NEW BLOG

Visit www.jcdugan.com.

F/T job opportunity

Decent starting salary, benefits, professional office environment…administration and client support in Cincinnati, OH.

E-mail joseph.c.dugan@gmail.com.

I have completed my law school applications.

I applied to ten schools–a couple of reach schools, a couple of safety schools, mostly schools I see as a good fit for one reason or another. The majority are in Ohio, although I applied to a school in California and one in Pennsylvania. I’m not sure how all of this will pan out–but my numbers are solid, and so I am optimistic.

It’s snowing today. How’s the weather in your neighborhood.

I keep forgetting that I have a blog.

I really ought to be more dilligent about updating…

LSAT Victory

I received my score on Friday. 164: that’s 90th percentile. Given my score and my uGPA, I should have a variety of competitive offers to evaluate this winter.

I’m very excited. All the studying seems to have paid off.

One of my favorite memories from this past summer: eating cayenne roasted peanuts and sipping an iced tea while studying for the Logical Reasoning section at the Hyatt Regency on Jeju Island.

(Too many prepositions in the previous sentence.)

I love the taste of peanuts–and of success.

Leasing

If all goes well, I’m signing an apartment lease this afternoon. It’s been a chaotic week, but it’s exciting to have some semblance of structure in my life.

Now, I need to find a new job to go along with my new townhouse…!

If the good lord meant for man to fly…

Of course, there are tremendous advantages to living in a global society; we see and experience things our grandparents only imagined, if that. And I’m very grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to see a bit of this planet we call home.
That said…international travel is a wearisome business. It’s profoundly hard on the body–on the soul even–to cross time zones, to arrive at a distant destination earlier than you departed for it, to spend hours cramped on a dwarfish seat between unpleasant airplane people, delirious and sleepless.
It just takes so gosh darn long to recover. Which is why, I suppose, I’m up blogging at 2:30 instead of in bed with my wife like I ought to be,
Ah, well. Such is the price we pay for a life worth living. Here’s hoping for faster jets–or softer seats, anyway–in the years ahead.

A few helpful Twitter resources…

I’m still kind of new to the “Twitterverse,” but I think I’m starting to get the hang of things. The following are a few tools I’ve found very helpful as I’ve worked to build a decent following and a credible reputation. Perhaps they will help you, too?

1) FriendOrFollow.com. I’m not one of those users who follows a bunch of accounts only to delete the ones who don’t follow me back the next day; I hate Twitter spam. But I have found FriendOrFollow.com to be helpful insofar as I’ve attempted to weed out some “dead ends” and so forth.

2) TwitterSheep.com. I love the “tag cloud” visualization format. It’s a quick and easy way to see how I’m managing my tweets–and adjust if appropriate.

3) TwitDir.com. Helpful for category searches, such as “journalism” or “marketing.”

4) MrTweet.com. I log in to Mr. Tweet at least three times a week. “He” consistently produces good leads for me; many of these follow me back.

Some general tips on being a good “twitterer”:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/26/pirillo.twitter.tips/index.html

Are temp agencies relevant in 2009?

I’ve set up accounts with several of the more prominent ones recently, but I haven’t seen very many postings; at one particular agency–supposedly an international leader–there were 6 or 7 jobs in Metro Detroit, all of them blue collar or technical in nature.

I’m sure this is partly a consequence of the bearish employment market.

But could it be that employment agencies have, in this era of job boards and aggregators and corporate Web sites, more or less outlived their usefulness?

I’m not sure…

Hangeul International?

This is a first: hangeul (한글) as an official language outside of Korea.

http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/08/117_49729.html

Most experts agree that Asian languages are among the most difficult ones for native English speakers to learn. Certainly, this is true in the case of such E/SE Asian languages as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, with their complex alphabets and subtle phonemes.

But Korean is remarkably easy; it took me about three hours to learn the alphabet well enough to read most signage, and after a few months of practice, I was able to correctly reproduce most Korean words using hangeul.

While I doubt that Korean will ever achieve the international notoriety of, say, Japanese or – for that matter – English, I hope usage of the language continues to expand as Korea’s global reputation increases. It is a scientific language, and a precise one – and it’s fun to read / write.