Just because I happen to think my wife is pretty awesome, if you’re in Chicago and pick up this week’s Chicago Reader, you might just notice a photo they used with one of their stories that she took.

If you’re not in Chicago, the article and photo are online too.

Way to go!

The best camera, of course, is the one you have with you. My wife has recently talked about missing the days when her camera was easy to throw in her purse and just have with her. Now that she owns a Nikon D70, it requires a little more than that to make sure she has a camera with her. (cell phone notwithstanding, she hasn’t been satisfied with the camera in her cell phone, unlike my experience with the iPhone)

Given this predicament, I decided to pick up a point and shoot for her birthday, and found a pretty good deal on a Canon Powershot A1100IS. I leave it to her to comment on the performance of the camera, as I haven’t used it.

It does, however, make me wonder how many other DSLR owners regularly carry around another camera because sometimes it’s just too much to pack up the whole kit? Or are you just using cell phones now? What’s your beat advice for having a camera with you whenever you might need it?

So, as you’ve probably noticed, the blog is now running on Wordpress, and the blog home page is now being redirected to the main page of the site. There is still much work to do, to tweak the layout and work on pages, etc. but I think this is pretty much where we’re going to stay for now. I managed to pull in all of the blog posts and comments in from Blogger, but also decided to leave the static blog pages in place so as not to break 8 years of links from outside sources. Of course, I turned off the ability to comment on those too. If I can ever get a decent redirect solution in place I might take those pages out, but I’m not holding my breathe on that one. The existing RSS feeds, however, have been updated, so if you’ve been getting the full blog feed, or the tech, litigation support, or photo only feeds you should continue to see everything you were before.

Still, running Wordpress now opens up some new possibilities, so I’ll be looking into some of those, and experimenting along the way. First, though, I’ve got to clean up some of the loose ends that the transfer left behind this week. Then we’ll get into some of the new things!

In light of last week’s announcement of changes at Blogger, I’ve decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I’m going to be converting this blog over to Wordpress. Of course, with over 8 years of customizations to the site, it’s not going to be a simple process to convert everything, so just be aware that it’s going to be going on if/when you see some things looking wonky around here. In fact, the site will probably disappear for a few hours sometime later this week, as I move it to a different server in preparation for the Wordpress install.

Of course, since I have to be in court tomorrow, nothing starts until I’m comfortable with the knowledge that I won’t be spending any of my evenings and weekends working, at least long enough to see this transition through. Given the industry I work in, you’ll forgive me if plans change and I have to put this off a little bit.

Last week, I was fully prepared to be working long hours for the entire month of February, and things changed suddenly. It’s the nature of the business really. You never know when, or if, a case that you’re preparing to go to trial, will settle. It often ends up with us doing a whole lot of prep work, only to find that it never gets used, but you still have to do all the work the same way for every case, because some of them don’t settle and you have to be ready to go in court!

Anyway, consider yourselves warned, and hang on. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for a bit, but I think we’ll all be better off in the end for it!

The event to raise money for Haitian earthquake relief through the Red Cross is being held tomorrow, at the Ohio Historical Society, and through online donations.

You can find out all the details, and how you can help, from the press release.

Since this is the first post of 2010, I thought I’d make it a nice list of all the ways you can connect with me, the content of this site, or both!

Blog RSS Feed
Subscribe by Email
Become a fan on Facebook
Comments RSS Feed
RSS Feed just for posts tagged Tech
RSS Feed just for posts tagged Litigation Support
RSS Feed just for Photography
My Flickr
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Friendfeed
Delicious Links

Not to mention the other site I run, for child abuse survivors, and all of the many ways you can interact with that content as well!

So there you go, no matter what services you use or where you like to hang out on the net, there should be a choice for you to keep up with things being posted by me. I thank you for the interest in what I’m doing and talking about, and look forward to connecting with all of you, wherever it may be!

Here’s to a getting your 2010 networking goals off to a good start!

Well, it’s been an interesting year, that’s for sure! Like most years, 2009 didn’t turn out the way I expected. Last year at this time, I really had no idea what was headed my way. The biggest surprise, obviously, was being promoted to management. Not only did I not expect that to happen, but I also really had no idea what that would mean for my every day life.

I’ve mentioned before, management is different. It’s no longer about going to the office, doing the work, and going home. I spend so much time planning strategy, evaluating ideas, brainstorming, preparing training materials, reaching out to other areas of the firm, etc. that it can be very difficult to turn that off at the end of the work day. That’s not always a bad thing, sometimes I can accomplish much more of that stuff away from the distractions of the workplace, but it has caused some other things to suffer. I find myself with less time to write very meaningful posts here or on the child abuse blog, and I’ve not managed to blog at all over at Friends in Tech. I simply don’t have as much spare mental energy as I used to!

On top of that, it’s been more difficult to go home and do the social, personal things I’m used to doing. Oh, I may still spend the evening with Angela doing things we’ve always done, but I may not be 100% mentally there when we are. I may be mulling over an idea I had earlier, or fleshing out details of a plan while also watching The Office or eating dinner. That’s not good.

That being said, I suspect that much of the problem lies not so much with a lack of time as much as an undisciplined approach to time. Not that I’m unorganized, I probably have more lists than any three people you know, but when I sit down to write, or brainstorm an idea, it doesn’t always keep my focus, and winds up taking much longer than it should. My mind goes in tangents instead of opening up an Evernote page and outlining an idea right then and there while I’m thinking about it.

So that’s the plan for 2009. I’m going to be trying to figure out ways to be more disciplined with my time, and learn how to focus on getting all the way through a plan, or activity, then focus on the next one, instead of starting, writing a few ideas, then remembering that I need to email someone about another task, or check the hockey score real quick, etc. Any tips you’ve gleaned from your own lives are always appreciated!

Since I was in Indianapolis this weekend, for my niece’s birthday, a stop at Fry’s was on order before heading home. Turns out they were running a special on a Western Digital 1.5TB external hard drives. Until Nov. 19 they are $99.99. Naturally, I picked one up while we were in town, and immediately made plans for rearranging my backup workflow over the long Thanksgiving weekend.

A 1.5TB drive should allow me to take my current dual 250GB drives that currently act as two copies of our photos and other documents, into just the first copy, with the backups being on the 1.5TB, along with my Time Machine backup of my Macbook Pro, and perhaps some video storage. Not a bad pickup for a hundred bucks.

Of course, that was my first impression. My second thought was, of course, about the e-discovery implications of having that much storage available that cheaply. Not that I’m all that worried about being sued myself, but for small business, we’ve surely reached the point where the temptation to simply keep everything is going to be overwhelming. You can keep a lot of stuff on a 1TB drive, more than a typical 5-10 person office is currently using up, and then you can double that storage for very little by buying a new 1TB drive cheaply. Creating a retention policy is much more work, and maybe even much more cost, right up until they get served with a discovery request for the first time and have to try and find relevant documents.

After all, with storage that available, the days of an attorney coming in and reviewing documents without doing any sort of in-depth search, are gone. There’s simply no way to look at everything that might be stored on a 1TB drive, let alone a few of them, at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time.

Good search is definitely the future, at least I hope so!

I forgot to mention this earlier, probably because the “official” announcement came out while I was on vacation sans laptop, but I am officially certified as a Trial Director 5 trainer.

Now, since I can’t really do much training outside of my own firm, the certification doesn’t mean much. (It’d be a conflict of interest to train other firm’s attorneys.) But, since I needed to get as much in-depth training as possible in order to put together our own attorney educational program on how we could use the software at trial, or at depositions, it makes sense to go ahead and get the certification. If nothing else, it tends to make attorneys stand up an take ever so slightly more notice when you can throw some initials on your credentials.

Then again, I’m an SCT, Summation Certified Trainer already, and I have no idea if there are initials in common use for this certification. (TDCT? Anyone?)

At any rate, it never hurts to drop the new certification on a resume or LinkedIn profile. While I don’t have any plans to put that to use, you just never know!

So, now that I am armed with all of that technical know-how with Trial Director, the next step is going to be convincing our attorneys to put it to good use, and convincing our clients that the extra cost is worth it for their case. I have a feeling the certification tests are going to prove much easier than the sales job I’m about to embark on, but it’s all part it. As with any tech tool, it’s only powerful if it gets used. As much as I think we could use Trial Director for, I’ve got to convince others of that now, so if anyone out there has been through this and has some tips, I’m all ears!