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On Sunday I finally graduated from law school. Those three years fly by so quickly. A graduation is a conflict of emotion: excitement for the next adventure and also a feeling of sadness as I will be leaving the school I loved so much and many friends will be moving away. I was lucky enough to be joined by some family friends at the ceremony and then we went out to dinner afterwards. My parents even surprised me with a beautiful cake that had an oreo frosting filling in the center that was delicious.

The bittersweet part of a graduation, especially from law school is that as soon as you finish bar review begins. I’m still working on my job search and finishing up the last parts of my Connecticut bar application but next week I will have to start studying for the Massachusetts and Connecticut bar exams full-time. I opted for the BarBri program that most students sign-up for. It is expensive, nearly $3000. However they give you all the books, lectures, and other material you need to pass.

I of course decided to geek out and install the mobile app on my iPhone. The app lets you to play the video lectures and tackle practice questions. I decided that I wanted to watch the lectures on a bigger screen so I bought the Apple HDMI adapter for the phone and plugged it into the television on the porch. The picture quality is not quite as good as the screen on the phone but it is fine for the BarBri videos. It certainly makes it easier to pay attention to than the little phone screen and is less distracting than streaming it on my MacBook. My friends assure me that I can work on my own time with the video lectures and need only attend the live classes for the simulations, but I will probably go to the first one to check it out.

There’s nothing terribly exciting about bar review. It’s just something to grind out. So do not worry, I will not post about the intricacies of agency liability or sixth amendment rights.

Back when I was thinking about running for graduation speaker I asked the library archivist to pull some of previous speeches from the law school archives. I thought that this one, which was the first student address, was good. The UConn Law Facebook Page adds the following tidbit:

Did you know a student address was not always part of the Commencement ceremony? Dean Blumberg first proposed the idea of having a student speak in January of 1982 and the question was put to campus-wide vote. 45 people said they wanted a student speaker, 42 said no. With the vote that close the committee decided against having a student speaker for the class of 1982. A year later feelings changed and Willa Perlmutter gave the address posted below.

[scribd id=93424259 key=key-1w93tjrfx0rorevc6apw mode=list]

With the end of school coming up I have been pretty busy. I took the morning Saturday to volunteer at the Connecticut Democratic State Convention. It was an early morning, I woke-up at 6 a.m. and started helping out around 7 a.m. However it was fun and I got to see some old friends. The lull of posting will probably continue over the next week as I hustle to finish up my remaining papers for school but I wanted to share this video of Chris Murphy taking the stage and the beginning of his victory speech at the Democratic State Convention. The convention hall was emptying out by the time he gave it but it was a good speech.

I was looking at buying a scanner like a Fujitsu ScanSnap. They come highly rated and my thought was that it might tame the large amount of paper accumulating on my desk. However I recently became aware of scanner applications for the iPhone and decided to test a couple. The first one I tried was JotNot. It worked decently but if there were too many folds or a document was crinkled then the text would get too light in parts. This made some of the scans unusable. After doing some research I saw people recommended TurboScan and so I gave that shot.