Tyger is a great short film by a Brazillian, Guillherme Marcondes. You can watch it online at various bandwidths, or download it for viewing offline.

Tyger an interpretation of Blake’s marvelous poem of the same name:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

[Read the rest of the poem here.]

There are no words behind the film, just sound and music. . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association Canadienne des bibliotheques de droit is hosting our annual conference May 6 to 9th at the wonderful Fairmont Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa.

The theme of the conference is the clever “CAPITALizing on Change” (en français: “CAPITALiser sur le changement”). Peter de Jager, one of my favourite speakers and an expert on change, will be our kick-off speaker talking on “Managing the impact of technological change in law libraries”. I am excited about this and the rest of the program, so it is going to be a challenge as usual to decide . . . [more]

Those of you who use Firefox might like to take a look at an “add-on,” as the extensions and plugins are now being called, that lets you customize your Google pages to some extent. CustomizeGoogle (what else would it be called?) boasts the following features:

Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you’re typing)

Add links to competitors

Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images

Removes image copying restrictions in Google Book Search

Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https

Block Google Analytics cookies

Hide the Gmail spam counter

Make URL previews on sponsored links visible

Another interesting article from the Toronto Star:

“Social networking rivals porn on Web” (April 23rd) discusses how web traffic to social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook) is coming close to the numbers attracted to online porn sites. According to market research firm HitWise, porn’s dominance on the Internet is being challenged mainly by MySpace, the most popular website in the US. The article even hints at the influence of porn sites on the current crop of social networking sites. . . . [more]

The Ark Group is putting on KM Legal 201: Moving Beyond Technology (Determining the future of your firm’s knowledge management) on May 17 in Toronto. The list of speakers is as follows:

– Ted Tjaden, Director, Knowledge Management, McMillan Binch Mendelson LLP
– Joshua Fireman, Vice President Market Development & General Counsel, ii3
– Marcia Cooper, Director of Knowledge Management, Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP
– Norman Letalik, Partner, Managing Director, Professional Excellence, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP
– Elizabeth Ellis, Chief Knowledge Officer & Director of Research, Goodman and Carr LLP
– Laurence Detiere, Partner, Director of Knowledge Management, Davies

Ever since Robert Scoble sent out the Twitter message on April 7th that “Jaiku is better software than Twitter“, fans of Twitter (and Scoble) have been looking seriously at the new kid on the blog, Jaiku. . . . [more]

News is slowly trickling out on the web, see Riskin and Gratsch, about a symposium at Georgetown Law on the topic of Publicly Traded Law firms in the US. (Bruce MacEwan’s post, one of the key participants, details included…).

Taking place on Apr. 3 & 4, 2008, and titled “The Future of the Global Law Firm,” the discussion will address Sir David Clementi’s Report of the Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales, and the potential for these types of reforms in the US legal market.

We have discussed the . . . [more]

A wit once said that the UK and the US are two countries separated by a common tongue. That comment is equally applicable to aspects of the legal system shared by the US, the UK and Canada. 

What’s below is an example of why it isn’t safe to blithely assume the seemingly similar is similar.

Can anyone imagine untenured Canadian legal academics undertaking a study whose question is: why do motion and trial judges write judgments? Can we assume that admitting that that is what they were working on wouldn’t advance tenure prospects? If they mentioned that to the Dean, . . . [more]

Yesterday at its annual conference, Internet2 announced Internet data transfer speed records had been broken in December. From the article Researchers Break Internet Speed Records at SFGate.com by AP Internet Writer Anick Jesdanun:

A group of researchers led by the University of Tokyo has broken Internet speed records — twice in two days. Operators of the high-speed Internet2 network announced Tuesday that the researchers on Dec. 30 sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols.

The next day, using modified protocols, the team broke the record again by sending data over the same 20,000-mile path at 9.08

Given the discussion in the Globe and Mail and in Parliament about the Canadian-Afghan arrangment for the transfer of prisoners taken by Canadian troops, I thought readers might be interested in the governing document itself. The Arrangement for the Transfer of Detainees Between the Canadian Forces and the Ministry of Defence of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, between the Canadian Forces and the Minister of Defence of Afghanistan can be found on the website of the Department of National Defence. Perhaps ominously it has thirteen points. . . . [more]

The Library of Congress launched its blog this morning. See: Library of Congress Blog. . . . [more]

I’ve stumbled across what seems to be the continuation of an old feature? bug? in the accuracy of the print out-put when printing the html copy from the web. I’ve seen it once. I haven’t tested it on other cases on the SCC site.

It’s the old problem of printing html documents with the print job not corresponding to what was on the screen. 

It’s the problem of indentations in the text, as it appears on the screen – markng quotations rather than using quote marks – vanishing when the job is printed, so one loses track of what was . . . [more]