The Connected Lawyer

I have read seveal of Charlie’s other books and I would recommend his book Six Bad Things to anyone who has any interest in crime fiction. However, I was not thrilled by his last stand alone novel (The Shotgun Rule). Thus I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up his latest novel, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.

What I got was full bore Charlie Huston. I am pretty sure that my affinity for Charlie Huston novels lies somewhere in the fact that they are dialogue heavy and most of the dialogue is either cynical or sarcastic or both. Those are traits I can appreciate and they are present in spades in this book.

The plot involves an unemployed slacker who gets a job as someone who cleans up the remains of dead people from crime scenes. Of course, he gets tangled up with an attractive woman and a smuggling deal gone bad.

The plot, however, is not what makes this book good. Instead, it’s the characters and the dialogue. In his review of the book, Stepehn King said:

There are many things to love about Charlie Huston’s fiction–he’s a brilliant storyteller, and writes the best dialogue since George V. Higgins–but what pushes my personal happy-button is his morbid sense of humor and seemingly effortless ability to create scary/funny bad guys who make Beavis and Butthead look like Rhodes Scholars.

That’s about as accurate of a decription that can be found. Plus, who am I to try to improve upon what Stephen King said.

If pressed, there are two things that I would have to say about this book. First, if you like crime fiction or you like good dialogue, read this book. Second, if curse words make you uncomfortable or excessive violence bothers you, don’t read this book. If you have read any of Huston’s other books, you know what I am talking about. If not, just be warned that his books contain a lot of violence and swearing.

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Carol’s Corner Office Blog recently had a great trip on how to add checkmarks to an Excel spreadsheet. Carol explains:

I receive lots of e-mail from subscribers asking me if they can put checkmarks into the cells in their MS Excel spreadsheets. The short answer is yes!

There are several ways to place checkmarks in the cells of your MS Excel spreadsheets. Follow the steps below to learn how:

Note – Depending upon your version of MS Excel and Windows, you may not have some of the fonts below.

1. Type a lower case a and change the font to Marlette or Webdings.
2. Type an upper case P and change the font to Wingdings2.
3. Hold down the ALT key and type 251.
4. Click on Insert | Insert Symbol and scroll down and click on the checkmark. Click on Insert | Close | Enter.
5. Hold down the ALT key and type 0252 and change the font to Wingdings.

I know that this is probably not something you need to do often, however, if you need a checkmark, you now know several ways to accomplish this. Check out Carol’s complete post. It contains 6 different ways for you to add checkmarks to your spreadsheet.

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It is no secret that I am a fan of efax services. If you are thinking about switching to an efax service, you should check out FaxCompare, which compares the various efax services available.

The site has good information and I recommend it for anyone thinking about signing up for an efax service. The only downside that I see to the site is that it does not yet compare all of the efax services.

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At times I am amazed at the technical incompetency of some people. Recently the AP was able to discover the confidential details of  the settlement between Facebook and ConnectU because whoever “redacted” the confidential information did not actually redact the information. Instead of properly redacting information from the document, the person simply put white boxes over the “redacted” information. Because of this, “The Associated Press was able to read the blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document.”

Additionally, there are multiple other ways in which the information can be read in Adobe Acrobat. In fact, if you choose Document > Examine Document, in Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat will create a report that lists all of the “redacted” information.

To view the document yourself, click here.

The reality is that it is not too much to ask for basic technical competence from people who are publishing allegedly redacted documents. It’s one thing to not have a full understanding of all of your computer’s programs. However, if someone is going to release allegedly redacted documents on the internet, it is not unreasonable to have that person actually ensure that the documents are redacted properly. The thing that makes this worse is that the document could have been redacted in Acrobat easily and, if done with the redaction tool, none of the confidential information would remain in the document.

In a great coincidence I attended an Adobe webinar on redaction just days after the AP story broke. If you would like to learn more about redaction, you can check out information from that webinar here.

Hat tip to PDF for Lawyers for first linking to this story.

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