You can register for free and access the just-released 2008 AmLaw 100. In case you don't know, this provides articles and charts about the 100 top-grossing law firms in the United States. The charts available cover:
The new supplement to the current 2007 Federal Sentencing Guidelines Manual is now available and becomes effective May 1, 2008.
It's nice to know some things never change. Ben & Jerry's is continuing its annual Free Cone Day celebration on Tuesday, April 29th. It's not just happening in the U.S. & Canada either. You can also get free cones in:
just to name a few. I know there is a scoop of Cherry Garcia with my name on it.
But wait! That's not all. Baskin-Robbins is having 31 Cent Scoop Night on Wednesday, April 30th. They are doing it in honor of U.S. firefighters. Despite the fact that they are located internationally, they do not appear to be selling cheap scoops to honor firefighters in other countries on Wednesday. Maybe they'll be doing that later in the year.
The real question all of this poses is, "Dairy Queen, when are you going to join in on the fun?"
BuzzTracker (which was sold to Yahoo! late last year) aggregates the most popular news stories on over 1,000 topics and monitors 90,000 blogs to see who is talking about them. The site is currently in Beta and has a lot more to offer than just the feed. The feed is fun to follow, though. It's a great way to keep tabs on the blogosphere.
Here's the main news feed:
http://www.buzztracker.com/rss
Here's the legal news feed:
http://www.buzztracker.com/rss/legal_news
Et Seq. points out that you might win a print copy of the 19th edition of the The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, plus a one year subscription to the online version, by helping out the Bluebook editors. To have a crack at being one of the lucky 10 (OK, couldn't they make it at least 20?) all you have to do is take their survey by June 30th, 2008.
Terri at Et Seq. wonders if she's old since she used the 15th edition in school. I would have to say, no, Terri. I was using the 16th edition 9 years out of college (The 14th ed. came out while I was in college. Ah, I love reminiscing about ye olde Bluebook!). Now we know who's old.
I realize this is a bit late. I'm also not really sure which week this is covering, but hey, better late than never. Right? Right!
The New Urban Legends feed is basically the "What's New" feed for Snopes.com. Snopes is the site that answers the question, "Is this for real?" So, if you get one of those multi-forwarded e-mail messages that sounds a little odd, scary, or unbelievable, you can check it out at Snopes.
Here are some examples of Snopes items with a legal slant:
'Sound good? Here's the feed: http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.xml
Paul Bush of the Legal Dockets Online Blog is providing a login and password for everyone to access Legal Dockets Online for free until April 20, 2008. He's doing this in honor of National Library Week. The best part is that you don't have to fill out any forms or provide any information about yourself.
See related: Free for National Library Week 2008
Next week (April 13 - 19) is National Library Week (NLW). In years past, that has always meant freebies. This year appears to be no exception. Running a quick search, here's what I found (Granted, some of these aren't really related to NLW, but the timing's good!):
Happy hunting.
Yes, I finally succumbed to the land of Twitter. However, I'm not "tweeting" about my every life experience. I'm never going to understand that concept, I'm afraid. Actually, I'm not afraid. I'm really, really glad that doesn't make sense to me. If it ever does make sense to me, I hope one of my friends or relatives will seize my computers and dislocate my FiOS.
Instead, I'm using Twitter as a "link blog." So, my twittered links = "twinks." The twinks are to the items that most interest me from the 500+ feeds I read (with the exception of the few I may blog about). It's the one feed I wish I could read (instead of compile).
In case you're wondering why the twinks are almost all tinyurls, it's because that's what Twitter defaults to when you enter a long URL. Remember, Twitter will only allow 140 characters per tweet (I keep wanting to say twit.). So now this makes a lot more sense. Ah, it's tough when you leave the blogosphere and then try to play catch up....
If you're a Twitterer and you want to follow my twinks, you can do that at abstracked. If you want to read the feed, here it is: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/13187682.rss
The blogosphere takes itself far too seriously, so here is MiniMulvi to provide you with the legal definition for ab initio.
MiniMulvi has expressed an interest in occasionally providing additional legal definitions on AbsTracked. This should prove interesting as MiniMulvi continues to lose front teeth.
The 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial, United States (928 PDF pages) is now available via the Web site of the Federal Research Division (FRD) of the Library of Congress. The FRD site is sponsored and funded by the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center & School (TJAGLCS) Library (--TJAGLCS need to update their Web site security certificate--) and has been updated with 54 new documents.
At some point 3-4 years ago, I stumbled across a pre-defined Daily Rotation feed. Not knowing what the heck it was, I naturally subscribed to it. It has always been one of my favorites. It's a science/tech feed that produces such fabulous headlines as:
It's a heck of a lot easier than trying to set up your own Daily Rotation feed. Here's the feed: http://www.feedfire.com/site/rss.cgi?ChanContentId=004901
Thanks to Jim Milles for pointing out that you can now follow floor proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives and Roll Call votes of the U.S. Senate on Twitter. Who knew? Well, other than Jim, apparently the 164 Twitterers who are currently following SenateFloor and the 247 following HouseFloor. More people follow Jim than either of them!
I will check to see if these are being Twittered by the official offices and get back to you, but you can compare the House Twittered floor proceedings with the House Web site floor proceedings as well as the Senate Twittered Roll Call votes with the Senate Web site Roll Call votes.
If you don't "follow" on Twitter, you can still sign up for the feeds. Here they are:
SenateFloor: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/9855382.rss
HouseFloor: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7402662.rss
Update (04/05/2008): As I suspected, these are not official Tweets. They are being scraped from the official Web sites. Of course, this probably wouldn't happen if the sites added RSS feeds (hint, hint).
Since it's April Fool's day, I thought I'd provide you with a link to Lifehacker's Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks.
Oh, and if you like upside down text, check out Flip from David Faden.
![[Link to THOMAS Home Page]](http://thomas.loc.gov/images/link.gif)
