that purpose. [See what I mean -- you probably wouldn't want to read a long entry with lots of sentences like these in it.] The merger clause can't will away that ambiguity.

Denise Howell pointed out that someone could still contest a limitation of the scope of the license, and she's right. There's always a risk of disputes. It probably wouldn't even be an utterly frivolous argument for someone to make. The fact that someone will most likely lose a dispute in the end rarely precludes him or her from being a considerable pain in the meantime, especially since there's no guarantee that they'd lose.

I don't want to lose sight of the real world, though. Therein lies the challenge -- guessing at what about these licenses is going to turn out to be important for the people in the real world who use them. I could spend a lot of time writing about nuances that will never make a practical difference. With an experiment like this, it's hard to know what'll really turn out to be important in the end. I know the propagation clause is important, because it lies at the core of one of the goals of the entire licensing scheme and is one of the most dramatic features of the license, so you can bet I'm going to talk about that. It's more tricky to predict what sorts of things, if any, may lead to disputes. I'm still trying to decide how much detail to spend on the scope-of-license question.

I made some Creative Commons license propagation clause art, if anyone dares call it that. I wouldn't. I just did, of course, but I was kidding.

C.C. License and Work Propagation

Copying Anna's Work: Who has a legitimate copy and license?

You don't remember Jennifer and Dan from the hypothetical scenario in my first entry on the topic. Dan's new. He gets a license through the propagation clause. Jennifer's new too, and she's a rulebreaker. She didn't give Anna credit for her work. Bad Jen. No license for her.

Yes, I'm blogging too late. Here's hoping I don't regret it.