New Blog Theme: Law Actually 2.0

Yes, it’s official: Law Actually 2.0 has arrived.  My previous blog design had been in place since May 2007 and it was coming to the end of its planned two year service.  I felt it served Law Actually well and was obviously based heavily on the visual style adopted by the film, Love Actually, to which this blog duly owes its name.  I know – I’m not particularly proud of it!  Alas the style was getting a little long in the tooth and I’ve wanted a 2nd sidebar to accommodate the growing content for a while now.

So, yeah, here it is.  This style wasn’t my first choice.  I had initially opted for something a bit more laid-back and, dare I use the word, grungy!!  You can check that style out over at my other (and now defunct) blog, F1 Central.  It’s a kind of ‘what might have been’. 

Feedback from my ‘focus group’ suggested it wasn’t ‘lawwy enough’ and perhaps was a touch too grungy.  I don’t know: I still kind of like it. 

So, I duly went back to the drawing board and came up with another design for Law Actually 2.0.  I reverted to a style which incorporated red as a key colour and law-ed it up a bit more.  It was going to adopt a filmstrip design as part of the header and footer, but ultimately I felt that little ‘Polaroid stills’ looked better.  Some of my annotations seem a bit lame but it’s a work in progress, I guess.  Plus, with this style, I can change the header photos and annotations as and when the mood takes me, which, if history is anything to go by, will probably be quite often. 

The new design isn’t perfect and I’m still fiddling here and there. Not-so-fun-fact: I’ve given myself no end of trouble by word-wrapping post photos to the text (particularly blockquote text) for the past year and a bit which I’ll probably have to go back and change.  It looks really bad in Internet Explorer, but, I guess, if you’re using that browser, you’ve brought it on yourself.  I’m just kidding.

Friendface

Friendface - you'll feel so social! from Rimvydas V. on Vimeo.

 

No doubt many of you will recognise this from the latest series of the IT crowd, but it’s such a good parody of social networks -and particularly Facebook – that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share it on Law Actually.

In the explanatory video of what Friendface is all about, an analogy with contagious illnesses is drawn.  And I think that’s about right for a lot of social networks out there.

Some of my favourite quotes:

“Each Friendface page is like a petridish filled with Friendface germs.”

“It’s basically a diseased face of friendship.”

“Just sign up to Friendface by giving us all of your personal information.”

“We own everything you put on friendface – it says so in the terms and agreements. But don’t worry about that, we won’t use it to do anything bad – we promise!”

Later in the actual episode, Moss bemoans that his mother has signed up to Friendface, meaning he must endure yet another channel of communication with her. When colleague Jen suggests that that can only be a good thing, Moss’ reservations quickly become understandable when he reveals she’s set her online mood to ‘sensual’.

Love it.

You just can’t beat this stuff.

My legal space/3rd IT law paper

Not so tidy, eh?  I came in for some stick for my last legal space photo, with allegations to the effect that I’d ‘staged’ it.  That wasn’t true – it was merely taken on one of my ‘neater’ days.  But anyway, here’s another photo just to demonstrate that I’m not always like that.

This pretty much sums up my whole experience with this 3rd and final IT law paper.  I feel it really ‘speaks’ to the progress I’ve made and sense of direction I’m experiencing with my thesis.  Oh yes!

I’m about to start the ‘writing process’, so, you know, lots of luck and motivation needed.

Sigh.

Facebook Friend Saves Teenager’s Life

I know I rag on Facebook quite a bit, but this story is truly amazing.

“A British teenager’s suicide note on Facebook sparked a transatlantic rescue mission which saved his life.

The 16-year-old boy’s threat to kill himself, sent to a girl 3,600 miles away, in Maryland, America, was the starting point for an extraordinary race against time.

When she read his private post at 11.30pm on Wednesday night his American friend told her parents, who called the local state police.

The only details they were given were his name and the fact he went to school in Oxforshire [sic].

Within one hour the girl’s distress call was passed all the way across the across the Atlantic to Thames Valley Police via a White House Special Agent, the British Embassy in Washington DC and The Metropolitan Police in London.

Armed with scant facts from his Facebook profile, Thames Valley Police Officers turned to other internet sites, including Google and online electoral roll search services to trace him.

They managed to narrow down the boy’s home to eight possible addresses, dispatching officers to each one.

At 2.30am, three hours after his message was sent the boy was found at the fourth address, alive but suffering from an overdose of prescription pills.

The boy, who has not been named, was rushed by ambulance to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where he made a full recovery.”

You can read the full story here at The Times.

More courtroom shenanigans

Gary Slapper’s most recent entry in his tireless exploration of those weird and wacky cases that are peppered throughout case law touches on a rather mischievous topic: bare faced cheek.

From the Times 02/04/09:

Faced with a tough legal challenge, a law academic should be able to strip away anything superficial and quickly get to the bottom of the matter.

Megumi Ogawa, a lecturer in law, did that unconventionally when representing herself in an Australian trial recently. Unimpressed by the prosecution’s case against her, she lowered her trousers and bared her buttocks at the judge.

For presenting her rebuttal in that way, she was given a predictably poor mark and jailed for four months for contempt by the Brisbane District Court.

[D]uring the trial, she was forcibly removed from the court several times for sustained high-pitched screaming, making statements calculated to bring the justice system into disrepute and violent wrestling with security officers.

(As opposed to gentle/peaceful wrestling, I suppose?)

All this talk of mooning at a judge reminds me of a Christmas card design stocked by professional gift specialist, Carbolic Smoke Ball:Great stuff.

More from the Times:
The award for most impassive unclothed contempt goes jointly to Mssrs Gohoho and Gough. After being ordered to pay £50 into court as a security payment in 1964 for a forthcoming action, Mr Moses Gohoho manifested his despair in the High Court in London by removing his trousers and underpants and lying on the court bench in front of the judges.

What an exotic name: Moses Gohoho. It rather lends itself to some kind of smutty play on words – Austin Powers’ style. But what an eyeful it must have been for the judges, who surely couldn’t have missed it; unlike magistrates, High court judges wouldn’t dare be caught ‘resting their eyes’. Cue the previous post!

Magistrate merely ‘resting his eyes’

From CPD Webinars 30.03.09:

Magistrate, John Harrison, is being investigated after it was alleged that he fell asleep during a teenager's trial for a suspected assault.

Mr Harrison was sitting with two colleagues at Lancaster Magistrates Court when the defendant's mother noticed that he had closed his eyes.

She informed her son's solicitor who proceeded to make an official representation to the court.

Mr Harrison denied having fallen sleep, but following discussions with both his colleagues and a court official decided to halt the case after a day and a half and schedule a retrial for next month.
Mr Harrison told his local newspaper he had merely been resting his eyes.
"I was not asleep, but I rested my eyes for five minutes or so," he said. "It was just a normal reaction in the middle of the afternoon.
"The court was warm - the heating was on and the sun was pouring in through the window.
"I was still listening to the defence solicitor speaking to the defendant and I was able to take down some notes related to what was said.

Resting his eyes? Hmm, we’ve all heard that one before. Quite why Mr Harrison would then go on to explain that the heating was on and the sun was making the court hot, I don’t know. Surely even a humble magistrate is capable of recognising that painting such a picture is unlikely to help his cause.

Google April Fools’ a flop? Ingenuity has left the building

 

I can’t be the only one thinking this.  Recent years have been so good on the Google April Fools’ front but this year’s offering falls disappointingly flat, courtesy of CADIE.  In 2007 we had the brilliant Google Flushdrive (which essentially involved flushing cables down a toilet for connectivity) and in 2008 we were treated to the ingenious Google Custom Time which ‘allowed’ you to back-date emails – primarily for mischief making.  Both ideas were great April Fools’ trickery.

This year, however, Google have unveiled CADIE Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity for April 1st.  And it just seems like a massive damp squib to me.  It’s something about, um, oh go and read it for yourself.

There’s a quirky blog deliberately designed to look amateurishly bad which features Cadie the panda – go figure.  It’s ‘something’ I guess…. if you like that kind of thing.  As if that were not enough, though, there’s a YouTube channel and some explanatory text.  Hmm.

And that’s it?  Yeah, that’s really ‘it’.

Seriously, Google: you’ve let us down for April Fools’ this year.