I believe there may be two or three people who actually visit this page once in a while to see if there are updates (others read on RSS, which I think is the better way). This message is for those of you who actually load the page: Don’t click on the random photo near the top of the page. It will take you to my now-retired photoblog, and then you’ll quickly be redirected to some sort of pr0n site to which you probably don’t want to go. I will try to fix this soon, but first I have to figure out how the heck some hacker made this happen. I assume it’s some sort of exploit of the randomization code that makes the photos change. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, you spell meringue m-e-r-i-n-g-u-e. Just so you know.

Also, this writ of supervisory control was the highlight of last week.

Alas, I just discovered the blogger formerly known as Audacity (formerly, long ago, here) has quit blogging and deleted her blog! If you visit her site, this is all you will see:

Audacity was one of the blogs I’ve been reading regularly since starting as a PD so I will be sad she’s no longer there to offer her tidbits on football, travel, and indigent defense. Plus, she only recently responded very helpfully to my whining about never going to trial and now her post is just gone, pfft! Like it never existed.

Deletion. It’s powerful.

In her final post (which I luckily was able to see thanks to a cached RSS feed), Audacity said she might be interested in an anonymous group PD blog. Perhaps its time we start one of those? I’m not sure how it would work, but it could potentially be interesting.

Ah, I don’t know. I do know that I will miss you, Audacity!

Last week’s inbox brought the latest installment of the ABA Weekly Journal Newsletter. Inside are interesting tidbits about “big brother” facial recognition software from Micro$oft, some slightly interesting whining from biglaw associates about the gruntwork they no longer have to do¹, and a Blawg Directory that lists 200 “Criminal Justice” and 12 “Criminal Procedure” blogs.²

But the really interesting bit in the newsletter is the story of a law school grad on a campaign to talk people out of law school:

“I’m on a one-woman mission to talk people out of law school,” she tells Law Blog. “Lots of people go to law school as a default. They don’t know what else to do, like I did. It seems like a good idea. People say a law degree will always be worth something even if you don’t practice. But they don’t consider what that debt is going to look like after law school.

“It affects my life in every way. And the jobs that you think are going to be there won’t necessarily be there at all. Most people I know that are practicing attorneys don’t make the kind of money they think lawyers make. They’re making $40,000 a year, not $160,000.”

Ah yes, so true. I do love my job. I do. What I don’t love is the debt it took to get it and the feeling that I will never escape or retire that debt. Ugh. I don’t even like to think about it.

I haven’t paid up my ABA dues for this year but so far I continue to receive stuff from them as if I had paid. I don’t see much benefit from being a member of the ABA, but, speaking of debt, I do lament being unable to afford NACDL and National Lawyers’ Guild dues. Where do people find the money for these professional organizations? Grr…

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1. I like the one who had to “appear and bail out clients who managed to get arrested late at night.” I thought I could be disbarred for bailing out a client!↩
2. Who knew!? A couple of interesting finds from a quick browse include Simple Justice, a NY criminal defense blog w/a slightly academic focus, and the Cook County Public Defenders blog, to which I really should probably pay more attention. There’s also the No Montana Death Penalty Blog; it’s not very active, but good to know it’s there. Michigan Public Defender also looks promising (I love it when cops testilie!, but again, not very active. ↩

Congratulations to all of this year’s Rodney Award Winners—the very best of the public defender blogging world. All winners are now linked in the blogroll on the lower right so I (and you, if you want) can get to know them better in the coming months.

While I think all the winners have great blogs, I really think Woman In Black should have won her categories and even been a contender for Best Blog overall. Every post she writes is just fascinating to me — great insights into the law, the practice of law, and important bits of life, as well.

But it was a very high-quality field. If you’re a reader looking for quality writing about the work and lives of public defenders, you’ll find plenty among this group. Again, congratulations to all!

the imbroglio is currently experiencing technical difficulties. The site is in the midst of it’s own little imbroglio, it seems. It will be back as soon as its humble editor figures out wtf is wrong w/it. Someone out there is probably sorry for any inconvenience, but around here we’re just pissed and unhappy. Helluva way to start the new year.

UPDATE: Things seem to be fixyed. Still don’t know what was wrong, but in the process of trying to figure it out I updated to Wordpress 2.3.2, which destroyed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin that I was using to tag posts, so now you’ll see most posts have an ugly [tags]whatever[/tags] string at the end of them. If you know the solution to that little problem (like how to turn those strings into actual useful tags again, please let me know. Note to self: Be careful how much you rely on plugins!

Slow day at the office? Got a minute to spare and share some love before the year ends? Then go vote in the Rodneys, the public defender blog awards. Vote here today!

The 2007 Public Defender Blogger Awards, aka, The Rodneys, are now in full swing over at Public Defender Stuff. I’m flattered to see that the imbroglio was nominated for Best Writing in a public defender blog. It’s very sweet of whomever made that nomination, but the days in which this blog featured anything close to quality writing seem long gone. I still harbor tiny little glowing embers of hope that someday, and someday soon, I will be able to find a way to return to writing here with the frequency and relative substance that I once did, but for now I must face facts: This blog has been in slow decay since I started working as a PD and I just haven’t quite figured out how to balance everything out yet.

With that in mind, I hereby heartily support Scoplaw or Woman of the Law, both of whom far surpass me in style and substance. And, of course, congratulations to Scoplaw, who just was officially sworn in to the practice of law in Florida! Woot!

I would also nominate Woman In Black, whose posts are almost always both entertaining and informative, w/a good mix of personal and professional content that keeps readers interested and also gives them lots to think about for their own lives and practice. Highly recommended!

Recently the imbroglio began suffering from double-posts and other technical glitches. Those were solved by a PHP hack and an update to the Sideblog plugin that powers the “little imbroglios” in the sidebar. But those fixes caused a new problem: clicking on various pages (e.g., quotes or archives) would produce a 404 error. Not good.

For my own records, and in case anyone else out there experiences the problem: The 404s are caused by a conflict with the latest version of Sideblog (3.8). As i.ndustrio.us explains, when you create a page, Wordpress associates it w/the category you’ve chosen as your default category for posts. If that category is also the category you’ve designated as your “asides” category in Sideblog, then the page will not show up and will produce a 404. I imagine this will be fixed in future versions of Sideblog, but for now, the solution for me was to delete the old pages, change the default category, create those pages again, then reset the default category back to what it was. It’s a little cumbersome, but doesn’t take as long as you’d think.

(This moment of geekery has been brought to you by the letter S.)

I do not know why some posts are appearing twice. I do not know how to make the duplicates go away. I do not have the time to track this down right now. I do not like it. Please, someone, make it stop.

I’m thinking maybe it has something to do w/the fact that I can no longer post from ecto, either, which is also very not good. If you have any suggestions for alleviating these technical difficulties, please share!

UPDATE: Maybe this has fixed it.

UPDATE II: I failed to upgrade several plugins after the last Wordpress upgrade. Oops. I thought this blogging thing was supposed to be simple!

It seems the students currently attending my alma mater¹ are finding themselves w/far too much time on their hands.

Introducing Not the Bene at GW Law, a sort of blog/newsletter filled with satirical and humorous stories about the life and times of GW Law School. If you’re a recent grad, don’t miss the revelations about Prof. Friedenthal² or the lowdown on Mr. Cakelove.³

Best of all, the recent riff on the “Cart Lady” also links to a discussion board thread listing reasons to attend GW. Suddenly I can’t imagine how I could have ever regretted going there myself. [tags]humor, GW[/tags]

1. I think “bountiful mother” is really over the top as a moniker for a school you’ve attended. Perhaps that’s why only pretentious putzes — such as myself, apparently — use silly latin phrases like that.↩
2. To me Friedenthal will always be the kindly man who taught me almost nothing about evidence, but that may not have been as much his fault as mine.↩
3. I miss Cakelove and I think I was only in there twice. It’s not about whether I went there, it’s about the fact that when I lived in DC I could have gone there any time I wanted. Now I can’t. Nostalgia blows.↩