Comedian Don McMillan nails it in this hilarious video. It’s a must view for anyone who has ever endured a bad PowerPoint presentation (is there anyone left who has not?). Hat tip to Craig Newmark.
Meanwhile, the WSJ’s ($) technology columnist Lee Gomes takes a look at the status of PowerPoint on its 20th (!) birthday.
One of the most popular sessions each year at the ABA Technology Show in Chicago is the 60 Sites in 60 Minutes session, in which a panel of tech-savvy lawyers review 60 of their favorite websites. Although directed toward lawyers, most of the sites are equally useful to businesspeople and other professionals, so check out this year’s selected websites that were presented at last week’s show. It’s a great way to keep up with web technology that is on the cutting edge for the law and business.
Shorpy.com is an innovative new blog that presents old photographs from around the United States over the past century. As the blog’s authors describe it, “Shorpy is a photo blog about what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating.”
The photo on the left is from Houston. Called “The Banana Wagon: 1943,” the May, 1943 photo shows a house with a fruit stand in Houston on Franklin Street. Note the laundry hanging around the second floor porch. Check out this interesting new blog.
Medstory is an interesting new search engine that offers “Intelligent Search for Health & Medicine.” When I ran a search on “diabetes,” Medstory generated at the top of the results “Information that Matters” — specific categories of information regarding diabetes, including Drugs and Substances, Conditions, Procedures, In Clinical Studies, Complementary Medicine, Personal Health, and People. Each of these categories has five related topics on which you can click to narrow your search further. Beneath these categories are the Web results, which allow you to narrow your results to specific types of information, such as news, audio/video, clinical trials, or research articles. And there is even an RSS feed for each search. Inasmuch as speed and focus is the name of the game these days in search engines, Medstory looks to be a very promising addition to the medical search field. Hat tip to Tom Mighell for the link.
The blogosphere’s coverage of the Scooter Libby trial prompted James Joyner to make the following insightful observation about the impact of blogging on the processing of information:
When the blogosphere broke open RatherGate, it was through a combination of two things that the mainstream press seldom has: obsession and expertise. There are people out there who simply care more about things like Dan Rather, Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame, or just about any other topic that you can think up than anyone working for any press venue. Similarly, there are people out there who know a whole lot more about the nuances of 1960s era typefaces, perjury law, FISA, or what have you than any working journalist could possibly be expected to know. The combination of these things give citizen journalists a powerful advantage.
Because bloggers donít have to even pretend to be unbiased or interested in ìall the news thatís fit to print,î I wouldnít want to rely on any one blog for my news, or even my commentary. Collectively, though, blogs add an enormous amount of information and insight to the process.
FeedDemon is a highly-popular RSS aggregator that I have used for several years. Nick Bradbury developed FeedDemon, and he passes along the interesting story of how development of this elegant product came about:
I used to rely on email, but it’s almost useless to me now.
Funny thing is, if it weren’t for spam, I might not have created FeedDemon. As I’ve mentioned before, after spam and anti-spam filters made it impossible for me to communicate with customers by email, I dumped email and started using my blog and its RSS feed to communicate instead.
And that led to the creation of FeedDemon, which I’m having a blast working on. So I actually benefited from spam. Go figure.
“My name is Terry, and I’m dying of cancer. Welcome to the adventure.”
That is the welcome to the Houston Chronicle’s newest blog — CancerDiva. Terry Hayes, the author of the blog, describes herself as follows:
I’m a single, 40-year-old woman living in Houston with my sister and her two dogs. I have a kitty cat named Sasha. I love to shop, read, watch movies and listen to music. I enjoy a challenging jigsaw puzzle, “This American Life” and “Prairie Home Companion”. I like plays, traveling, and art cars. I love my job and my co-workers. I can’t get enough of “CSI,” “Law & Order,” or “The Closer,” and I’ll watch anything on BRAVO. My favorite color is pink.
Oh, and I’m dying of cancer.
No use sugarcoating it. When my oncologist told me in April 2006 that I have metastatic colon cancer, I nodded my head and said, “Okay.” When she told me I had about 24 months to live, “give or take a few,” I nodded my head and said, “Okay.”
My cancer had spread from my colon to distant sites in my body, namely my ovaries, liver and abdominal wall. Last week, I thought I might have a brain tumor. Luckily, my MRI was normal (normal for now anyway).
Only 5-8% of patients with Stage IV/Duke’s D colon cancer make it five years after diagnosis. The usual course, from diagnosis to death, takes about 24 months, “give or take a few”.
I’m not sure why I took the news quite so casually. My oncologist, a wonderful woman named Dr. Glover, said I was “eerily calm.”
I have a few theories. One of the many, many issues I’ll be discussing in this blog.
You can bet I’ll be reading this one.
Justia, the company that developed the popular Blawgsearch engine, has just introduced another outstanding search vehicle — a website that allows the user to track federal court cases in a number of different ways, including by date, state or party name.
The website taps into a database of recently filed federal district court civil cases and starts with a list of all of the cases, which then can be broken down by State/Court/Practice/Sub-Practice. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all of the new cases that meet these criteria, or you can do a search and subscribe to an RSS fee of the search results. For example, you could track all of the federal court cases filed against a particular company as an RSS feed, or you could subscribe to just those that are filed in Texas. Whatever the search criteria, you can track new cases with an RSS feed.
Each case has an individual page with a link to the Pacer info page (you do need a subscription to access these documents at 8 cents per page) as well as Blog, News, Finance and Web searches on the party names. Not a bad way of picking up some quick informal discovery on the parties to litigation.
Justia has inputted over 300,000 case titles since January 1, 2006 and are now updating the database daily. The website is still in beta and Justia plans to add more functionality and editorial groupings of parties. But it’s pretty darn useful already. Give it a look.
In my practice, I am continually amazed at how most lawyers underuse Adobe Acrobat’s features despite the fact that pdf files have become the standard file form for legal briefs and pleadings. Such basic and simple-to-use Adobe features as bookmarking and linking greatly facilitate the review of large documents, but rarely do lawyers include these features in their papers. I bookmark and link all my large briefs and pleadings, and many judges — most of whom review briefs and pleadings on a computer these days — have commented to me on how much they enjoy using those features in reviewing voluminous documents.
Ed Poll realizes the same thing that I do. So, he interviews Rick Borstein, Business Development Manager for the Legal Community for Abobe Systems, Inc. in this podcast in which Borstein discusses the new features in the latest version of Adobe Acrobat that are of special interest to lawyers. It’s 20 minutes of listening that will be well worth your time.
Dallas lawyer Tom Mighell is the dean of Texas law bloggers and is a widely-respected expert on application of technology to the practice of law. Along with fellow legal technology expert Dennis Kennedy, Tom writes a monthly column entitled “Strongest Links” for the ABA Law Practice Management magazine that highlights helpful technologies.
In this column, Tom and Dennis provide their “Strongest of the Strongest Links” that they wrote about during 2006. Although written primarily for folks interested in application of the technologies in the practice of law, most of the technologies are helpful for anyone interested in using their time more efficiently. Check it out.