The Connected Lawyer

Leveraging Technology to Practice Law More Effectively

Monthly Archives: October 2008

Let Mail Goggles Save You

One of the things I love about Google is that they aren’t afraid to try something. They almost always have some cool new feature coming out of their labs. One of the latest is Mail Goggles. Named after Beer Goggles, Mail Goggles is a feature in GMail that requires you to perform a series of simple math problems before sending an email.

In the default setting, the feature is enabled only on Friday and Saturday nights between the hours of 10 pm and 4 am. The idea is that you may not be in the best frame of mind if you are sending emails at that time of night. On the other hand, Google figures that if you have the thinking skills to solve a few math problems, you can probably decide for yourself whether to send the email.

You can activate Mail Goggles from selecting Setting > Labs from you Gmail screen. Best of all, there are a bunch of additional lab feature that you can choose from in that same tab. Take a stroll through these features and see which you would like to enable in your Gmail account.

The 20th Century Strikes Again

When I checked my mail at home today I found a two inch thick book that was a gift from my alma mater. The book is an alumni directory. And yes, my undergrad is small enough that all of the alumni can fit in a single book.

When I realized what this was, I was struck by the absurdity of it. I can’t imagine how much money the school spent to compile it, to print it, and to mail it to everyone. Despite the fact that I just received it, I have no doubt that it is out of date and it will simply continue to grow more out of date as time passes, simply because people move and change jobs.

On top of that, is the fact that it is flat data, when there is no reason that it should be. Why should I have to thumb through a book to find someone’s information. It would be much easier for me if I could search for it. Speaking of searching, if I want to find a woman that I graduated with, I either have to know her married name or I have to the year she graduated and read each name until I find hers (because of course the graduating year information is organized by last name with the maiden name in parentheses).

Why isn’t this information in an alumni section on the website rather than in some dead tree version in my kitchen? Why do I have to wade through pages of names instead of simply searching for names in a database? Why can’t I pull up a list of all of the alumni who live in my city, my state, or within 10 miles of me? Why can’t I pull up a list of alumni who are doctors, or lawyers, or plumbers? Why can’t I find alumni who also attended my law school?

This could be a really cool feature. As it stands, however, it is practically worthless. I would love to see a useful Web 2.0 version this directory. Instead, what I got was the same thing that could have been handed to the first incoming class in 1954.

Safely Using Wi-Fi

The Consumerist has a great post titled The Idiot-Proof Way to Securely Use Public Wi-Fi. The article discusses a variety of VPN solutions to protect your privacy when you are using a public wi-fi connection. I have a VPN through my work. Thus I have not tried any of the listed programs. However, because I am a fan of open source software, I was intrigued with the discussion of OpenVPN. If you want to check it out, it can be found here.

Basic Tech Tips

One thing I have noticed is that the shortcuts people use to make their computing lives easier are usually things that someone else has showed them or, more typically, something they discovered by accident. I can remember freaking myself out the first time I moved my scroll wheel with my Ctrl key depressed. At the time, I had no idea that it changed the display in my browser.

In a recent post, David Pogue has put together his list of basic computer tips. The tips he lists are useful and definitely worthy of reading. Even better, however, his comments are open and he has invited others to provide their tips as well. At this point, there are almost 1,000 comments, the majority of which contain handy tips of their own.

This post from David should be required reading for everyone.

My favorites from David’s list:

You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.

Nobody, but nobody, is going to give you half of $80 million to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire…from Nigeria or anywhere else.

You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.