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I use the Debian distribution of GNU/Linux on various machines at home and at work. I've been using this distribution since the 1990s, and have been keeping it upgraded over various versions, so my configuration on my laptop has become increasingly customized and comfortable. I'm currently using the squeeze version (with some backports from wheezy). For a graphical user interface, I use XFCE4, version 4.6.2; the latest stable version available through Debian is 4.8. One of the nice things about this version is that it allows me to visually monitor my machine's performance as part of a panel, using a GNOME applet called "system monitor"; this GNOME applet integrates with XFCE via a bridge piece of software called xfapplet.
Note that I'm "one version behind" for both the Debian and XFCE projects. The reason I'm not upgrading either set of software is because the xfapplet bridge that allows me to use GNOME system monitor does not exist in these new versions. I have heard that GNOME has been changed dramatically in its new release (going away from "applets" and using a new paradigm called "indicators"); this may make it difficult for the maintainers of xfapplet to upgrade it to the new versions of GNOME and XFCE.
My solution is to make my own version of the parts of GNOME system monitor that I use. I will start with the excellent xfce4-cpugraph-plugin applet. From there, I intend to make two sets of changes:
One caveat: the current plugins are designed to work not only on Linux but on various other operating systems that XFCE works on: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Sun/Solaris. I am not going to make the "clone" plugins work on any kernel other than Linux. Also: I plan to modify the upstream code in the XFCE repository, not the Debian package. I may be able to help the Debian maintainer package the projects, if that helps.
Want to help? Please let me know.
I brewed ales and meads with a group of friends for about two years, starting twenty years ago. I stopped after a while; friends moved away, and it just didn't fit into my schedule for a while. I'm pretty happy to be starting back up.
This weekend I brewed two fermented beverages: a mead (technically metheglin: fermented honey, ginger, and cinnamon), and a porter ale. The latter is a dark ale with moderate bitterness, and was the source of some trouble. I was up until 4am nursing a cranky batch of beer, and my bathroom is currently (pleasantly) scented with the aroma of hops and barley.
The porter I brewed, like most ales, is made of water, sugars and starches from malted barley, and hops (for flavoring and preservation). This concoction is called the wort. When the wort is cool, yeast is added; the yeast will convert most (sometimes all) of the sugars into alcohol. The hops release their oils during the boiling process; these oils impart flavor to the finished beer. The yeast, as part of its fermentation process, generates carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
This fermentation process usually takes place in a carboy:
. At the top of the carboy in the picture, you can see what's called an air-lock; this allows the carbon dioxide to escape, and prevents oxygen (and anything else) from coming into the carboy. When things are going well, the air-lock will make a bubbling sound, often about once per second (sometimes more frequently, especially at the beginning, and sometimes less frequently, as the sugars are converted). If the carbon dioxide cannot be released, the air-lock may be expelled rather forcefully from the carboy. While the wort is fermenting, heavy particles sediment out to the bottom (the trub), and lighter particles and oils rise to the top (kraeuzen).
It was the kraeuzen, the bitter oils and particles, that clogged up my air-lock on the porter. I returned home from an evening out, to find the air-lock across the room, and kraeuzen all over the carboy. I attached a blow-off tube to the air-lock's stopper, and allowed the kraeuzen to continue to bubble out overnight; when I finally heard it start bubbling steadily (around 4am), I was able to re-sanitize the air-lock, and attach it back to the carboy.
Because there was steady fermentation the whole time, I'm pretty sure there was positive pressure heading out of the carboy at all times; I'm pretty sure no contaminants entered during the process. Nevertheless, I'm going to keep my eye on it pretty closely over the next few days.
If you have any questions about brewing or any recipes, please ask!
I don't want to post ad nauseum about the bar exam and my law school experience. I'm also not representing this as "how to pass the Texas bar exam" because for all I know at this point, I've not yet accomplished that. Instead, here are some classes I'm glad I took, and experiences I found relevant, once I started the bar review process.
The MPT is an exercise in which you are given a packet with some made-up court cases, made-up law(s), made-up facts, and a task, usually to write a memo or some persuasive brief. In my opinion, this is probably the most valuable part of the bar exam, especially for potential solo practitioners; it simulates what you'd have to do to come up to speed quickly in an unfamiliar area of the law in order to solve a problem for a client. I'm really glad I took an extra research and writing course, a course in "advocacy" (at the appellate level), and I interned with an appellate court. Other things that might be good for this exercise might be to clerk for a law firm, and to compete in mock trial or moot court competitions where you need to do more research and writing.
Interestingly, and just by chance, I found my internship with an immigration lawyer particularly relevant during this part of the bar exam; the specific task I had on my MPT was to write a brief in support of a client who was trying to show his marriage was bona fide for immigration purposes. It was nice to feel familiar at least with this area of law, even though all the court cases and statutes were made-up.
The MBE is a (pretty difficult) multiple-choice examination covering the basic topics you learn as a first-year student (1L). I'm really glad I took additional courses in Evidence and Criminal Procedure. That pretty much rounded out the topics on the MBE for me. I also apparently had pretty broad-ranging classes in Real Property and Torts as a 1L; often, when the review professor in those areas said "You probably didn't cover this in your 1L class", it wasn't true for our class.
Other than that, I found it really helpful to do lots and lots of practice questions, and then to review the ones I got wrong. A small number I got wrong more than once, which was embarrassing, especially because I probably got those wrong on the bar exam as well. Oh well.
The Texas bar exam asks 20 questions about criminal procedure and evidence, and 20 questions about civil procedure and evidence. Each question is answered in up to 5 lines of handwritten text. I was pretty happy again for having taken Evidence as well as Criminal Procedure. I have the feeling (and no first-hand experience to back it up!) that participating in mock trials, trial advocacy training, and as an intern in a trial court or district attorney's office would be helpful here too.
The Texas subject exams are 12 essay questions over two three-hour sessions. Just doing that much writing was pretty exhausting. The subject areas were pretty broad, too.
During the bar review, I was again pretty thankful for my 1L class in Real Property because we covered topics such as landlord/tenant law. I'm also glad I took Family Law, Trusts and Wills, Federal Income Tax, Business Organizations (which included a chapter on Agency), and Texas Consumer Law. Because I took those classes, those sections of the bar review were truly review for me.
Areas I didn't take classes in were Oil and Gas, Guardianship, Secured Transactions, and Commercial Paper. I found those pretty easy to pick up, partly because I found them pretty mechanical, and partly because I could focus on them and just review the other subjects.
If your school offers bar prep classes, such as for the MPT, you might consider taking them. On the other hand, I really can't imagine taking the bar exam without taking a bar reivew/prep course, so if you are sure you will take a review course anyway, then maybe you should take more substantive courses during your time at law school. If you've got the resources, it might not hurt to start practicing MBE questions with an online question bank "ahead of time", maybe during your 3L year, especially if you feel comfortable already with Evidence and Criminal Procedure. If don't already know those areas, then wait for the review course to teach you the basics in those subjects, because otherwise the review questions are likely to be frustrating.
One last thing. I ended up choosing to hand-write my exams, mostly because I'd already seen the bar exam software freeze up or fail for various classmates during final exams at law school (in fact, it even happened to me once). Although I still wonder if that were the right decision, I doubt it made much of a difference. I would have been better served doing a lot more hand-writing practice during the bar review process; most of the practice was online and typed, which was a very familiar environment. Time management is different when you hand-write, at least for me; I can type 80-90 words a minute, and certainly can't write that much. I think my hand-written essays were a bit shorter than typed ones would have been. In the end, it doesn't matter as long as I pass the bar exam; I wasn't going to get the top score even by typing, so unless hand-writing put me below the passing grade, I'm okay. Just saying if you make that choice for taking the bar exam, you might consider practicing time management while writing lots and lots of essays over a six-hour stretch.
Well, I just finished taking the February 2014 Texas Bar Exam. I'm in a strange quantum state between lawyer and non-lawyer; I feel a bit like Schrödinger's cat. The Board of Law Examiners (BLE) has my completed exam; it's sufficient to determine if I'm eligible for admission to the State Bar of Texas. The BLE will collapse that wave function when they open, grade, and scale/curve the exam. The function won't collapse for me or anyone else until May 1, 2014, when the results are announced.
There was a really interesting article in Scientific American about the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics; unfortunately, this article is now behind a paywall. What makes this interpretation so compelling to me was the confirmation that the cat knows the outcome before the box opens. Each potential observer has their own wave function; an observation event by that observer collapses the potential states of the system into an observed state for that observer. Much as the special theory of relativity describes how different observers in different accelerating frames may perceive sequences of events differently, this theory of quantum mechanics eschews a single, canonical wave function and "collapse". To me, discovering the relational theory was so freeing; the "objective" theories, including even the quite compelling "many worlds interpretation" with its infinite alternate universes (based on what quanta??), seemed to require too much compromise.
The copyrights in this material are held by Luigi Bai. The contents are licensed to you under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
