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The lack of blog updates is due mostly to my intense studying for the Massachusetts and Connecticut Bar examinations. Tomorrow is the BarBri midterm. A lot of my classmates have adopted the style of cramming before their tests. I’ve been steadily keeping to the paced program. I know that my brain cannot absorb large amounts of information at once and retain it. So a last minute cram is not that helpful. The way you learn from BarBri is failure. You get questions wrong in certain areas, you find your weaknesses and you fix them. In law school we learn to fail and fail quickly. Everyone starts out thinking they’ll get a 4.0 and be at the top of the class. Turns out that doesn’t work when you are on a curve. However since you are working so hard you just pick yourself up and continue. You don’t get on the journal you want, you keep going with another one. You don’t get the job you applied for? You apply for more. You get a bad class grade? You learn from it then you move on. I’ve had a few bad practice problem sets, some really good ones, and many that sit in the middle. So I’m not terribly worried. No matter how anyone does on the practice, by putting in the work they can do better on the final. Failure is just part of the process.

I thought that this interview with UConn President Susan Herbst was exciting. I’ve been critical of the tuition raises at UConn especially in light of the current economic climate. However after President Herbst explained that many undergraduates were unable to complete their degrees in time and therefore were paying more I think that its more justifiable than it used to be. Herbst made a case for ambition and noted that here we have an uneasy relationship with it. Having spent four years in Massachusetts I think she managed to hit the nail on the head when it comes to our respective cultures.

I have been a fan of Soundcloud for a while now. Basically it is a YouTube for audio content. The iPhone application allows you to record audio and upload it directly to your account. Poking around it you can find some interesting interviews. Robert Scoble has technology related interviews with people involved in funding start-ups. However I especially enjoyed the discussion of the HBO Game Change movie, which I have embedded below.

The thing that amazes me the most is how many people that own iPhones I can casually ask whether they have enabled iCloud and they say they haven’t. Sometimes they are not even sure what iCloud is. iCloud is Apple’s free service for storing backups of your stuff online. By enabling it you save the space on your hard drive and you no longer have to worry about what happens if your iPhone dies. So far I’ve had two die on me and after signing into iCloud it took an hour to download all my data and then it was as if my entire phone was restored from the dead. No extra time spent configuring or do anything else.

Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis have some comments about life and success. Both of these guys think luck plays more of a role than we admit: