Jim is a leader in the the legal blogging world and it is an honor to be recognized by him. Also, if you are not reading his Law Practice Tips Blog, you need to start right now.

Today I admit my error. Yes, in its default mode, TinyURL still makes you click a box everytime that it generates a tiny URL. However, stopping the extension from doing this is a simple as selecting: Tools > Add Ons > Extensions > TinyURL Creator > Options.  In the Options dialog box, select the box next to “Do not show confirmation dialog apon [sic] TinyURL creation.” Once you have done this, you no longer have to deal with the annoying dialog box again.

Now TinyURL Creator is back to being my favorite Firefox extension that shrinks URLs. The main reason that it moves back into first place is that the extension has been updated to work with Firefox 3. Shrinkify has not yet updated its extension.

If you are still using Firefox 2, either extension should work fine for you. If you are using Firefox 3, I would go with TinyURL Creator simply beacuse you can install and use it without any difficulty.

Given that we have over 5,000 songs in our library, this can be a bit of a problem. No one wanted to go back through the the library and select the songs that we actually wanted to synch to the iPod. Fortunately, we had recently synchronized the iPod and it had our currently selected songs on it. After some Googling, my wife found a solution that allowed us to reselect our desired songs without spending hours going through the library again.

Her solution is as follows.

1. On the iPod, create an On the Go Playlist.
2. Go to Genres.
3. Hold the select button down for each genre until it flashes blue three times. This should add the songs in that genre to the playlist.
4. Go back to playlists and open the On the Go Playlist.
5. Scroll to bottom.
6. The last option is save. Select that.
7. Uncheck all music in iTunes.
8. Synch iPod
9. The synch will wipe all the music off the iPod. However, the playlist will show up in iTunes.
10. Open the new playlist in iTunes. Select all of the songs. Right click, and choose check selected.
11. Check any other other playlists you might have to make sure that all songs were selected.
12. Synch again.
13. Problem solved.

Mobiliti is a great program and one I recommend for anyone often has to work when disconnected from the network.

Recently, I had some files on our network that were deleted. I had local copies of the files on my laptop and I needed to synchronize them back to the network. The way that the synchronization is set up, if a file is deleted from either the network or the local drive, the other file is deleted upon synchronization. In this case, I did not want that to happen. Instead, I wanted certain local files to be copied back to the network.

I looked in the configuration settings and did not find a way to do that. I checked the online Knowledge Base and still found no solution. So I contacted customer support via email and got my answer. I am posting it here in case others need the info and so that I can find it again.

1. Go to File\Synchronization settings\synchronization tab and set it to fully interactive mode. Save changes by clicking OK.
2. Sync.
3. At the preview, select the file that you don’t want to be deleted from the real network. Right click and choose “Change sync action”
4. Set the sync action to the new desired action and proceed with sync.

Of course, not everyone will download the compatability pack. Tom Mighell, of Inter Alia, has a different solution. He suggests using Scribed.

Tom explains:

Here’s how it works. Take your document and attach it to an email. Address it to the members of your team, and CC ipaper@scribd.com on the message. Scribd will take your document, convert it to iPaper, and send your collaborators a copy of the link to the online document. And if you haven’t viewed a document in Scribd yet, you’re missing out. Scribd supports a lot of document formats, too — in addition to all Office files (both 2003 and 2007), it will convert PDF, PS, .TXT, .RTF, and open document formats.

The great thing about Tom’s solution is that you are simply adding an additional email address to your message. You do not have to take the time to manually upload the file a to a service such as Scribed or Google Docs.

As always, when using a service such as this, you must be cognizant of their terms of use to make sure that you are not disclosing confidential information to third parties. However, this is a great simple solution for sharing documents with others without worrying about what software program your recipient is using.

After coming to this realization, I switched to printing my cases to PDF and then commenting and highlighting the cases in Adobe Acrobat. If I have a big project, however, I can end up with several cases to print to PDF. This can be a time consuming task if it is done one case at a time.

Using Adobe Acroabt 8 Professional (no, I do not yet have 9), I can take advantage of the Batch Processing feature. I simple select Advanced > Document Processing > Save as PDF. I then identify the files that I want converted to PDF. Acrobat will open the files and convert them to PDf for me.

Last week I had about a dozen cases to convert to PDF. I simply started the batch processing and ran out to grab some lunch. When I returned, all of the work had been done and the files had all been saved as PDFs.

Anyway, the book’s release date is today. If you have been waiting for it, wait no more. If you have questions, check out my earlier review. In either instance, Fuzzy Navel is now available for purchase.

The problem is that Microsoft changed the file format in Office 2007, and users of Office 2003 cannot read files created in Office 2007. Fortunately, there is an easy and free fix for this. Unfortunately, it seems as though very few people know about this fix.

Simply go here and download the compatibility pack. After you install this, you will be able to work with Office 2007, even though you still use only Office 2003.

Fortunately, Adobe appears to want to answer that question. Rick Borstein has announced on his blog that he will be free 1 hour eseminars where he’ll “show off the latest legal-specific features of Adobe Acrobat 9.”

Rick says that during the seminar, you will

• Find out which features are in which version of Acrobat
• Learn how to create a PDF Portfolio for a Closing Binder
• Discover the new and powerful Document Comparison tool to help you spot changes fast
• See how to accelerate Redaction workflows with pattern-based search
• Split documents for electronic filing workflows
• See new, easier-to-user forms creation and data collection tools
• Use enhanced Bates Numbering to help you manage your case
• Take advantage of new ClearScan OCR
• Export PDFs for re-editing in a word processing program

Right now he has three different seminars scheduled. I am getting ready to sign up now. If you are at all interested, simply click here to go to Rick’s blog and sign up.

This is a gracious offer from Rocket Matter, as well as a great opportunity for those attorneys to try out Rocket Matter and see how it works.

On a related note, I will heed Ernie the Attorney’s call and link to the Linn County Bar Association. According to Ernier, the Linn County Bar Assocaition does not have a Google page rank. So hopefully a few links will help that.