[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.
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!
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.
Recently, I was cleaning out some of my old stuff from my parents’ garage and found a lot of my old childhood books. Several of these were important in my late childhood and “tween” years, so I kept them for Erik. One is The Fallen Spaceman, whose protagonist is coincidentally named Erik; I would have saved it anyway because I have very warm memories of that book. The collection also includes my Choose Your Own Adventure books, a find that got me to wondering: have I always been a roleplayer, even before that fateful day when I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons? And perhaps more importantly, is my son doomed to be a geek?
Last week, I gave a presentation on my current research. My brief introduction ended with comments that are a mantra to many grad students: “…which will hopefully be my dissertation project.” The talk went well enough—the audience was just other grad students—and I got a lot of good feedback. At the start of the question-and-answer period, one of the girls raised her hand and asked, “Do you have a hypothesis?”
I don’t have a problem with people eating animals for food per se (although with so many starving humans, it is a tremendous waste of resources). Instead, I have a serious problem with the way the animals are treated. If you think it’s all happy cows wandering in grassy fields, you are sadly mistaken. (WARNING: Ignorance is bliss. Don’t read this if you like your meat or if you’ve got a weak stomach. Personally, I’m having a hard time keeping my breakfast down as it is). This article is about pig factory farms, but the same thing is true for beef and poultry.
The fact that I’m having a son is slowly starting to sink in. I’m trying to figure out how to brush up on my sports skills. Not that I’ve ever been terribly athletic, or that my boy will be playing any time soon, but it’s an important job for a dad.
It’s not the only one, of course. Over the holidays, I heard Judd Apatow reviewing DVDs on NPR. One of them was a documentary about a cinematographer made by the man’s son. Apatow said that one of the best parts of the DVD wasn’t even in the film itself. It was an extra about the filmmaker showing the work to his father and finally getting the old man’s approval, which in Apatow’s estimation the guy had probably been striving for all his life. It really drove home to meâ€â€as though it needed emphasizingâ€â€the importance and uniqueness of the relationship between father and son.
I’ve started that, too. I’ve been talking to the stinker a bit, and the other day I felt him kick (or perhaps punch). That was pretty cool.
A picture is worth a thousand words:
We went to see The Nutcracker last night. My favorite part is the snowflakes, but for the first time, I was also enamored of the children queuing up to get gifts from Herr Silberhaus. I was thinking about how exciting it would be to have a child on stage (Did I mention that I love ballet?). Ballerinas are adorable, of course, but I also loved Billy Elliot.
Yesterday, you were reading the mad ramblings of a mere graduate student. Today, you are reading the mad ramblings of an official PhD candidate. Woohoo!
Unfortunately, I didn’t actually get any money. Doh!
I’m really quite pleased with this. A lot of my troubles in grad school have come from a lack of a clear plan, but now I have one. And it’s not just my own crazy, hare-brained ideas; it has actual faculty input. I feel like I should have done this a year ago. But then, who knows what my project would be or if that really would have avoided any of the turbulence of the last year. Certainly the genomes that are central to my project weren’t available then.
I’m not sure what to think about this (from AP via IHT):
Employees at the Chinese headquarters of Wal-Mart have set up a Communist Party branch, the company and the party said Monday, as part of a campaign by the party to expand at foreign companies.
The state-sanctioned labor body in China set up unions this year at Wal-Marts in the country.
On the one hand, I think it’s funny (and ironic perhaps) that a stalwart of the American hegemony is playing host to the Communist Party, like they’re somehow going to subvert Sam Walton’s behemoth. On the other hand, it sort of frightens me to think of the largest employer in America, which is frequently accused of mistreating its employees, teaming up with an entity that is often characterized as faceless, conformist, and dehumanizing and is, in a very real sense, guilty of some very serious human rights violations.
I also see it as a triumph of globalization as the rampant comsumerism and profiteering of Wal-Mart has to get along with the managed economy and “new communism” of China. But if the damned Red Chinese can have unionized Wal-Mart employees, why can’t the good ol’ U. S. of A.?
