The Rundown - August 23, 2018

  1. A Spectre is Haunting Unicode - fascinating article about "ghost kanji" in the Japanese character set of Unicode. Was just talking to class about how we build cities and legal systems through accretion, and how some provisions we may take for granted may still be there, lurking in the background.

  2. Some Friendly Advice To New Law Students - " Law school culture often wants you to hate, resent, and fear your fellow students and see them as competitors. Resist. Make friends with, and be friendly with, different people. You'll learn from them. And you'll hate law school if you buy into the cutthroat narrative."

  3. Stephen Colbert teaches a millennial how to use a payphone.

  4. Television and the frequency of sex - So it's actually Netflix or Chill. Marginally.

  5. The most fascinating (and saddest) video I saw this week:

Sapporo 2018

Hello from Sapporo. I am writing this from what looks like a Showa-era hotel, trying to have a real vacation while everything falls apart around me.

 

Haven't been here in a while. Since my last update, I’ve been working on:

1. A paper on Philippine` Copyright law for a comparative law conference that will be held in the Philippines soon - DONE;

2. A paper on the pork barrel cases of the Supreme Court, to be presented before the IACL in Fukuoka - DONE;

3. A paper for the 2018 ASLI Conference in Korea, where I try to model the statutory definition of quasi-depicts using LKIF and Protégé. - DONE

4. Another paper for on ethical algorithms - and I don't even know where to begin, I mean what was I thinking when I submitted the abstract for this one. - DONE (sort of)

5. A paper on cryptocurrency regulations in the Philippines, hopefully to be published by the Law Center - DONE

6. Workshops and exercises for public health workers dealing with legal risks of implementing the RH law - DONE

7. A courseware package for Data Protection Officers - A package of lectures, exams, and exercises. - Still Pending

8. Chapters for an annotation of the draft federal constition, which we're supposed to pull out of the hat without transcripts of the consultative committee's deliberations - Status: 🤐

The new school year is opening and I have 6 classes full of bewildered, bewildering freshmen. I have a research load, possibly a new administrative post, a part time job as in-house lawyer, and who knows how many writing and coding projects. I try to cope with new gear: like a mechanical keyboard and smart speakers. It will be the dungeon for me, but at least the chains and the whip will be top notch.

 

Kasoku

Hello from hot, humid Manila. Which is just like Singapore, except with all the murders.

For a couple of months, I was on leave, and wondering about whether I would have a place under the office's new management. (I did not).

So after a couple of weeks with nothing but books and Netflix, things are ramping up again. I'm diving deep into data privacy - writing content for a website, editing a casebook, and developing an online training course. 

I'm teaching again in the UP College of Law's shiny new BGC campus (so God help the young ones). I'm also consulting for several Law Center projects, helping out with the ASLI conference this May. Looks like things will be very busy very fast.

 

 

Shuukan

So. A couple of weeks into the new year. I have a new job, new patterns to establish. Things have not yet coalesced into a workable routine that I can schedule around from, so no crazy trips and projects for now. 

My brain is still stuck in former patterns. For three years, the task has been the composition and decomposition of arguments. I was in the argument business, peddling premises and conclusions that would justify my governments acts. It's always been a tough job. Every government is monstrous in its own way. But man, I miss the sweet deceptive pretense to the rule of law. So good luck to the new kids. 

Then for one year, my pattern was to write this exhilarating and exhausting bit of thesis about transaction security, and read books and attend classes in between. So now I take odd legal jobs that will require me to write long form text, and I take online classes because we are what we do often enough. 

Back It All Up

I once lost nearly all my data in a catastrophic hard disk failure. I was young and cocky and stupid and I did not have a backup routine. All digital artefacts of my life before law school were wiped out. And it was such a way cooler life! There were pictures of misty mountains from my SLR. There were raw audio tracks of indie bands. Then there was source code for all sorts of interesting side projects. 

Those who know me after The Disaster will remember that I was always burning DVD-R's, backing up important directories every week or whenever I reach major project milestones. What they don't know is that I was also cobbling together a poor man's cloud backup through shell scripts and an FTP server. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption that failed half of the time,  and its actual value is derived from myself learning that I should have never built in the first place. 

 

Fast forward to today. Terabyte drives are smaller and cheaper. There are plenty of cloud based storage options. I also have the good sense to buy an online backup solution rather than cobbling together my own. I've finally got a backup system I can live with, one that I can set-and-forget so that it doesn't take up too much of my time. Best of all, it's finally 3-2-1 rule compliant. Here's what I have:

Three copies: All my working files are in Dropbox's cloud and replicated across all my computers. Dropbox, however, really shouldn't be considered a backup solution. So it counts as one copy (the original). My system ensures that I have four copies in the cloud and spread through various storage media.

Two types of media: In addition to the external hard disks that Dropbox synchronizes to, I have:

  • A network accessible storage that automatically backs up my files via TimeMachine.
  • Crashplan - a cloud based backup system.
  • A couple of portable drives with TimeMachine backups, that I plug in for onsite and offsite archival

One offsite copy: Keeping a copy offsite makes sense. If your house burns down with your fancy computer and external hard disk drive - what's the use of a backup routine? Crashplan, since it hosts my files in a network far away, is my primary offsite backup. Whenever an external hard drive fills up, rather than letting TimeMachine delete the oldest backup, I'll just swap in a new drive and put the old one in an offsite storage facility. 

 

This is all probably too much for a personal backup system. Eventually, I'll scale it back and simplify it to use just one network drive instead of swapping in USB drives, so that the entire process will be fully automated.

 

 

You Can't Go Home Again

I've been back in the Philippines for more than a month now,  and I'm still feeling nostalgia for Japan. Not in the marketing retro sense of the word, but in its original Greek meaning - a painful aching to return. 

 

Cities just make sense to me. I start with the information overlay - the maps and guides, the websites and travel forums, drilling down to the street level until I get a feel for the pattern language of a city. A mentor of mine taught me about how each city is an organism with a unique heartbeat. Travel from city to city often enough and you become sensitive to the variations in these heartbeats: In Tokyo that beat was always fast, always frantic. In Kyoto it was more ponderous, like a temple bell.

So much of our selves are linked to the background radiation of our cities, and we don't realize it until we start living in another - and the change in context jars us to realization. In Fukuoka, where there are fewer cars (and most of them far more well-maintained), I discovered that my nasal issues were due to the heavy air pollution of Manila, and that my constant stress headache was linked to the hellish gridlock of my home city.

Ruby once asked me why some fashion just seemed to work in Japan but would seem crazy in Manila, where the same set of clothes are available (and still weather appropriate). The best answer I could come up with is this - the difference lies in the city itself. You can have Instagram-worthy fashion in Japan (and the US, and Europe) because the cities provide a clean background - solid lines, great lighting, interesting textures. 

But that is all gone now. The first weeks back, I felt reverse culture shock even though I knew full well what to expect: the filthy streets, the mind-numbing traffic, the lack of basic organization and service standards. Those things I can get past through. What really shook me was that, after the elections, it turns out that I never really knew my people. Even as I served them and fought for them, I had always assumed that they shared fundamental values - like human rights and the rule of law. Turns out that's not the case. I also taught I knew my family and friends. Seeing them sublimating to the mob was painful.

I thought I was going home. Everyday it feels like I ended up in enemy territory.