Monthly Archives: January 2008

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Could Someone Please Tell the Daley Center that it is the 21st Century?

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Daley CenterYesterday I had a court appearance at the Daley Center at 9:30 and then a noon meeting in the Loop. A perfect chance for me to go to court and then run upstairs to the law library on the 29th Floor of the Daley Center.

I love going up there. The views are absolutely wonderful. There are windows galore and, because of the number of windows, the library is well lit. Also there are lots of chairs and tables to work at.  It is a great place to work, as long as you are stuck with the 19th Century concept of researching only by books and taking notes only by hand.

The law library is missing two things that every library should have. First, it has no wi fi access. Peter Olson asked this same question almost two years ago. I agree with him that it makes no sense that the law library has no wi fi access.

Second, and this may even be worse, it has no electrical outlets. Thus, even if I were content to do all of my research via books (which the library has lots of), I am limited to taking notes on a legal pad, or on my computer only until the battery runs out. Is it too difficult to wire a few tables with electricity so people can practice law efficiently? Is this just too much to ask for from Cook County?

Instead of doing research in a comfortable setting with a beautiful view, I ended up in a Starbucks looking at the street. It certainly was not the best view. However, it did have wi fi and an electrical outlet.

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Thanks Rick!

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I was working with some documents in Adobe Acrobat and I realized that I needed to reduce the page sizes on some document and I was not sure how to best do it. Fortunately, Rick Borstein had the answer I needed. I hopped over to Rick’s Blog Acrobat for Legal Professionals and after a quick search of his blog, I had a solution to my problem.

This solution emphasizes one of the great features of Rick’s blog. He posts about solutions to real world problems that attorneys might encounter during their workday.  If you are trying to solve a problem in Acrobat, I recommend that you start first with Rick’s blog, before you start searching for solutions elsewhere.

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Another Story Emphasizing the Need for Off Site Backups

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I saw this interesting story about a Florida woman (Marie Lupe Cooley) who thought that she was about to lose her job. She had concluded this because she “saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job — and with her boss’s phone number listed”

So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years’ worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.

“She decided to mess up everything for everybody,” Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. “She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed.”

The twist to the news story, of course, was:

As for the job, Cooley originally wasn’t in danger of losing it. The ad was for Hutchins’ wife’s company.

However,

 The firm told FOXNews.com that Cooley no longer is employed there.

I guess that is one way to ensure that you do lose your job.

Anyway, the moral to the story does not involve the allegedly felonious acts of the employee, instead, they apply to the employer. Your employees have access to all of your data. How able would you be to function if one of you disgruntled employees destroyed all of your data?

Given that almost everything is store electronically today,  I would guess that it would take quite some time to get your office back to normal. Also, it is likely that, in some ways you would never recover from the damage.

The quote in the story I found most interesting was:

Hutchins told one TV station he’d managed to recover all the files using an expensive data-recovery service.

Here the employer had to employ a data recovery service to try to salvage his information. If, however, he had employed a proper off site backup strategy, he likely would not have had to incur the cost of “an expensive data-recovery service.” Instead, he simply could have restored his information from his off site back up.

Obviously, there are only so many things we can do to ensure that our offices do not get hit by some sort of disaster, be it fire, flood, or disgruntled employee. However, there are simple steps we can take to make sure that, in the event of such a calamity, we can easily restore our data and get back to work.

If you are not sure what a good backup plan looks like, or how to implement one, you cannot find better suggestions and directions than this post from Ross Kodner

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Has Mark Cuban Been Converted?

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I have always believed that Apple does not have customers. They have converts. In fact, I often refer to Apple fans as Macvangelists. It looks like Mark Cuban has now started drinking the Kool Aid. I can see why, of course. both the new MacBook Air and the iPod Touch are beautiful devices.

Of course, I still think iTunes sucks.

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Stop the Music

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One thing that I absolutely hate is a webpage that starts playing music when I navigate to it. This is one (of several) reasons that I avoid My Space pages like the plague. Haineault.com has a great post on this very issue.

He gives a few reasons that you should not have autostarting music on your webpage. My two favorites are:

  • your music choice most likely sucks, if not, it will be outdated soon enough.
  • if your visitors want to listen music they will listen their mp3, your site is not a jukebox. In fact they most likely already are listening music and yours is only mixing with it, creating an unbearable and unwanted musical chaos.

If this too drives you crazy, I recommend an extension for Firefox called Flashblock, which blocks all flash media from loading. You can then manually start the flash items. You can also white list certain pages so that the embedded flash works normally.

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Finally: A Dell Convertible

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Dell Latitude XTI received great news this week. Dell is finally releasing a convertible tablet notebook. The Latitude XT. The problem, of course, is that it is pricey $2499 for the least expensive option with a 1.06 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive.

One cool thing about it is that it comes standard with Microsoft Windows XP rather than Vista.

Equipping the mid tier model with the things that I want (120 GB Hard Drive, Bluetooth, 2GB RAM) raises the price to $3,203. These are great looking machines and I would love to have a convertible. However, when a comparaby equipped Latitude D630 costs about half of that ($1,617) I have to question the additional expense to upgrade to the XT.

On the other hand, the XT certainly is appealing. I would love to get my hands on one.

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Favorites: Fictionwise

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FictionwiseI love ebooks. I love the fact that, on my Treo, I can carry a several books with me as well as a multitude of short stories. If you enjoy reading, I cannot recommend highly enough that you check out ebooks. Also, if you have a PDA (or at least if you have a Palm PDA) you can easily use that device as your ebook reader. If you already have a PDA, you have no need to purchase a separate e-reading device.

Of course, having a reader is only the first step. You now have to find the books. Free books (those no longer protected under copyright law) are available at Project Gutenberg. Manybooks.net also is a great place to find free books. Additionally, my public library allows me to “borrow” ebooks, just as I would borrow a dead tree version of a book. Plus I can do this from the comfort of my own home, or anywhere else I happen to be with internet access.

My favorite source for books, however, is Fictionwise. I have been using Fictionwise since early 2003. They have a huge selection of books in a wide variety of genres. Fictionwise also allows you to subscribe to magazines such as Analog, Asimov’s, and Interzone.

Fictionwise also has a reward program that gives you a percentage of the purchase price of a book (sometimes up to 100%) to be deposited into your micropay account. The micropay account allows you to accumulate money in order to purchase items that cost less than $5. Fictionwise has plenty of these, in that its short stories often sell for about a $1. In fact, as of the writing of this post, Fictionwise has 2633 items for less than $1.

Although I love Fictionwise, that does not mean that I think it is perfect. The key thing I would like to see is a version of the website that allows me to easily search and browse the website and purchase books from my Palm. Right now, the website if virtually impossible to view and purchase from on my Palm. If they would correct this, I would really love Fictionwise.

My other complaints about Fictionwise/ebooks are directed more toward the publishers than to Fictionwise. For example, the publishers will make some volumes of a trilogy available but not all. Often this involves offering volumes 2 and 3 of the trilogy but not volume. Why would people want to read the first book in the series? The last two should take care of everything.

More comments on ebooks can be found at Rob Sawyer’s Blog in posts where he talks about Fictionwise buying eReader, Manybooks.net, and purchasing books over the air.

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It’s Been One Year

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It has been one year since I officially launched The Connected Lawyer. I thought I would take a second to detail some statistical information. In that time, I have made 182 posts. Of those posts, my most popular posts have been my series on formatting in Word. The categories that I posted in most frequently were Software, Tips and Tricks, and Internet.

The most interesting statistic to me, however, relates to the operating system used by the people viewing my website. According to StatPress (which was not operating all year) the page visits from the various operating systems are:

  • Windows XP 58.5%
  • Linux 15.1%
  • Windows Vista 5.6%
  • Mac OS 5.1%
  • Windows NT 5%

What I find most interesting about this is that three times as many page views came from people using Linux as did those from people using Vista. Also, almost as many visits came from people using Windows NT as from using Vista.

I know that I have been hesitant to jump on the Vista bandwagon. From the looks of these numbers, it appears that I am far from the only person who is avoiding Vista.

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Friday Fun: Zorn’s 50 Things

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A few days ago, Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune published his list of 50 Things he has learned in his 50 years.

Some of my favorites:

2. Promptness shows respect.

3. You can’t avoid offending people from time to time. When you don’t mean it, apologize. When you do mean it, accept the consequences.

6. The most valuable thing to have is a good reputation, and it’s neither hard nor expensive to acquire one: Be fair. Be honest. Be trustworthy. Be generous. Respect others.

8. Don’t be bothered when people don’t share your tastes in music, sports, literature, food and fashion. Be glad. You’d never get tickets to anything otherwise.

14. It’s not “political correctness” that dictates that we try not to insult others’ beliefs and identities. It’s common decency.

35. Candor is overrated. It’s hard to unsay what you’ve said in anger and almost impossible to take back what you’ve written.

49. Whatever your passion, pursue it as though your days were numbered. Because they are.

 His entire list is worth reading. I encourage you to check it out.

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Is Your Keyboard Dirty?

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Everyone once in while I notice that my keyboard gets a little dirty and key may start sticking. When that happens, I get out my can of compressed air and blow the dust and stuff out of my keyboard.

For those of you who really like a clean keyboard, however, Scott Moschella of Plastic Bugs tells us how he got his keyboard really clean: He put it in the dishwasher. I don’t know that I would recommend this approach, however it worked for him.

As he explained:

Last Monday, I spilled beer on my keyboard and received the Dishwasher advice from two very tech-savvy people.

Today, I can report that not only will the keyboard come out clean, but it will probably work once it dries completely. Every key on the keyboard works and feels just right – the Caps Lock light even works! This ‘hack’ is not for the weakhearted, and I would probably avoid putting a $100+ keyboard in the dishwasher. But if you don’t have any other options, it’s a pretty good bet.

So if your keyboard is real dirty and you would otherwise have to replace the keyboard, this might not be a bad option for you.