January 2005 Archives

What would happen if you were four years old and saw a commercial on the television for the very first time in your life? The author of Outer Life describes here how his son reacted.

Jim Calloway has been making a series of posts about WordPerfect in which he makes the case that WordPerfect is still an excellent — perhaps the best — word processor for lawyers. Some of the posts have been a little Oklahoma-centric, but only by way of example of the great WP resources available to Oklahoma lawyers.

I'm a WordPerfect fan and have been for a long time. It was only with dismay that I used Microsoft Word at my previous employer, and I have used WordPerfect at home for several years. I hope Jim Calloway is right when he says that WordPerfect is ripe for revival in the practice of law. Read all four posts, as taken together they express quite well why WordPerfect's strengths are important ones and why many of its perceived drawbacks are illusory.

Jim Calloway: A WordPerfect Lawyer in a Word World
Jim Calloway: The WordPerfect Lawyer - Sharing Your Documents
Jim Calloway: Advanced WordPerfect Macros
Jim Calloway: The Past and Future of WordPerfect

My only concern with WordPerfect is that there is no WordPerfect for Mac, and I am flirting with the possibility of switching back to Macintosh technology sometime in the future (at least by buying a Mac Mini — I am, after all, squarely the target market for that computer). If I "switch," I'll still keep my homebuilt PCs around, but I'm the kind of user who likes having several computers capable of running even more operating systems. Most computer users aren't, especially in their businesses.

Andrew Cohen has this column in the Denver Post today about the demise of Gorsuch Kirgis LLC, one of Denver's oldest law firms. Cohen credits the firm's long history to its earlier successes in maintaining a genuine partnership, one based on personal relationships rather merely "the pursuit of cash collections," its renown as being "one of the more humane places to practice law in town." He blames its impending dissolution on its failure to maintain that kind of workplace. In his story, the firm didn't have control over all of the factors that eventually led to its demise, but it did over some.

Yesterday I went to an opthalmologist to be checked for glaucoma risk. My optometrist had referred me because she didn't like the look of my optic nerves. I'm rather young to have glaucoma, but the thinking is that if things look the least bit sketchy, it's best to at least do some tests to establish a baseline from which one can track the eyes over time. So I drove up to Boulder and visited the very efficiently-run offices of an opthalmologist and two optometrists. (I imagine the office is fairly profitable, since the staff seem well-trained, handled much of the examination themselves and left the MD to evaluation and counseling roles.)

The first diagnostic tool was an ordinary intraocular pressure check using the Glowing Blue Plastic Rod Against The Eye. If it's done right you don't notice that something is touching your cornea, and it was done right. Pressures were normal, though a little on the high end of normal. You see, many kinds of glaucoma are caused by the fluid pressure inside the eye being too high, putting stress on the optic nerve and cornea.

Next was a very fancy computerized retinal tomography ("Heidelberg Retinal Tomograph") that used retinal imaging to develop a three-dimensional image of the optic nerve's attachment to the retina. Strictly speaking, according to its manufacturer, this device is a "Confocal Laser Scanning System for Quantitative Three-Dimensional Imaging of the Posterior Segment." Whatever one calls it, this is a very slick machine. It is also no doubt very expensive, since my three-minute visit with it cost my insurance carrier well over a hundred dollars. But it meant I avoided having my eyes dilated or enduring a long and tedious field-of-vision test, and it did give a very fast and detailed first impression of what's going on in the backs of my eyes.

The next part of the exam is the part that sends shivers down my spine to think of it. See, like many people, I'm very protective of my eyes, and the thought of sitting there passively while something touches the surface of my eyes just creeps the hell out of me. The next test involved a device called a "pachymeter." Its name sounds like it should be used to measure elephants. It's actually used to measure the thickness of the cornea. For this test, the medical technician numbs the eye with an anaesthetic drop and then — and this is the part that sends shivers down my spine a full day later — touches the cornea with the probe with enough pressure that the cornea bends slightly, in ways not at all like how it bends during ordinary eye focusing, and space seems to warp and wiggle. I don't have too many issues with space wiggling as long as I don't get sucked into a singularity or lose the effects of gravity, but the thought of being repeatedly touched on the cornea just gives me the creeps. Fortunately the anaesthetic worked, but after it wore off several hours later it felt just a little sore, like, well, like I'd been poked in the eyes a few hours before.

Fortunately there is nothing prompting immediate alarm, though we will have to keep track of the eyes over time. I'm considered a "glaucoma suspect." The immediate practical implication is that I will have to be poked in the eyes repeatedly. I'm glad that part happens only once per year.

JDBliss posted this interview with Ernest Svenson, a/k/a Ernie the Attorney.

Ernie the Attorney's weblog was one of the first that I began reading back in 2002, and I've long admired his efforts to encourage improvement in law practice through better use of technology and other practices. He's looking forward in a business that spends most of its energy looking backward.

Slashdot linked a story by the BBC reporting that the U.S. hosting service The Planet terminated the contract of the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA).

According to the article, ISNA is "semi-official" and may have some connections to the Iranian government. (If I recall correctly, the fundamentalist revolution in Iran called itself a "student" revolution, which may have some connection to the name of the organization.) Assuming so, the policy concerns, from the perspective of the United States, are different from a termination of a more liberal website.

There may be no effective way for a U.S. ISP to distinguish between the two kinds of websites, though, nor is it at all clear that the U.S. government should systematically engage in content-based discrimination between them. From a practical standpoint, ISP operators can't read Farsi and are unfamilar with the culture and politics of Iran, and can't be expected to make those calls anyway. It's not surprising that some ISPs are taking a bright-line approach and terminating accounts of Iranian entities and Iranians not resident in the United States, even if it silences some voices that the United States would probably like to amplify.

Assume an Iranian national resided legally in the U.S. and used a webpage hosted in the United States to write in favor of the existing Iranian government. Can the ISP terminate the contract because he is an Iranian national? Can the government require the ISP to do so without running afoul of the First Amendment? What if the Iranian national moves back to Iran?

Hossein Derakhshan reports, citing the BBC's Persian edition, that Iranians who have hosting or domain registration in the United States are being refused or cut off by their U.S. hosting providers.

Iran is on a U.S. blacklist that is intended to prevent it from receiving technology that it could bend to military uses. For example, it is particularly illegal to transmit encryption technology to Iran. I'm looking for a copy of the law or regulation now but I haven't found it yet.

If U.S. providers won't host Iranian web pages, reform-minded Iranians lose out, as do U.S. efforts to support them. They can't host their web pages on Iranian providers. I don't know whether it is at all easy for an Iranian to host a web page with, for example, a provider in an European country.

So I doubt that the U.S. ought to apply its restrictive technology policy to web-hosting. But even if the Department of State or other agencies are not putting pressure on hosting providers, those providers may themselves restrict access in order to avoid a conflict with the government. If that's the case, then what is needed — as a first step — is communication from and among the various government agencies that could potentially be involved, making it clear whether they intend to make life difficult for hosting providers who provide access to Iranians. A policy of prosecuting hosting providers would be unfortunate for reform-minded Iranians and contrary to the policies announced in President Bush's inaugural speech.

I have seen some comments conjecturing that this is part of some action leading up to a conflict between the United States and Iran. I suspect it's just the application of a technology blacklist that's been in effect for decades. But like most embargos, it harms the people the U.S. wants to help; and in this case, it harms them in a politically powerful way.

I hope it is just ISPs being overcautious, but even if it is, then someone in the government needs to tell them that they can relax. But governmental communication, especially on points such as these, is sadly too much to hope for.

[Via Dan Gillmor]

Donna Wentworth posted a link to the book review Righting Copyright: Fair Use and "Digital Environmentalism" by Robert S. Boynton, published by Bookforum. The book review highlights four books on improving the balance in U.S. copyright law between exclusive rights and the public domain.

The review surveys the social and legal context, identifies the problems the books' authors try to address, and tries to explain (in relatively small space) why they are problems. It's a good survey, and from it I can tell that I will need to add some books to my reading list.

The term "digital environmentalism" was new to me, but seems very useful. Rather than explain it clumsily here, I simply refer you to Boynton's articulate introduction to the topic (it's in his 14th paragraph by my count, if you want to try to skip straight to it).

Now that I can retrieve photos from my camera phone, I can show you one of the more unusual sights that I've recently seen. I can say that I had never before seen a mouse perched on top of a cat, let alone one that was perched on top of a dog. Until I saw this:

All three animals were quite alive and were looking around at people who passed by. The cat and mouse shifted their weight regularly in an effort to keep balance.

Thanks to this post by Jon Armstrong and the "bitpim" software he refers to, I finally have a way to extract photographs from my Sanyo PM-8200 phone without zapping them across SprintPCS's digital data service.

I had already bought a USB data cable for the phone, so all I needed were current USB drivers for the phone and bitpim. I did struggle for a while with the hardware until I realized that the caller ID program on my computer was grabbing access to the phone and locking bitpim out. Once I disabled the caller ID software, bitpim worked fine.

Yesterday, I commented on the recent discussions about law firms' ability to develop and use computer technology to serve clients more effectively. Today I browsed the classified advertisements in the Denver Post and noticed that Holland & Hart LLP, a Denver-based firm, is seeking a C#/ASP/.NET programmer and a computer quality assurance analyst.

In my return to regularly reading weblogs, I've found a lot of recent discussion about law practice management, billing, and the future of law and technology.

For example, consider Laura Owen's article — or dare I say manifesto — The Tech Evolution: Change or Die [Law.com], in which she signals law firms that it is time to take advantage of information technology at least to the same extent of other successful businesses. Owen is the director of worldwide legal services for Cisco Systems, Inc. In her article, she articulates nine strategies to improve the efficiency of legal services. She specifically has corporate counsel in mind, but the law firms armed with those tools could use them to the benefit of all manner of business clients, small businesses as well as large corporations. Dennis Kennedy read the article and recalled a presentation Ms. Owen gave last year on many of the same themes. He reports, "In the room were reps of some of the largest and most prominent law firms in the country. Not one of them was willing to say that they could do even one of the items on the list. I was stunned." [See also Ernie the Attorney's post.]

Carolyn Elefant wondered, could the demand for higher-tech law practice reflected in Ms. Owen's article could run to the benefit of smaller law practices, or will the large firms ultimately dominate all of business law?

Even as forward thinkers like Owens or Dennis argue for lower costs, at the same time, firms continue to merger growing larger and larger. I simply don't believe that a ginormous firm will have the same efficiency as a smaller one if only because it relies on the power of hundreds of associates and multiple levels of review to generate revenues. So how to reconcile the merger trend with the increased calls for flexible billing and the like? In five years, will the legal market be dominated by ten giants (who will rewrite conflicts rules to enable them to retain more clients?) Or will it be populated by small, lean high tech operations responsive to client needs? Naturally, I'd love to see the pendulum swing to the latter but I am not always so sure that is where we are headed.

I wonder how many small firms will really be able to achieve the level of high-tech efficiency that Owen has in mind. I am mainly worried that small firms do not have the capital (both financial and human) to invest in the level of technology that the large firms can achieve.

Ms. Owen probably began her article with larger firms in mind; she specifically praised McGuireWoods (~750 lawyers) and Reed Smith (~1000 lawyers) for their efforts in developing electronic services and technologies for their clients.

I worry about the smaller firms because the kinds of technological systems Owen envisions can require significant investment. That investment takes at least two forms. First, the firm must pay for IT staff and equipment to design and contain the system, or it must find a well-designed and flexible commercially available system to use as a foundation. Second, attorneys must take time to populate the system with information and maintain it.

When my wife and I returned to Colorado from Wisconsin a few weeks ago, I felt for the first time since moving here the sense of returning home. I've long considered Madison, Wisconsin my hometown; I was born there, I lived there until I was four and again from twelve until I went to college, and I went to college and law school in the Midwest. I moved out to the Denver area in 2002, following my then-girlfriend (now wife). I liked the mountains and the fair weather, but parts of me missed the midwest. The near-constant Colorado sun seemed just a bit too sunny, and the green of a midwestern summer overwhelms the drab greenish-brown of the Colorado plains and foothills. And, of course, many of my closest family and friends still live in the midwest.

But this time, somehow, Wisconsin felt more alien to me. Its oddities, the things that fuel Wisconsin stereotypes, stood out more awkwardly — like Packers jerseys and larger, more vaguely Germanic- and Scandinavian-looking people. The sun seemed unusually faint and buried in clouds.

I'm still getting to know Colorado. And I still harbor some dismay at the fact that visiting any of our friends and family elsewhere requires an inconvenient and expensive trip. It helps to be reminded, though, that I feel this is the right place to be right now.

I tried to use Zempt 0.4 to post that last entry. It posted the title but not the entry text. Odd.

Suffice it to say I've been afflicted with at least one respiratory ailment all week and, between symptoms and the effects of medications, have been practically useless for most of the week. I saw the doctor today, though, and maybe by the end of the weekend I'll feel like I'm in one piece again.

Sweet. I don't pay much for hosting and don't have much space, and I won't get much traffic, either. So, using PHP and dynamic page generation in Movable Type probably won't cause too much trouble. I was trying to limit the forms of archiving MT would use so that I wouldn't have to worry about using up my scarce disk space on the server. Now I don't have to worry about that as much.

I found I could set the correct "preferred" archive format only by directly editing the mt_blog database entry in MySQL. I seem to have got it working, though -- at least for the moment.

Fix one thing, break another....

I've updated the site to MT 3.14, but I've run into a few problems and I've reverted the site to a generic MT template set rather than try to update what I had. I still can't get archiving to work right. I use individual, monthly, and (for the moment, at least) category archives. The "preferred" archive selection radio buttons in the "weblog config / archiving" page don't work -- they're all set to active. Even though I've turned off weekly archiving, the permalinks for posts still point to the old weekly archives instead of the individual archives. I'm guessing it's just a tag I need to change.

But if it's just a tag I need to change, then why does even the CMS "Edit Entry" screen "View Entry" link point to the non-existent weekly archive?