As promised, I finally dusted off the links on this blog. The categories are updated and the dead blogs are removed. I apologize if I left your site off or miscategorized your blog. Let me know!
As promised, I finally dusted off the links on this blog. The categories are updated and the dead blogs are removed. I apologize if I left your site off or miscategorized your blog. Let me know!
So I realize that the current comic-booky layout is not working for anyone, and that my writing is sparse lately.
I know, I’m sorry, now please stop sending me hate tweets. Direct your fury to Huma. Thanks.
Internet privacy is like a living room window: people occasionally glance over if the curtains are open but most of us do not shut the curtains for fear of someone trampling across the yard and peering in.
We are more likely to shut the curtains when the living room is a mess, when we are naked, beating our step-children, or otherwise having a private moment, but most of us don’t barricade ourselves in our homes for fear of being seen from the street.
I somehow feel the need to write this post once a season, usually after a lawyer messages me regarding a bikini picture on this site.
My full post about branding and this blog is here, but I can be concise, I hope…
Most blog readers are familiar with mommy bloggers like Heather Armstrong, Ree Drummond, and Maggie Mason, but for some reason the legal and advertising industries are uncomfortable with real personal blogs written by law students and marketers.
Professionals expect law student blogs to either be poorly disguised resumes or anonymous blogspot accounts that strictly focus on the law school experience.
Blogs by advertisers are supposed to regurgitate Mashable’s biggest stories with the occasional foodie or knitting post. These bloggers need to appear hip, techy, and yuppie… in an urban outfitters outlet sort of way…
I need a FAQ page on this blog. I usually respond to questions via twitter, but my new readers keep asking the same question: “Why don’t you write more about dating or work?”
My answer: discretion. This blog is fun, but not sloppy.
Contrary to popular belief, there is a filter here…well, sort of. One trick I learned as a resident assistant in undergrad is that clean living is the simplest way to avoid projecting dirt, so I try not to do anything that I would have a problem with broadcasting on the world wide inter-web.1
That means that there is less to filter, which my life easier, because filter refills are expensive…
I haven’t grown lax on the blog…well, sort of… you see, there’s an overhaul coming. The photoshoot is scheduled tomorrow. The inspiration is Ke$ha. This is exciting.
Everytime I sign into facebook I see a combination of the same trashy ads.
Several readers have asked why I am not participating in a “best of blogging” competition for law student blogs. The answer is simple: the competition is a scam.
It works as follows:
NoName Legal Website (NLW) needs visitors. NLW has no credibility because it is a content aggregator and offers little (or no) original content. Snooze.
But NLW has a plan! Lawyers and Law students love competition and arbitrary rankings. Heck, all the law schools in the country tout their US News Ranking while simultaneously bitching about how ridiculous the rankings are.
So NLW creates its own rankings of the top law school bloggers. NLW informs the bloggers of their nominations through pingbacks and emails. The student bloggers mention the competition and link back to NLW. The new traffic helps NLW build a reputation and to compensate for its lack of original content.
NLW now has visitors without paying for advertising space.
Explaining social media tools to someone who doesn’t use them is always awkward, but I’ll try anyway.
I use social media tools to make my life easier. This is how that works:
The blog:
Twitter lets me instantly connect with friends, professionals, and others. Twitter is less harassing and time consuming than an IM conversation, and a great way to meet new people, especially other law students and lawyers.
There is a lot of noise on twitter that I don’t subscribe to. I don’t follow people who only retweet news stories, stock prices, quotes, or “deals” that no one cares about. It’s like subscribing to junk mail. And to that I say, “Bitch, boo, bye.”
Twitter, is not (for me at least) a popularity contest to find the most followers. The important part about twitter is connecting with real people. And if I also happen to get a coupon from a local pizza place then that’s just an amazing bonus…
The ultimate way to connect with locals. Foursquare uses my phone’s GPS to locate me and attaches that location to my tweets.
Foursquare also tells me who else is at my location and has allowed me to connect with coworkers and neighbors who I would otherwise not have met. There has been a recent stink over privacy concerns, but it’s simple to give the address of a nearby park or public place when you’re at a friend’s house or at home.
If someone was really going to rob you or stalk you, they would (and could) do it without the assistance of Foursquare. This is why the new Taser X3 is super affordable and comes in cute “fashion colors.”
Where it all comes together. Chances are that you are reading this post on facebook, or have become my facebook friend after running into me on Foursquare or Twitter.
My facebook account is constantly updated with posts from my blog, Foursquare, and Twitter. This is incredibly convenient because people just have to look at my facebook page to see where I am, and what I’m up to.
Giving my friends this information makes my life easier because my friends know when I am available. The running-updated schedule makes people more likely to respect my time and less likely to pester me when I’m busy. The updates are also conversation starters and invitations for my neighbors to join me at local cafes and bars if they are in the area.
My social media connectivity never feels like a “big brother” or exhibitionist situation because all of these applications require an affirmative action to update. This makes a true, unintended, overshare uncommon. Which is why you won’t know if I’m constipated at a rat-infested 7-Eleven restroom unless I post it (which I won’t, don’t worry.)
My life is made easier by sharing more information rather than less. I got used to living in the proverbial fishbowl as a resident assistant in undergrad, and living in the fishbowl is rather comfortable.
I share what I want to, and I find that perpetual connection with others is far better to being out of the loop.
I spent some time going through the archives this evening. This blog starts during my freshman year in college and it is sobering to go back and re-read the entries.
I was surprised when I saw this picture from around my 20th birthday:
That was only three years ago, and so much has changed. I am not going to live in the archives, but it is nice to know that the posts I write today will have the same time-capsule effect as my odd-ball college posts.
College was fun. There were car-crashes, parties, music, caffeine, and a lot of junk food. There was also Matt, who (along with Carlos!) is one of the must-see people during my upcoming trip back to Miami.
The people I remember as freshmen are college seniors now. Most of my college friends have already graduated, moved out of Florida, and gotten jobs or breast implants…the blog and facebook allows us to stalk keep up with each other, even if we don’t “stay in touch” regularly.
Chronicling the present here makes moving forward that much more exciting because I know in three more years I can look back on today and remember what it felt like to be 23 in the city.
We’ll see how this goes.
Every time someone asks me about my New Year’s resolutions, I think about this Brenda Ueland quote:
“When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won’t do the thing.
“If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it.
“And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years – the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.”
Damn straight.
I prefer keeping a private bible: a little list of goals, and a few quotes. It keeps me mindful and focused, and works.
One of my goals1 is to write here more often. There were few substantive posts last semester because I was either studying, or working, or in a state of irritation2 or pettiness.
So, the goal, or resolution, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it is to live a life that I can blog about. This means I need to develop a better immunity to life’s daily annoyances2 and be as positive as possible without parroting Wavey.
We’ll see how I do.
1 Lest I say resolutions…
2 The things that I was preoccupied with were not blog fodder – subjects impolite to write about and things that I suspect I don’t want to remember, ie, being annoyed at the boyfriend for not calling, insanely loud girl at work and her liquid leggings, off topic guy in class, etc.
Domain anonymity: I have recommended using the domain upgrade feature from wordpress.com in the past. I used the wordpress domain upgrade feature when I first started this blog and I was happy with the service.
When I moved to hostmonster.com I saw an option to purchase “domain privacy” which is something that wordpress did not offer… and that is when I realized: Oh my god, my home address and phone number was public information for anyone who did a WHOIS search. Security breach!
I’m going to let all of you wordpress users finish hyperventilating.
What can you do? Well, I’m not sure if there is an answer other than switching to a domain provider that offers a privacy option.
The second, less scary, announcement is a little more techy and obscure. I’ve switched the permalinks around on this blog so a link like:
http://www.memosandmirth.com/?p=208
is now…
http://www.dennis-jansen.com/humor/legal-humor/on-the-record-civpro-conlaw-and-torts/
The old numerical links should forward. And it not… meh. Whatever.
It’s a SEO thing. Increases ad revenue and pays my bills. If your blog is hosted at wordpress.com then it should do this automatically.
I have two twitter account.
My @dennisjansen account is for friends, news feeds, and celebrities that I follow closely. It also updates my facebook status, so my tweets are less frequent.
I update my @dennisjansen more frequently, add people more freely, and use the account to interact without cluttering up my friend’s facebook feeds.
I’ve taken the approach of adding everyone who adds me on @dennisjansen, and this is a mistake, because not all twitter-friends are created equal.
Here is an example of the types of tweets I see through @dennisjansen:
These are the types of tweets that I see on @dennisjansen:
Needless to say, I have to wade through a lot of crap on the @dennisjansen account.
The point of the @dennisjansen account is not the amount of followers, but the ability to interact/network with more people. All off these marketing, news-aggregating, all around crappy twitterers are cluttering my feed, and some weeding is in order.
I’m going on an unadd campaign!
See also:
These people are not worth interacting with or following.
Bitter Lawyer has released a list of its favorite law students and I’m on it! Vöt!
For those of you living under a rock, Bitter Lawyer is a legal entertainment website which includes a ton of hilarious top 10 lists and videos.
The rising number of google search hits I am getting for variations of “Dennis University of Minnesota law student” is probably a good indication that more UMN 1Ls are discovering the website.
Hi.
A few quick things:
And if you feel inspired to start your own blog, read over this list first so you won’t get in trouble.
Welcome, and go Mondale High!
Are you looking for some poorly written angst-laced posts? Well I have got a treat for you!
No.634 now contains my archive of posts from senior year of college.
Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone hung out with me.
It all started when I decided to transfer my dennis-jansen.com domain to hostmonster (which hosts this site). The transfer deleted a significant number of images from my blog archives because the images were hosted on the old server. Basically, all the posts from first semester had lost their images! And I can’t just let my archives get sloppy because a lot of pre-law students read blawg archives, especially right before law school. And I like to show I care. Really…
Most of the images were on facebook, so I went through the tedious process of downloading a shit-ton of images from facebook and re-uploading them to wordpress.
As I reconstructed my archives from fall semester, I realized that this blog started in an odd way. I used Livejournal during college, and began the earliest incarnation of this blog during the summer before law school.
For a while, No.634 was my “law school only” blog. I kept a personal blog in addition to No.634.
The closer I came to starting law school, the more I found myself posting the same content to both blogs – the line between “blawg-worthy” and personal-blog-worthy blurred, and keeping two blogs seemed, well, stupid.
So I eventually gave up the personal blog and started blogging exclusively here. But the early archives of No.634 still retained that odd, stuffy “business only” feel. So, to give everyone a more complete view of where I came from (ie, my angsty, annoying roots) I have added my senior year to the archives. And yes, they are tragic. Enjoy!
I just read the Above The Law story on the 1L deferrals at the University of Miami’s law school, and I thought, “Hm. That picture looks awfully familiar.”
That shouldn’t have been a surprise, since I took the picture last summer.
Remember, if you’re going to swipe content, it’s polite to link.
By request, 5 reasons why I blog:
The best part of having a blog is the journaling effect. My blog is a type of scrapbook/diary. I blog about what happens to me so I can remember these stories later and share them with others (ie the big semester reviews here and here.) Journaling is a cumulative thing – what seems inane today might turn out to be an important part of a bigger story.
I learned this in undergrad when I became a Resident Assistant for a freshman floor.
I wrote:
I seriously have the coolest guys on my floor. I think I lucked out. I’m really proud of them and so grateful that I got the best guys in Hecht. Everyone is interesting, they get along with each other, they are wild but not in a bad way, we don’t have that many serious writeups, and I think they’ve realized that I’m not an asshole.
A few weeks later there was a huge football game and I wrote up over half of the guys on the floor for drinking. That started a year-long feud with some of the freshmen that culminated in them throwing a mixture of poop, urine, and beer down the hallway towards my dorm room. The best part about that was that the floors in the dormitory were not level, so all of the nast flowed into the room next to mine.1
Fail bratty freshmen…fail.
But at one point I really felt that I had the coolest residents in the world and you couldn’t have told me anything different. If I didn’t record those feelings I certainly wouldn’t have remembered them. That’s the journal effect, and I think it’s important.
When I tell someone that I will “keep in touch” I mean it. My blog allows me to keep in touch with relatives, friends, and former classmates. People don’t feel like I “disappeared off to law school” and I don’t have to have those epic catch-up phone calls anymore. The blog lets people read up on me on their own time, and allows acquaintances to stay in contact without that awkward stalking-feeling that comes with looking at someone’s facebook wall…
The blog is a convenient way to get to know my classmates, especially those from other sections. What usually happens is that a classmate stumbles across the blog, reads it for a while, and then starts commenting or strikes up a conversation2 at school. Some of my classmates vicariously experience the journaling benefits of the blog because they are reminded about all the funny stuff that happens to us at school, like The Crash or When Jill Became “That Girl.”
Managing your own web presence is crucial. Maintaining a blog helps check rumors and misperceptions and allows people to have a reliable source of information about you. Sure, some of my professors are mortified that I post about going to gay clubs, getting shot, and my run-ins with the neighborhood druggies. I hear this all the time:
Professor: “Your blog! Gasp, what if a prestigious employer read these things? You’re ruining your career!”
Am I? My theory is that any employer (professor, classmate, etc.) will quickly realize that I’m the drug-free, designated driver type who mostly blogs about school and his dog. There’s a difference between writing about the remmidemmi and being a part of it. Besides, if an employer is completely scandalized by this meek little blog then I probably wouldn’t be a good fit at that firm anyway.
Yes, there’s an amazing community of law school bloggers. I have a good chunk of them linked on the page. It’s always interesting to read about people going through the experience at different schools. I think it informs and enriches the law school experience to read student blogs. As a single male, I definitely think about all the female law students raising children (such as her, her, her, her, and more…) before I ever dare bitch about being busy in law school. I’m sure that I wouldn’t have this perspective but for blogging. And remember your community is not limited to law students: cool undergrads, reporters, political columnists, and yes even amazing local bands all have blogs.
Those are my reasons for blogging. I think it’s time more people join in on the conversation, and start blogging.
1 I’m not starting the “the dorms at UMiami are unruly chaos” rant but lets just say it’s hard to get punished for anything really…
2 Sure, there are people from other sections that read the blog and never comment, but I prefer people to know more about me than
The highlight of my evening was that facebook allowed the registeration of username shortcuts at 11pm.
So of course “Jansen” was taken by some Asian dude.1 And for whatever reason “Dennis” was unavailable, but you can catch me at http://www.facebook.com/dennisjansen. Original. I know.
Add me, eat, and be merry.
1 “Jansen” is a common Asian first-name. Don’t ask me why.
Dear RSS/Feed subscribers,
Minnesotans joke that there are two seasons: winter, and road construction.
As homage to the craters that Minnesotans swerve around every day, I decided to impart my own bit of digital inconvenience1 to everyone: No. 634 has moved!
And yes, a redesign will follow. No.634: Season II is coming shortly!2
The redesign will feature pictures taken by the absolutely fabulous Eric James of TwinCityScene.com.3
1 And no, this construction isn’t state-sponsored…I’m not part of the stimulus package…I think.
2 I should add a crazy subtitle like: “Res Judicata Heat” or something…
3 Which is the best part of the redesign considering that I have to go in and manually fix a boat-load of image links. The site is at half speed for a hot minute…
