The Disk Keeps Spinning

I don't know if Macs do this, but every Windows user must be familiar with those mysterious moments when the hard disk just keeps spinning, spinning, spinning. You're just typing something routine, trying to click on a web link, or perhaps not even touching the computer at all -- just reading what's on the screen at the time -- and there goes that hard disk, spinning, spinning, and more spinning. If you succeed in clicking on a link or typing a few characters, the machine reacts with agonizing slowness, as though it's fitting in your requests in those few spare moments it has in between its own, far more important business. You want to press a big red button that would tell your computer, "stop whatever you're doing and pay attention to ME!" Eventually, some minutes later, the hard disk stops spinning and the computer gets back to normal, as though it remembers that it's supposed to at least pretend that you're boss. Needless to say, that's what I'm going through right now.

What are our computers doing during these mysterious spinning moments? Is it a computer's form of exercise? Are they carrying out secret instructions from some distant user? Or do they have their own agendas -- some grand, unknown computation that they are calculating, all in league together perhaps, linked up over the Internet, which will reach its fruition at some moment known only to them?

You might think that if you aren't even touching the computer, and if you haven't even asked it to do anything, it would sit at the ready, awaiting your next instruction. But you'd be wrong.

Dumb Smart People

You might think that an organization of law professors would know how to conduct business in reasonably smart ways. But you would be wrong.

I just got a message from the AALS -- the Association of American Law Schools -- asking me to update my information in the AALS Directory of Law Teachers. In the past, they've snail-mailed every law professor a paper form to be filled out and returned. This year, I believe for the first time, they've switched to an electronic system. The e-mail asks that we each login to the AALS website and update our information electronically.

Great idea. There's just one thing. To login, we need our username and password. These were included in the e-mail. And guess what? Both the username and password are trivially deducible from the law professor's name. I won't post the exact details, but let's just say that I now know the AALS username and password for every law professor in the country. I could change any of their directory entries. Any of them could change mine. Well, actually, they couldn't, because I immediately logged on and changed my password. But I bet 98% of law professors haven't done that yet. So if you'd like to go crazy with the AALS Directory, now's your chance.

This has got to be the worst security system ever devised. I e-mailed the President and Executive Director of the AALS to suggest that they shut down the system immediately and keep it down until they institute proper security. I'll let you know if they respond.

Onward to Vista

I finally made the big switch to a new computer with Microsoft's Windows Vista. "It's all about the wow," said the campaign slogan. Frankly, "wow" is not the term that comes to mind when I use Vista -- it's not that different from XP, when you get right down to it.

But one difference, aptly spoofed by Apple in its "security" ad, is Vista's habit of asking you to confirm that you actually want to do what you just asked for. This is to prevent some evil worm from taking over your computer and doing nasty things.

But my question is this: if a worm can sneak in and tell your computer to reset your modem (say), how long will it take before the worm learns how to simulate the "confirm" approval? I'm guessing this is a lot of bother for not that much actual security.

Excellent Vacation

I'm back from the outer banks. What a great time. Gorgeous beach. Fabulous beachfront house. Perfect weather. Wonderful girlfriend.

I took a break from work, of course, but also a break from news, from e-mail, from blogging, from Internet surfing, from caffeine, from care, worry, and distraction. Who needs them? At work I check the headlines every hour, and my e-mail multiple times per hour, and for what? It's an obsession I would be embarrassed to admit to if it weren't so common (check out David Cole's recent piece in the WaPo). We should all relax a bit and work as though we were on vacation and just didn't have instant Internet access at all time.

Oh, I'm sure I'll be back into keeping up with every twist and turn of the news soon enough, but it was nice to be free of them for a week.

Mostly I sat on the beach and read. I read so much for work that it's difficult to read for pleasure during the term, so vacation is a time to read voraciously. I can recommend Wizard of the Crow, the latest from exiled Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. For an author whose best known work is called Petals of Blood, it's quite a departure -- much more humorous than upsetting. It takes a while to get going, but I was quite absorbed by about halfway. I also read Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, which I found in my library and realied I'd never read. Obviously not literature, but not bad for its genre. Certainly beats Grisham's stuff any day.

Also went swimming and hit a few golf balls. But mostly it was beach, beach, beach.

And I am embarrassed to admit this, but I took pleasure in noting that, even though the weather really couldn't have been more perfect all week -- absolutely cloudless skies and temperatures in the low to mid 80s -- it clouded over considerably on the day I left, and heavy rain is forecast for today and tomorrow because of tropical storm Barry. Why does that sort of thing make one happy?

A Visit to Paradise

Faithful readers, if you are upset that I have provided no content this week, forgive me, for I have been visiting Paradise, or, at least, that portion of Paradise known as Duck, North Carolina.

In this little corner of Heaven, life is truly a beach. The Outer Banks spread for miles in both directions, and nature itself has blessed the week with a cloudless sky and balmy temperatures. The rented beach house is splendid and even the water warmed up midweek for some lovely swimming.

But there is very limited Internet access. That's why I've been away from blogging. And there's not much cell phone access either.

How pleasant, really, to take a vacation not only from work but from e-mail, voicemail, news, and Internet surfing. Constant communication and the Internet are blessings, but also curses, in that they allow work and care to absorb all one's time. How often do you check your e-mail? How often the news headlines? And do you really need either so frequently? Getting access to them about once every two days reminds me how much time and mental energy I waste on them. The messages and the headlines are there for me when I get around to them. On vacation, they dance to my schedule, not me to theirs. An attitude to remember upon one's return.

More on the time stamp

OK, OK, I see now that it was my responsibility to tell Blogger that I was now posting from Eastern Daylight Time, not Eastern Standard Time. So I guess this post took a somewhat unfair dig at Google. But still, hmm . . . . couldn't Google's Blogger program have guessed that I, in the Eastern time zone, just might, possibly, maybe, have moved my clock forward on the same day as every other American as mandated by Act of Congress? Did I really have to tell it that I was not staging a one-man protest against the time change and still keeping myself on Standard Time while everyone else was on Daylight Time? As an old colleague of mine used to say whenever he made some similarly absurd adjustment to his computer, "someday computers will do this for us."

Google Stung By the Clock Bug

By the way, I'm not really posting at 6:15 am. Google just hasn't adjusted its clock for daylight savings time. I've adjusted my clocks, and I'm not a powerhouse technology corporation!

Microsoft Tightens Its Grip

I always knew the day would come when I would be forced to use Microsoft Word whether I wanted to or not. Well, that day is just about here.

I've always used Wordperfect. It's the superior product. At least, it was the last time I did a serious comparison -- I have to confess that I'm about three product generations behind on both products (my employer still supplies me with Wordperfect 10), and for all I know Word has caught up with or perhaps even surpassed Wordperfect. So what I say may not be true any more. But really, the "reveal codes" feature of Wordperfect makes things so much easier. And Wordperfect is (or was) much better for footnotes. Legal writing is footnote-intensive, so this is important. And if there's one thing I really hated about Word (again, for all I know this is fixed in the most recent version), it was that if you try to delete from where you are to the end of the text in a footnote, you get the message "This is not a valid action for footnotes." You have to delete from where you are to just before the end. Sheesh. As though the software couldn't be set up to do that for you.

Anyway, I now have nearly 20 years of investment in Wordperfect. I know the keys, I know the tricks, I know how to use it. I've got nearly 20 years of files in WP format. Changing would be a royal pain, especially since WP to Word file conversion doesn't work very well.

But here it comes, I'm just going to have to change. The problem is that everyone else uses Word. It's what the economists call a "network effect." Part of a law professor's life is submitting written work to others, and all the others expect the work to be in Word format. If it's not, it causes problems.

In particular, every law review I know about now uses Word. When a law review accepts your article, the first thing they do is convert it to Word. Formatting disappears, footnote cross-references disappear, other problems arise, it's a pain.

But even with all that, I've just been putting up with it, but now, the end is in sight. Law reviews increasingly insist that articles be submitted in Word format, electronically. So long as I could submit on paper and get my articles accepted, I could put up with the annoyance of conversion difficulties afterwards. But being disadvantaged in the acceptance process is too much. I'm just going to have to switch.

It's a pity that Microsoft gets so much advantage because it's a monopoly. But once pretty much everyone is using Word, there's a substantial disadvantage to being in the minority. I've held out for a long time, but I can see I'm just going to have to switch.