Author: F C

Columbus Day… exploring five points.

1.

It was like everything we knew
was mightily swept away…
For the rest of time..
it would be like no one
even knew we were ever here.

2. The quote is from Gangs of New York, which I just caught on cable because there was nothing else on at 2 am. The Five Points area where the final bloody showdown is now Columbus Park, which is bordered by the criminal justice system on the west, and Chinatown’s funeral headquarters to the east.

3. I went to the wake I mentioned last week for my law school friend’s mother, who had suffered an unexpected heart attack. Same funeral home, same room, same age as my dad. My friend was standing in the exact same spot I was standing on the receiving line. It was extremely freaky, but also comfortable, in the sense that I knew where everything was. I stayed from 5 pm until it ended at 7 pm. There was not much to do except to chat with other law school friends in the lobby or sit in the room and meditate, which I was more inclined to do. The Buddhist chanting Musak made me want to do something prayful, so I ended up trying to say a rosary, using my knuckles to keep track of progress. If nothing else, it made me feel like I was doing something useful. The law school gang had drinks next door at Yello Bar, a Chinese sports bar that serves Italian food. (The only other restaurant on the block, Asia Roma, is also a Chinese resturant serving Italian. They’re both good).

4. Morbid news fatigue has set in. As of a new one last week, about 10 coworkers have lost a parent or partner this year. Guatemala has 3,000 dead, Pakastan 30,000. This has even overtaken Katrina victims, Iraq casualities, and terrorist targets from the news.

5. For the one bright thing in this otherwise grey Addams Family week, 10/11 is P’s and my anniversary. We have a week of things planned, including the return to the scene of where we met, Essex; a off-Broadway show, The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, and trying out the French Culinary Institute’s restaurant, L’Ecole. She’s really the love, faith, and hope that I need in my life, and I am so happy for it.

Opening Arguments, Endlessly (NY Times)

A survey conducted by Blogads.com, which administers online advertising on blog sites, and completed voluntarily by 30,000 blog visitors last spring, found that 5.1 percent of the people reading the blogs were lawyers or judges, putting that group fourth behind computer professionals, students and retirees. The survey also found that of the 6,232 people who said they also kept their own blogs, 6.1 percent said they were in the legal profession, putting lawyers fourth again, behind the 17.5 percent who said they were in the field of education, 15.1 percent in computer software and 6.4 percent in media, said Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads. He conceded that the survey was hardly scientific, but argued that at least it undermined the popular image of the blogosphere as dominated by antsy teenagers and programmers in their pajamas, tapping away at keyboards all night.

Now, how are you counted if you are actually all of the above, like some of us here?

—

Now that we actually booked it, I hope I am not jinxing it, but P- needed to go on her annual Fall trip, and wanted a change of pace from her usual whirlwind European tours, so she opted for Honolulu. I am not going to complain — if anyone could use a spiritual retreat in paradise, count me in.

—

I’ve volunteered to mark final briefs for the Thomas Tang Moot Court competition. I had an idea that it was going to be a lot of work, but I have 7 to read, each 50-75 pages a piece. I’m glad I have 2 weeks to do it.

Network feud leads to Net blackout:

On Wednesday, network company Level 3 Communications cut off its direct “peering” connections to another big network company called Cogent Communications. That technical action means that some customers on each company’s network now will find it impossible, or slower, to get to Web sites on the other company’s network.

Power grab could split the Net

For the first time in its history, the Internet is running a real risk of fracturing into multiple and perhaps even incompatible networks.

At a meeting in Geneva last week, the Bush administration objected to the idea of the United Nations running the top-level servers that direct traffic to the master databases of all domain names.

That’s not new, of course–the administration has been humming this tune since June. What’s changed in the last few months is the response from the rest of the world.

Instead of acquiescing to the Bush administration’s position, the European Union cried foul last week and embraced greater U.N. control. A spokesman said that the EU is “very firm on this position.”

This has been driving me nuts over the past day. I’ve had to go through this server to get to the work servers from my RoadRunner connection. The Level 3 – Cogent fight is almost exactly like the same fight as the Time Warner Cable – Cablevision fight over the Yankee YES Network. Level 3 thinks that Cogent ought to pay for a “transfer” connection, where one pays the other, while Cogent believes it is entitled to have a peering connection, where one swaps connections with another for free.

This is what it is all about, isn’t it: the convergence of pay for play versus share and share alike. Open Source vs. Commercial Software. Copyright vs. Creative Commons. Cable vs. TV. RIAA vs. Peer to Peer. Telephone vs. VOIP. Convergence or crisis?

Went to a surprise farewell party in Chinatown. She’s moving to Washington, D.C. this weekend. If anyone knows anything about eating out in New York, Monday has to be the slowest day at any restaurant. This was true at the place that we went to, Harmony Palace. If it weren’t for us, they would have just packed it all in. But it was very nice to have the whole place for a fine despedida.

I still have the cold from the 26th, that continues to linger like a bad houseguest. Several of my co-workers are starting to get it, too.

P-‘s sister’s dogs spent the day on Sunday hanging out at our place; it was also the annual Blessing of the Animals that is traditionally connected to St. Francis of Assisi Day (which happens to actually be today, October 4), and P’s sister really wanted the dogs to be blessed as some protection against dog flu.

A friend from law school’s mom passed away on Friday. It was apparently unexpected, and there is so much grief. The wake is on Friday at the funeral home my dad used. The only thing to say is that this annus horribilis cannot end soon enough.

The other thing that I totally missed when I blogged on the 26th because of my sickness was the blog’s second year anniversary. Muchos kudos to SSW and YC for writing, for making up for my slack, and just being damn interesting. For all you people who bother to read our rantings (amazingly, it’s like 900 unique people a month, 600 of which are probably search engines), thank you.

Roberts was confirmed and sworn in as Chief Justice today. He definately had the credentials, a lot of things broke his way, and I’m pretty convinced that he is not going to be a Scalia. However, Senator Richard Burr’s statement during the floor debate that I caught on the PBS NewsHour describes my worry about the political process:

If we’re not careful, the best and the brightest legal minds in this country that would serve on the bench and serve with distinction, regardless of what party they’re from, when they get that call, they will say, ‘Mr. President, I want to pass. I can’t put my family through it. I can’t put myself through it. The risk of going through with it is too great to everything around me to serve my country.’

I ask all of us – what message are we sending to our children when the best and the brightest pass, when they elect not to go through the process that we in this body have control of?

I know that it what is happening right now and America is the worst for it.

I’m in an Asian Standard Time zone; I got suckered into helping a Korean group with a printing job. They farmed out the job to a high school student, which by itself is not a problem, but the student tried to lay out 56 pages using Photoshop and set the resolution to 72 dpi. Ouch. I spent the last 48 hours (2 micro-all nighters) whipping it into shape and getting it to the printer. At least I’m getting paid for it. Now that I’m trying to go to sleep, I can’t. Probably a walking zombie again tomorrow morning….

This is a catch up entry for what has been a hectic week. In this entry: making markers, birthdays by the bunch, earings by email.

1. The Mid Autumn Festival, aka Mooncake Day is this Saturday. Usually this mostly involves getting your hands on some of the extremely sweet pastry. However, it also is one of the big cemetery visitation weeks; the Chinese association that my family belongs hires a bus to take members to the plot that they own. Unfortunately, it was on a weekday, so I couldn’t go. Also, my aunt was freaking out my mom, because the last time she visited, she couldn’t find my father’s site (we don’t have a headstone up yet – it takes at least 6 months for the ground to settle before they can put one up, and someone was just interred on Saturday to the right). P- and I went the day before to check things out and put up a temporary marker so the family didn’t go into total meltdown. Thankfully things worked out, and crisis was averted.

2. Today (Thursday) is my mom’s and P-‘s birthday. P’s brother’s b-day is tomorrow, her dad’s b-day is on Saturday. This is just crazy. Happy every day!

3. Things were crazy at work this week – I’ve been getting home at 8, and P- wasn’t making it easy to get anything for her, first because she’s usually around, and second, she wasn’t taking any of my probing for desired gifts, none of which should promote her fine handbag addiction. I finally got her to say “earings”. With zero time, a need to outdo last year’s present, and absolutely no skill in picking jewelry, I went for the hail mary and ordered online from Blue Nile, after polling the women at work. Yes, it’s something of a risk; it’s something like FreshDirect picking your meats and seafood for you, but the stakes are 10 times higher. I don’t get to see the items in person, and I have to trust these people from Seattle, but they had a good online reputation, the description was detailed, and you get to see the grading ratings beforehand (for the record, they were H color, VS1 clarity). It’s actually much more information than I would have received if I went to the store myself. The audience at work voted for the platnium Princess cut diamond studs. Everything went incredibly smooth, the package arrived on time in a non-descript box, and boy did P- love them. Phew! It was actually a good price, cheap shipping (would have been free, but I was really pushing the envelope), no tax, and the product was actually better than advertised, so I recommend them, but I don’t want to see my Amex at the end of the month.

P and I drove up to the Rockefeller estate on Saturday. P and been talking about doing it all summer, and the opportunity to do it came. It is not as grandiose as the Newport mansions, but sitting on 84 acres and having an incredible collection of large scale sculptures and tapestries on the grounds that rivals the Museum of Modern Art (actually, the Rockefellers founded MoMA), it cannot help but be grand. From the main house there are underground tunnels to a “grotto”, which no doubt inspired Bob Kane and company. Recommended.

There has been much controversy the last few days about Barbara Bush’s comments on the Katrina victims in Houston. It is just rude to offer hospitality and then take on an aristocratic air. But that’s what happens when we’re fighting a war on two fronts, in Iraq and at the Gulf Coast. In both cases we’ve rushed in with inadequate forces, and now we’re literally throwing money to opportunistic corporations in cohoots with the Administration that is”conveniently” the only ones that are available to provide the supplies and equipment necessary to rebuild. Enough already.

The awful truth that the Bush family matron alludes to is that a lot of these poor people won’t be going back. Like the survivors of the Asian tsunami, the blighted land that they were on is likely to be condemned by the government and given to real estate developers. Sounds familiar?

That’s Coldplay frontman Chris Martin running back to the stage during “In My Place” at their concert Tuesday. Man, that guy is fit. After doing his usual jig for two hours with his Coldplay cohorts, he ran the entire length of Madision Square Garden (an entire basketball court), sang two more stanzas, and then ran back to the stage. We won seats in the fanclub lottery, so we had these awesome floor seats along the left aisle. He was no more than one foot away when he made his dash!

They weren’t too preachy this time around, but let the sound and the fury do the work for them. On first blush, it was the ultimate crowd-pleasing singalong audience participation event for the 15,000 person sellout crowd — “Yellow” brought the crowd’s falsetto in unison and bobbing up and down hitting yellow beach balloons popping with confetti. On the next level, Coldplay sought to be more U2 than U2, with trademark ringing electric guitar, pounding piano playing, and effective use of the behind-the-stage widescreen Jumbotron to replicate an iPod commercial. At the deepest, unconscious level, Coldplay almost seems to have spent the last ten years writing prescient songs for today’s events. The first theme of water (including “Clocks”, “Swallowed in the Sea” and “Politik”) touched upon the Gulf Coast disaster. The country cycle (“Til Kingdom Come”, “Ring of Fire”, “Green Eyes”) paid tribute to the late Johnny Cash, fatalism, and the folk influence. The songs of the third theme of response (“Yellow”, “In My Place”, “Fix You”) are our calls to action.

Tears stream down on your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face
And I–

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you.

On many levels, and that I could share it with P-, this concert impressed me greatly.