Warning: I have it on "Good Authority" that adding too many extensions to your FireFox browser may slow it down or make it unstable. I also see where number 10 could really cost you some billable hours.
Neverthless, let me be a little cutting edge today by linking you to "10 Killer Firefox Extensions That You Probably Don’t Know About"
Dear Out of Sync:
Don’t worry. Despite our best efforts, we all find ourselves in this situation from time to time. When you are collaborating with others, you may just have to give them a little training or set up some rules of the game, like an agreed way to name the revised documents, e.g. including initials and dates in the file name rather than version numbers. You may have to train everyone on how to use Microsoft Word’s Track Changes. And, for non-confidential documents that are being jointly prepared by several people, nothing beats Google Docs.
My problem (that should be easy to fix) is that I can’t even stay in sync with myself. When you use different computers to work on a project, it is easy to get out of sync. That’s before we even discuss mobile devices. (On a side note, one of the things I really like about my new Treo 750 is the ability to sync over the air with Exchange Active Sync rather than being forced to use the cradle to sync. See a Treo 750 Review here.) Plus I know I’m not the only one who has saved a Favorite in my browser on one computer and been briefly puzzled when I couldn’t find it in my browser on a different computer.
Anyway, check out 10 Sync Tools Every Office Worker Should Know About. These aren’t all about work and documents. I personally wouldn’t use number 3 unless I didn’t keep client documents in the My Documents folder. But, it is an interesting list and a jump start to thinking about how you stay in sync.
When I’m back from ABA TECHSHOW, I always have a conflict between a lot of new ideas I want to share with my readers and a pile of work that has accumulated at the office. So this week, I’m going to try a theme on Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips. I’m going to pass along some great Tips articles online each and every day. Then on Friday, I’ll share something about where I located them. I really like this idea because I’m assigning all of you readers a lot of work and me not so much. (Other trying to do some of the things in the Tips articles I haven’t been doing.) But I also like this idea because if you read all of the articles I am giving you this week and do several of these things, it could be very, very big for your productivity. Trust me.
Ed Bott is a well-known technology writer with a couple of decades of experience. This month on ZDNet, he published My 10 Favorite Windows Programs of All Time. Having someone with his experience give you his top ten utilities, ones that he has relied on for years in most cases, is pretty huge. The article is fairly long and detailed, containing some of my favorite utility programs and several I’m been meaning to try out for some time. The article has already proven to be very popular online, so try to finish the main article before looking at what looks like hundreds of posted comments with applause, kudos and other suggestions that the posters think should have made the list. Then try out the program that looks most useful to you.
Back from ABA TECHSHOW and glad to be home. I’m inspired and I’m going to do a series of posts every day this week. Sadly due to a quirk in TypePad, the RSS subscribers may have gotten last post in the series before the others. But the rest of you will just have to wait for the series in order. It was a great ABA TECHSHOW. Congratulations to Tom Mighell and the rest of the TECHSHOW planning board, staff and speakers who worked so hard on this event.
ABA TECHSHOW 2008 is now over. I did a nice little live blog post during the TECHSHOW grande finale’ 60 Sites in 60 Minutes. Unfortunately near the end of the program, my browser froze and Typepad has no recovery options other than the ability to save a post or partial post as a draft before the lockup. But it appears that airport bordom and the browser history will allow me to recreate the post. The 60 Sites Stars this year were ABA TECHSHOW Chair Tom Mighell, Reid Trautz and Craig Ball.
Travel was on the minds of our panelists to start the program. They discussed finding the least problematic flight routes on FlightStats.com, the best seats on the plane with SeatGuru.com and then how to forward all of your confirmation e-mails for travel and lodging to TripIt.com where an itinerary will be prepared for you at no cost. They also noted my current favorite site to search for airline bookings, Kayak.com. I love the way you mark the Favorites on Kayak and then go back to sort through them.
An important site for online shoppers is RetailMeNot.com. Often when shopping online one will place an order and see a space to enter a coupon or discount code, if you have it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has taken that as an invitation to open a new browser window and do a few quick Google searches to see if I can find a valid coupon code online. (And, boy, is that a sweet $5.38 savings if you do score!) So now this site is going to try and collect that information.
The Chargepod from Callpod makes my list of "things I’m going to try and convice my wife we need post-TECHSHOW."
When i need to send someone a large digital file, I typically use YouSendIt instead of sending a too-large e-mail attachment. But Tom Mighell makes a pretty good case that drop.io is a better way to share or transmit files. Lifehacker likes this one, too. Check it out.
Crossloop is a free utility site to allow you to connect to another person’s computer over the Internet (with permission, of course.) If a friend or relative needs help with their PC, sometimes it is easier to use something like this to take control over their machine and fix it yourself remotely instead of trying to talk them through instructions.
60 Sites in 60 Minutes is an ABA TECHSHOW tradition. After two and a half days of a torrent of information about technology in the law office, the key with 60 Sites is to blend in a lot of humor with a fair amount of interesting online material. Each year the TECHSHOW planning board will receive two completed evaluations from attendees earnestly pleading that the program should focus entirely on useful material and forgo the humor. While I no longer have any decision-making authority about TECHSHOW, I predict you will be outvoted on this by everyone to two. The program was quite entertaining and drew a lot of laughs. And, there were lots of useful sites, as you can see above. The entire collection of sites will be posted soon to the ABA TECHSHOW website.
LexBlog conducted several Live from TECHSHOW interviews. You can read the transcript of the interview with me here. You can also read the transcript of the interview with my good friend, Laura Calloway, who is my counterpart at the Alabama State Bar, here. Congratulations to Laura Calloway on being named Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2009!!!!
Day Two of ABA TECHSHOW 2008
Microsoft’s OneNote is definitely not just for tablet PC’s. At $99 it may be the best purchase bargain from Microsoft. See Nerino Petro’s recent post Microsoft OneNote is No One Trick Pony.
I love YouSendIt.com for sending large files to others rather than attaching them to e-mails. But ABA TECHSHOW 2008 chair Tom Mighell points out that Drop.io does that and a lot more, also at no charge. LifeHacker likes it too!
Another Web service I learned about at the collaboration presentation by Tom and Dennis Kennedy was Crossloop, a simple way to connect two computers over the Internet. If your friend or relative is having a computer problem, it may be easier for you to use this to take over their computer and fix it yourself rather than trying to diagnose and repair it by asking questions and telling them what to do.
Barron Henley tells us ink jet printers are not worth using any more due to the ridiculously high cost of the ink cartridges. He got a good laugh showing a chart demonstrating that ink jet ink is much more expensive than any other precious liquid, including human blood.
This year’s entry in the "Things I’m going to try to convince my wife that we need to buy post-TECHSHOW" category is the ChargePod from CallPod.
I’m pretty hard on technology. As the presenters were discussing the IronKey flash drive, John Simek pulled his out and let me examine this extra tough flash drive with extra security features built it. Lawyers take note. If you are carrying confidential client data around on a flash drive, these security features may be what you need.
Here are a few quick tips from ABA TECHSHOW 2008, now headquartered at its new location at the Chicago Hilton.
For a small powerful scanner with a small footprint, Paul Unger loves the Fujitsu 6140c which scans at at blazing 60 ppm in monochrome and sells in the $1500 -$2000 range.
As we move more to using digital documents rather than paper documents, we need to think about how users will be reading them. If you have a document with attachments, you will, of course, want to have a hyperlink within the document that takes you to each attachment. But also, you should add a hyperlink at the top of each attachment labeled "BACK" that takes the reader back to their original location.
Google Calendar can now automatically synchronize with Outlook.
If your office does a lot of shredding, here’s a new reason to consider one of those companies that places secure bins in your office and sends a truck to shred them when they get full. Freeing your workplace from "the constant drone of shredders in the office" may be a quality of workplace life issue, according to Debbie Foster.
There’s more. But there’s more ABA TECHSHOW 2008 about to start downstairs. I make no pretence about being objective about ABA TECHSHOW. It’s the greatest! For more live updates from ABA TECHSHOW, check out the new TECHSHOW Buzz.
When the Columbus Bar Association invited me to give several presentations to their solo and small firm lawyers, none of us knew it would be a historic day for Columbus. But Friday as I talked, it started snowing. And it snowed and snowed and snowed. As most everyone knows by now, the total ended up being 20 inches, setting several weather records for Columbus, OH. My Friday evening flight was canceled as were hundreds of others. Our program attendees stayed until the end. We really had a great time discussing improving their practices. But then they got to go home. I didn’t. The Columbus Bar staff was great, making sure I had a place to stay at the nearby Hyatt (which did fill completely full later that night.) CBA President Nelson E Genshaft insisted I go to dinner and an art gallery reception with him and his wife Friday night (which was possible only because the gallery, restaurant and his house were all close to my hotel.)
My view of that state capitol Saturday morning could only be described as a blizzard.
Well, I was more than a little upset when I learned my rescheduled flight was cancelled and my next option was Monday. But I got a little perspective when i ran into a group downstairs at breakfast. They were all in town for a wedding. The location where it was to be held advised them it would not be open for them. Some of the guests were stranded in other airports. One of the ladies asked the bride, "What are we going to do?" The bride-to-be burst into laughter and said, "I’m going to get married! We just don’t know where yet." Later I overheard her laughing that everyone would remember her wedding. I guess that goes to show you that attitude really is everything.
I hated to lose the weekend with my family, but I thought how happy I was I packed extra clothes I wouldn’t need and remembered to pack my slippers and mobile phone charger, things I often forget. I had Internet access and cable TV. But I also kept optimisticly calling the airline and guess what? I am live blogging from the airport on Sunday, not Monday, and about to board my flight home.
Read this post even if you don’t intend to get Vista for years, or ever. E-discovery implications of this information are staggering.
LawTech Guru Jeff Beard gives us an expose`of the Shadow Copy feature of Microsoft Vista, along with information about a utility that solves part of the problems created. I was stunned, yes stunned, as i read this and frankly I really thought the category of Stupid Software Tricks from Microsoft had lost the ability to shock over the years. I was aware of the online chatter about this feature, but really hadn’t taken the time to read about it until Mother Nature gave me some time to catch up on my reading.
Read all of Jeff’s post. But here are some of the high points and some of my thoughts. Jeff says, "[n]umerous postings online have stated that by default, all versions of Vista automatically create shadow copies of your documents and other user data files and folders as part of the ‘System Restore’ feature." You can only stop this from happening if you turn off System Restore, but you may really need System Restore to repair your computer from time to time.
But there’s more. By default the amount of space dedicated to this feature is 15% of the drive’s size or 30% of available free space, whichever is smaller. As Jeff notes, on a 200GB hard drive that could be up to 30GB. But not all versions of Vista can access and retrieve these stored copies of files. Apparently, Vista Home Basic and Premium versions create these copies and fill a good part of your hard drive with the data, but you can’t touch it. Now for the Microsoft monolith this makes sense, right? Microsoft doesn’t pay for your hard drive space and every now needing to retrieve some of their lost data may learn that they can buy a more expensive version of Vista and possibly retrieve it. For the majority of Home Basic and Premium Vista users, it means that they have lost 15% of their hard drive space to a feature they will never use or even be aware exists.
But for lawyers and those concerned about privacy, there are big e-discovery implications especially if Vista ever really catches on. (We can all hope not, but at some point Microsoft will pull the plug on security support for XP. There’s too much money involved to think otherwise.) Then we could have a day when millions of home and small business computer systems maintain secret copies of the owner’s now-deleted documents. Law enforcement will certainly take note. There are implications for e-discovery- both for the inquiring lawyer who is told no such records exist and for the individual who represents that no such information exists on a computer, but is unaware of the hidden information on the PC.
Jeff mentions a utility that may help with some of this. But I want you to go to his post here to read about that since I haven’t looked at it yet. Part of this information is unverified, so we will just have to see. But Microsoft’s past actions make it believable.
My friend Dennis Kennedy has posted his annual predictions on LLRX.com. This year’s edition is called "Eight Legal Technology Trends for 2008 – Good Times, Bad Times or Hard Times in Legal Tech?" I’ll specifically note numbers 1 and 2 and let you follow the link for the rest.
