[Note: I started a separate page about the practice of patent law in general and where my job fits into the big picture. Please check it out to get an idea of what I do. Thanks!]
For the last two months, I’ve been working as a technical advisor in the patent group of a law firm. It’s great to be back at a company; the environment and atmosphere is really much more suited to me than a research lab. Moreover, this is, so far, the best job I’ve ever had.
Seriously: “Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the noseâ€â€say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep waterâ€â€the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve. The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up into the brain, where it continues the damage, ‘basically feeding on the brain cells,’ Beach said.” [via Yahoo/AP]
Erik has his 4-month checkup yesterday. He’s at the 95th percentile for weight, length, and head circumference. In fact, his head is bigger around than my neck!
First, there’s a book for introducing adolescent girlsâ€â€girly girls, at thatâ€â€to Dungeons & Dragons. If John Baichtal’s anecdote is any indication, it seems to be able to accomplish it’s mission. Moreover, Wil Wheaton’s teen son seems to have something going with a hot D&D girl at his school.
I recently downloaded pilots for some of this fall’s new tv shows from Amazon Unbox to watch on my TiVo. I’ve used the Amazon service before, so that’s a story for another time. But the shows I watched ran the gamut from the worst to the best of what television offers.
Lawyers bill their time in six-minute (one tenth of an hour) increments. Performance is judged largely on how many hours you bill in a year, and bonuses are tied to reaching some goal for billable hoursâ€â€that goal is typically a very large fraction of the number of hours a normal person works in a year, sometimes more. In other words, there’s a great deal of pressure on lawyers to maximize their productivity and bill as many hours as possible. So what I saw in the bathroom today shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
I’ve had a sort of blog fatigue recently. I think it’s partly a result of not having anywhere near as much free time to spend on it, but it’s also because of what I had wanted my blog to be. When I first started four years ago, it was largely because I gotten one of the first camera-phones, and I wanted to post pictures from it to the web. I also posted some stuff because I thought maybe some folks would be interested in a chronicle of grad school or something; I didn’t want my blog to just another self-obsessed online journal. Clearly I was deluding myself.
