Law on Rice

Will Geer is a third year law student in Georgia, and after school he’s going to be clerking for a bankruptcy court. He’s got a blog devoted to, what else but, high tech and bankruptcy. Very clever, and very interesting.

Check it out here: http://www.thebankruptcytech.com/

A few months ago, I was really hot on Len Tillem’s KGO podcasts. I still love listening to them as a I ride the No. 14 to downtown Seattle, but now I’m on to something new (and even more famous): Gerry Spence’s blog.

Gerry Spence is  a legendary trial lawyer who lives a few states to the east of me. I love his blog because the passion he puts behind his posts are remind me of why I went to law school. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but I agree with his approach.

Oh, for the record, I still dislike the term “blawg,” but I feel like I’ll be spitting in the wind if I try to use something else.

This post is more for me than you. Deal with it. The following are some of the features I want in the new Coderights. Don’t think of this as a requirements doc; think of it as a wish list.

1. No lame posts.
2. Do a better job linking to the ip blogosphere, but do it smartly.
3. Cover stuff that matters to the Academy, but make sure the real world understands why it matters. See In re Bilski.
4. Cover the red meat the real world cares about in detail.
5. Stop trying to do it all by myself.
6. Do more for open source and more for startups.
7. Cover sexy technology–the open file format battle bored the technologists I know, if they tuned in at all.
8. Be more than WordPress or Movabletype.

I’m seriously thinking about resurrecting Coderights (my old blog about software legal issues), but there are quite a few things I want to do a differently with it this time around. Foremost among them is that I need more technology behind it than just WordPress or Movabletype.

For example, I probably will talk more about software licensing. In the past, I was frustrated when I was trying to highlight multiple pieces of text from a contract (or one court case, for that matter).

So this afternoon I’m working on a tool to help me do just that: highlight text and render rich information related to that highlight. It will use AJAX, and I will post it soon on labs.michaelrice.me.

For a little while there, I was thinking about doing it with Cappuccino, the new Objective-J based framework, but I think that will be overkill for what I’m trying to accomplish—for now, anyway.

I like to blog because I like to write, but I don’t have lots of time to troll around the web looking for “the next Perez Hilton or the next BoingBoing.” Hopefully blogs.com, a new project from Six Apart, will make it easier for me. But, then, it won’t be me who discovers the next hot new name in web celebrity.

Oh well, I’ll deal.

Plus, I’ll be using a Six Apart product again, so I can stop feeling guilty for getting off MovableType.

I’m a little bored tonight, so I thought I would play around with the avatar creator that I’ve seen around Twitter a lot lately.

I think this is as close I could get, at least since I cut my hair.

There are at least two problems. First, I can’t get the lips right. This guy appears to have thinner lips than me. I tried to pick lips that were a little, well, fuller. Unfortunately, the only options I saw made me look like the women on Project Runway tonight. Second, the green color for my eyes makes it look like my avatar is wearing colored contacts.

Should I let a thin-lipped, colored contact-wearing impostor represent Michael Rice on Twitter? Aw, why not?

UPDATE: In retrospect, I want to do something more personalized, like the picture on my home page (sorry, I still haven’t fixed Safari browsers yet).

In my never ending quest to confuse Google and my two readers, I’ve yet again changed domain names. Having been endlessly scooped on my name as a domain name, I vowed to not let it happen again this time with the release of the .me domain name.

My apologies to whoever Michael Rice in Micronesia is, but I beat you to it, fair and square.