Author Archives

    Bryan Sims

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    Keep Your PDA Firmly in Hand

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    Have you ever had trouble keeping your PDA from slipping out of your hand? If so, Sean Bonner has a solution for you. Sean lost his new iPod Touch in a cab. That prompted him to find a solution to prevent this from happening in the future.

    He bought skateboard grip tape and adhered it to the back of his iPod. This solution would, of course, work for any similar device.

    In an update to his original post, he details how well the grip tape works:

    Quick Update: It’s been about a week and this keeps getting linked to so I thought I’d update folks on the antislippageness of this mod. So far it works awesome. And it’s not causing nearly the pocket or finger wear I was expecting. Turns out, and I never would have guessed, but a skateboard is way heavier than an iPod which makes it easier to scratch you when you pick it up. The iPod barely resists at all so there’s never any “scratching” going on. So far I’m pretty happy with this.

    Check out his entire post to see pictures of the finished product.

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    Bookmarking a Blog

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    Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog posted an entry recently titled Bookmark a blog? Are you nuts? In his post, Kevin addresses an issue that I encounter on a regular basis: people who read blogs via their bookmarks. Kevin says:

    Bookmarking blogs would only be done by someone with a lot of time on their hands. You know, here’s a lot of bookmarks on my browser and I spend all day going back to blogs I like to see if they posted anything new. ‘Nope, nothing new today, I’ll check back tomorrow and now on to the next blog in my bookmarks.’

    You subscribe to blogs. You do not bookmark them. When a new post is made to a blog you like, the new post will automatically be streamed to your newsreader where you collect RSS feeds from other blogs, news sites, and keywords & key phrases you follow from Google Blog Search.

    The busiest people in this country read blogs. It’s not the people with time to kill that browse around to blogs. They read blogs because they can get targeted information fed to them.

    It’s a search, browse, and subscribe Internet society today folks. We’ve moved on from the search and browse world.

    I could not agree more. I will admit that it took me a few months to switch from reading blogs via bookmarks to reading blogs via an RSS reader. Once I made the switch, however, I realized how stupid I had been trying to keep up with my blogs via bookmarks.

    RSS technology exists to make our lives easier and more efficient. Use the technology to your benefit.

    If you are wondering what I am talking about when I talk about RSS, check out this post I did a few months ago that explains RSS in plain English.

    When you don’t currently use and RSS reader, go to Google Reader, sign up for an account, and start subscribing to your blogs.

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    You Can’t Beat This Advice: Backup

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    Nerino Petro’s Compujurist has a great post on setting up a backup routine. He titles his post, Don’t be an idiot:Backup your data. The great thing about Nerino’s post is that he gives you concrete suggestions about how to properly set up a backup routine to best protect your data.

    One of his best pieces of advice is:

    5. Finally, perform a sample or test restore to ensure that your data is actually being backed up. Murphy’s Law of backups provides that your backup will fail when you need it most. One method of doing this is to select several critical files and data types such as your time and billing data and word processing files, renaming several of these files and then doing test restores from the backup data stored on the external hard drive as well as from the online backup service and see if the files will open and if the data appears to be current and correct. Initially, you want to test this with the first backup and then at least biweekly for the first two months. Thereafter, I would recommend doing a test restore at least monthly.

    Remember, the purpose of doing a backup is not to backup data. Instead, it is to ensure that you can restore your data if when your hard drive crashes. If you faithfully create a backup routine, but never ensure that it works, you may very well be wasting your time and effort doing your backups.

    Follow Nerino’s tips, however, and you will be well on your way to ensuring that you do not lose your data.

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    Tips for Using Your Computer Without the Internet

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    Here is an interesting post from Speaking Freely about Five Things to do with a PC When You Do Not Have an Internet Connection.

    My favorite of the list is probably the first tip:

    1. Clean out and categorize your bookmarks. I don’t know about you, but I tend to just click ‘bookmark this page’ and call it good. Yesterday, when I hit the little ‘down arrow’ on Firefox to let the bookmark list scroll down I counted. Not sites, but seconds. 11 seconds worth of scrolling bookmarks is way too many. If you haven’t visited a site in a month it’s not important.

    Create categories and organize the list of bookmarks after you’ve eliminated all those links you don’t need. Do not create a miscellaneous category. Catch-all categories do exactly that and soon become difficult to use.

    His other suggestions are good as well. I would like to add one additional tip that he did not mention: organizing your email. I use Outlook for my email. I find that downtime is a great time to sort and file any email that I have not yet sorted. Also, it is a great time to archive my email using Adobe Acrobat’s email archiving feature.

    A tip of the hat to Futurelawyer for the link.

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    50 Marketing Tips and a Personal Observation

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    The ABA has posted 50 marketing tips for solos and small firms. This list has certainly taken some hits in other blogs. The criticisms are certainly valid. Further, most of the tips do not really apply to me or my practice. For example, I cannot ever envision myself handing out my business card to the waitstaff at my favorite restaurant and asking them to give the card to other customers who seem like they need a lawyer. (Tip #26).

    However, one tip struck home with me, tip #28

    28. Cross-sell. When you complete work for clients, remind them that you handle other matters as well. Make sure they know that you would like the opportunity to serve them—or their friends, relatives, etc.—by drafting wills, handling personal injury matters or reviewing contracts.

    I once represented a client in a dispute involving her home owners association. Later, I represented her in the sale of her home. During a subsequent conversation with her, I realized that she thought I was a “real estate lawyer.” In reality, however, only about 10% of my practice involves being a “real estate lawyer” as she defined the term. It turns out that she had no idea that the majority of my practice was litigation.

    Because of this experience, I always try to make sure that my clients understand not only the types of matters that I typically handle, but also the types of matters that other members of the firm handle.

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    Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam.

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    I saw today that currently 95% of all email is spam. Given the amount of spam that still gets through my spam filters, I have no trouble believing this.

    One of the spam issues that surprises me, however, is the amount of comment spam that I get on this blog. Fortunately, I use a comment spam filter called Akismet. It works really well and I usually have to manually delete comment spam only once or twice a week.

    I checked my  Akismet setting just a little while ago. It’s been about a week since I cleaned it out. In that last week, Akismet caught 2,039 2,040 spam comments.

    I am not quite sure what these spambots think they are going to accomplish. I am glad, however, that Akismet is doing a great job of keeping almost all of the comment spam off of the blog.

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    A Great Treo Tip

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    If you use a Treo, you should be reading the Treonauts Blog. This week, the author was talking about the software enhancements in the new Palm Centro. One of the things the author talked about was the Most Recently Use Application Launcher:

    This is not a new enhancement on the Centro but because I had compPalm Quick Launchletely forgotten that it existed on my Treo 680 I thought that it might be worthwhile pointing out how this feature works again.

    By simply pressing and holding down your Applications (Home) button for a couple of seconds you will automatically get a small pop-up (image left) on the right hand corner of your screen listing your 8 most recently used applications – particularly helpful if like me you have a ton of icons in your software list.

    I had no idea that this feature existed. What a great discovery. This is a nice feature that works on my Treo 700. Now that I know about this, I have a feeling that I will be using this feature quite frequently.

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    Friday Fun: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

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    I learned of a great new blog today: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. The blog collects examples of people using quotation marks improperly. The blog has a great collection of these.

    A tip of the hat to Nobody Knows Anything for pointing this blog out.

    One of my favorites from the blog appears below. The irony in the picture is absolutely great.

    Security Guard

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    SpeedFiler Update

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    I posted about SpeedFiler the other day. In my post, I estimated that SpeedFiler correctly guesses the proper folder about 90% of the time. I was playing with the program today and discovered that it actually keeps track of such stats. It turns out that SpeedFiler guess the correct folder 85% of the time. That 85% is through 750 messages that it has filed.