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As a gadget geek people tend to ask me what they should get or consider getting others for Christmas. People have different price ranges and preferences but I think that it is worth highlighting some of the underrated products:

Many people believe that politics and government are far removed from their daily lives. Some people’s only exposure to civic involvement might be when a candidate knocks on their door. However there is another easy way to get involved locally. Towns and cities have commissions and committees that work on projects and are responsible for administering regulations in a wide variety of areas. This means that you can often find one that fits your skills and interests. In my home town of Wethersfield the members of these committees are people found and recruited by the political committees and then their appointments are usually confirmed by the town council. It is not often easy to find people to serve, so once a seat opens it is not hard for most citizens to get some kind of appointment.

I grew-up with the Internet and one of the strongest ethos that I benefitted from is the online community’s open source culture. Computer nerds or geeks love chatting and posting online where they can discuss the latest technologies and share neat hacks and solutions to their problems. As a student I spent time learning Linux, eventually settling on a distrobution called Gentoo where I even contributed bug reports and fixes. My age at the time did not matter, in an open source model your contribution is reviewed by others and if it works they accept it.

As a law student I had to research and write a paper for what was termed our upper-class writing requirement. The difficult part of writing papers in law school is finding novel material to cover. Fortunately the copyright seminar allowed me to explore an area of interest that I had without needing to be novel. So I researched the history of first-sale doctrine and made an argument that we should have one for digital goods. The first part of the paper is a review of the current law, and towards the end I lay out my proposal. Since I doubt this would merit publication I uploaded it to Scribd for your enjoyment.

After I got back from my trip to Las Vegas the other day I finally had a chance to try out the new cleats I bought for my cycling shoes. I use Speedplay X 5 pedals and have been pretty happy with them. Their best feature is that they’re fairly easy to clip in and out of. However in the past month or so I’d been popping out of them with my right foot. A scary thing if you’re going up a hill. When you use these pedals you are both pushing and pulling with your legs to get the bike to move. However after a twenty mile test ride the new cleats and regreasing the pedals seemed to fix the problem. So I put it through a real stress test yesterday: a 42 mile ride.