Say Goodbye to the Bugs

It's finally getting a little quiet around here with the leaves turning color and the air cooling to a crisp.  It also means that the cicadas that live in the tree right outside my window are finally falling silent.  That's one set of the bugs that have been plaguing me here as I continue to get everything ready.

I've also worked out a number of technical bugs that have held me back.  I've plugged the pipeline allowing me to convert recordings to MP3, which was such an incredibly easy fix that I'm embarrassed that it held me up.  I've also figured out answers to my image and music issues.  The last technical glitch is ambient noise which is partially dealt with by the passing of the cicadas, but I'm also working on a collapsible rig to assist with that.

Another big bug in everyone's bonnet is the extremely accelerated rate of change present today.  Most of that has to do with the current economic downturn and the resulting media play the economy is getting with the presidential election.  Law firms and lawyers are also going through a number of changes due to market forces.  The first large change was the amount of chatter generated by Professor Bill Henderson's blog post on the rise of the bi-modal distribution in salaries.  I would like to take more time in the near future to discuss his findings, but for now I'll just say that the amount of discussion this generated has been eye-opening.  But Professor Henderson did not stop there and his posts kept coming and coming.  Before we could digest the ideas presented by Professor Henderson, the economy hit us very hard.  Firms have broken up, delayed incoming classes of new attorneys, fired dozens of lawyers and then Wall Street blew up.  Market forces are in play and they are going to change the way law operates as a business in the same way that market forces drove up associate pay and partner profits.  There will be much to discuss.

But the biggest bug has been myself.  In late August I started a contract gig that quickly fell into a hard burn of 80+ hour weeks and that just sucked the life out of me.  That job is over now, another victim of the credit crunch.  While it might happen for a week or so in the future, I do not want to go this long again without placing something in the feed.

You'll hear from me soon.

-Kevin

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