The Many Faces of Mike McBride » Tech

LegalTech Coverage

Mike McBride — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:45:24 +0000

I have to admit, I haven’t seen much coverage from blogs or Twitter about LegalTech. Part of that is my schedule being off from a typical East Coast work day, thus missing a lot of morning twitter traffic. Part of that may also be the lack of usable wifi at the hotel, at least from what I’ve been told by those attending.

However, it appears that Lexblog has me covered in terms of gathering up a bunch of coverage and letting me flip through it in one place. Looking forward to doing just that!

Free Web Tool with Good Service?

Mike McBride — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:47:48 +0000

I’ve written before about the Photo Migration tool offered at http://export.goyaka.com/

It’s a nice tool to make a copy of your Flickr photo sets in Facebook, eliminating the need for folks who want to interact with your photos to create a Flickr account, not to mention a way to instantly backup your photos sets online.

I used it back in December to grab a couple of sets as a test, and it worked pretty well. Last night, I decided to go back and add some more, finally, but ran into a problem. The migration queue still showed those other albums, unfinished (they did finish uploading to FB), and the new ones wouldn’t start. My instant reaction was that something wrong with the service, and since it was free anyway, oh well. I did happen to find a support email address on the main page of their site, and sent off an email before heading to bed, not really expecting much. Based on previous experience with free online tools, sometimes they just break, and sometimes they never come back, so in this case, I wasn’t really even expecting a response.

Before I even fell asleep though, they had emailed me back and offered to clear out the queue and let me try again, which I did today. Of course, now all is working well again.

So, good work Goyaka Labs!

Google Killing Off Anonymity

Mike McBride — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:28:01 +0000

With recent announcements about Google migrating their privacy policy into one large policy, that lets them share your information across any and all of the Google tools, some folks are starting to get up in arms about Google moving away from their unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil”.

Some are even comparing Google’s moves to AOL.

There’s some truth to this. Unlike Facebook, which started out as a social network only, and has tried to bring more things into the walled garden, Google has a number of various things out there, that people have been using for years, and now they’re simply forcing all of it into the walled garden, and into Google+ specifically. Facebook, rightly, got their hands slapped when they tried to bring in “partners” and made folks opt-out of those additional postings to their profile. They’ve recently added partners, but have made the process more of an opt-in, where you can choose whether a partner has rights to interact with your profile information the first time you use it.

Google, on the other hand, has no opt-out. The various Google properties will, as a matter of business, share your information. Does that mean Google will start posting your activities to G+ publicly? Of course not. (Thought there’s nothing, technically, stopping them from, is there?) It does, however, mean that Google is using information from your email, maps, your calendar, from G+, and from your search history to target ads to you. What kinds of ads you get from Google will wind up saying a lot about the information that you are looking at and not sharing.Hope your boss or spouse doesn’t see that, eh?

For me, the unintended consequence of Google’s recent maneuvers to the end of anonymity on Google. Since we now know that they are striving, with G+, to be a one-stop identity source, and since signup for any Google product requires a Google account, which in turn creates a G+ profile, which of course, requires your real name, how could you use Blogger, Analytics, Gmail, etc. anonymously?

Let’s use this scenario. I’m a current Google account holder, and I want to create a second Gmail account, for use with an anonymous blog dealing with a highly sensitive subject. My attempt to create a second Google account is met with the creation of my G+ profile, which I can’t actually create without using my name, as I understand the TOS. Since there’s already a G+ profile out there for me, it’s not clear that I could create a second account. So, I’m left with walking away from Google, and using other web services to do what I want to do.

Ultimately, when your business model is encouraging users to use your competitor’s products, maybe you are FUBAR?

What do you think, will Google’s policy changes make you think twice about using Google products? Or are you so far into the Borg that there’s no turning back?

Black Out Day

Mike McBride — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:00:22 +0000

Well today is the day many of your favorite websites may be going dark to protest against legislation that is under consideration in the US that would give the government the ability to remove websites from the internet based on complaints of violating copyright, without much in the way of an ability of any site to defend itself before it simply goes away.

Obviously, I have decided not to “black out” this site. Mostly because, really, who would really notice? However, I will link to a site where you can learn a lot more about this legislation, and contact your Senator and Representative.

http://sopastrike.com/strike/

Inefficient Management – Poor Job Descriptions

Mike McBride — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:45:06 +0000

My wife has written an interesting perspective on the huge waste of time that is created when a job description is vague and doesn’t really identify the job you might be applying for.

It struck a chord with me not only from previous job searches, but also from things I’ve seen and heard in both the technology and legal industries. (Especially in the legal technology area!) It seems all too common for there to either be “formal” job descriptions, that describe the job as it was done the last time someone in HR got on the everyone needs a formal job description bus, no matter how many years ago that was, or something thrown together at the last minute by people who have never done the job they are now advertising for.

The latter situation comes about because of a pure lack of planning. Someone resigns and everyone is caught by surprise. There’s no succession plan, no cross-training has been done, and there’s no clear immediate steps identified for replacing that person. It usually takes longer than the two weeks notice to even make any sort of decision about hiring a replacement, therefore there’s no input on what to look for from the person who has actually been doing the job.

On the other hand, the former situation comes about because there was, at one time, an attempt to develop succession plans, and identify the steps necessary to assure work continues to get done in the interim, but those plans have not been updated in years. Things change, quickly, in any technology area. New tools are brought in, roles change, staff members assume new responsibilities, etc. Dusting off the years old descriptions is not going to give you a clear understanding of the skills you are currently looking for.

In both situations, you wind up reviewing resumes and maybe even interviewing a lot of people who aren’t good fits at all for the job you currently need to fill.Wasting your time, and theirs.

Do QR Codes Teach Users Bad Lessons?

Mike McBride — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:25:17 +0000

I have to admit, I haven’t given much thought to QR codes, or how to use them, over the last year. I keep sort of waiting for a reason to really learn what there is to know about them. But, when I saw this post about QR code malware, my mind immediately flashed upon something.

Haven’t we been telling people for years now to always check the URL before clicking links, so that you won’t be taken to a malicious site? Not to click on any links in emails from people you don’t know, not to open unexpected attachments, to type in the URL for their bank or PayPal instead of clicking links, etc.? Doesn’t encouraging the use of QR codes sort of undermine that?

The whole point of QR codes, it seems, is for the end user to scan it using their smartphone, and have information presented to them or be taken to a specific site immediately. In the interest of security, do we really want to encourage that sort of behavior?

If That’s Not Right, What Else Isn’t?

Mike McBride — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:05:03 +0000

I’ve talked before about the things that show up on procedural TV shows (I’m looking at you CSI) that simply aren’t possible in the real world. Think about the number of times you’ve seen a crime drama take a crappy cell phone picture, for example, and using “technology” get a crystal clear image of a license plate 200 feet behind the subject of the photo, for example? It drives me up the wall when attorneys expect those of us who work with electronic evidence to just magically be able to do something similar.

I’ve always wondered how much of what we see on television in areas that I’m not as familiar with, is completely wrong as well.

Worse yet, as someone who’s worked in technology for awhile, it’s somewhat shocking how many incorrect “facts” show up in actual news articles about technology. Articles that complain about missing features, that aren’t missing, or reviews that seem very biased written by people with a clear agenda, etc.

The other day I was listening to a hockey game and one of the announcers started talking about the schedule having “back to back visits by teams from British Columbia”, which seemed odd to me, as Vancouver is the only BC team in the NHL that I know of. Of course, I checked the team’s schedule and saw the next two games were against those great BC outposts of Edmonton and Calgary.

The point is not to poke fun at hockey announcers and technology writers, however. As I thought more about this mistake, I started to think about how many American’s probably do think those cities are in BC, or just don’t have any idea. I’ve been a hockey fan since childhood, and following the game means I probably know more about Canada than most Americans. Given that, I knew the statement being made was incorrect. But, how many areas of knowledge can I be expert enough in to make sure I’m getting “facts” from journalists? For most of us, when we hear economic, health, geopolitical, or scientific “news” reports, we don’t have the expertise to know an inaccuracy when we hear it, or the resources to fact-check the reports. The best we can hope is that someone who does know differently will point out the inaccuracies, or the misleading uses of statistics, etc.

But what if they can’t reach most of us? Are you looking for the corrections, or just taking what your favorite news sources tells you at face value?

No related posts.

Time Machine – The Plugins

Mike McBride — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:33:24 +0000

No this is not a blog post about Apple’s backup system. This is about a couple of pretty useful plugins for WordPress. One, which I’m pretty sure got it’s name from the Apple backup software, I’ve been using for quite a while. The other I just discovered the other day and thought would be kind of cool to have on the blog.

WP-Time Machine is a plugin that will create a backup of your WordPress install. It includes options to store your backup files offisite, with Amazon AW3 or Dropbox accounts. It’s a nice, easy way to create a backup of my site, files and database, and store it on my Dropbox account for easy access if I should ever need it.

Of course, I have to remember to go and make a backup, so it’s not foolproof. Let too much time go between backups and you’ll lose quite a few posts!

The new plugin I discovered is just plain Time Machine. It’s a little difficult to explain what Time Machine does, so if you’re reading this somehwere other than the site itself, you may want to click through and see it in action. On the right hand sidebar there’s a section titled “On this Day…” and then a list of posts that were published to the site on this day (within a day or two.) over the 10 plus years that I’ve been blogging here. I thought it would be a good way to highlight some of the old stuff, though I also admit to being a bit fearful of some rather poor writing from the time I was still figuring out this blogging thing will be resurrected. (Who am I kidding? There’s a possibility of poor writing, or statements that have been proven ridiculous, all through the history of this site!)

The lesson, as always, is that if there’s something you might want to do with your WordPress install, there’s probably a plugin that will help you.

Lack of Inspiration; Need New Sources

Mike McBride — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:56:09 +0000

This being the end of the year, I’ve been doing a long overdue cleanup of some of my various information sources, the first being Google Reader. After taking a look at the over 300 subscriptions I had there, and removing all of the ones who haven’t posted in 2011, and a number of ones I simply don’t care about any more, it occurs to me that a large part of why I’ve been struggling to find things to write about outside of eDiscovery and Litigation Support is due to an utter lack of good sources of information about Tech or Photography, for example.

Of course, this seems odd. The tech blogosphere is where I first learned about blogging, and where I used to find a ton of inspiration. However, I realize now that I’ve really lost touch with it. It seems the only tech news sources I’ve been following have mostly been consumed with iPhone/Android comparisons, and Google +/Facebook/Twitter comparisons. What happened to all the folks working in IT sharing their learning experiences? Where have the tech support folks gone?

So, now that my subscription list has gone from over 300, to just about 180, I’m looking for suggestions. What are your favorite blogs? What are the best sources of information about technology, photography, and yes, litigation support and legal technology, as well?

My RSS reader needs some new content!

Happy Holidays!

Mike McBride — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:15:57 +0000

I hope everyone out there has a wonderful holiday weekend!