Ilta ‘09 – Legal Technology Conference

I just submitted my registration for the ILTA ‘09 conference that will be held in August in Washington, DC.  This years conference is important to me for a few reasons.

• They have added an Enterprise 2.0 track.  My thinking at work turns more and more to introducing E 2.0 concepts into our firm.
• I am expecting some interesting discussion around the Interwoven 8.5 line of products.  Perhaps some real answers relating to e-mail management?
• I am predicting that the back channel at conference this year will be quite rich.  I thought it was good last year (I didn’t attend) and am hoping for spectacular this year.
• The economy is hitting administrative travel and conference budgets hard.  I really want to attend this year, so I am planning to foot the bill on my own (and pray for a turn around so I can expense it in August).

I thought it would be fun to throw together a personal blog for conference this year, so I will kick of Sean’s ILTA ‘09 blog today.  Content should be come more frequent as August approaches.  I will be live blogging the conference, and plan to share some video as well (got to love the Flip cameras).  Stay tuned.

Upgraded Kindle Unboxing

Being the gadget freak that I am, I had to take advantage of Amazon’s offer to be first in line to try out the new Amazon Kindle (K2).  It arrived on Tuesday, and I immediately recorded my Kindle unboxing (sorry for the crap quality).  I also opened up my newest geek t-shirt that I got from Woot.

 

A few quick thoughts on the K2:

• The user experience compared to the first Kindle is quite different.  Reading on the K2 just feels like a new experience.  I am not sure yet what the good and bad parts of the experience are, just different.
• Many of the actual UI changes are quite nice.  I especially like the progress meter and the top information bar.
• I am missing the ability to lock the device using the keyboard.  It is not as convenient to reach to the top and flip the switch.
• Basic navigation was much faster with the K1’s scroll wheel.  However, the stick in the K2 makes highlighting and annotating much easier.
• Automatic dictionary look ups are an amazingly cool feature…maybe the best new thing.
• The default (read cheap) leather case that you can order a) holds the Kindle very securely and b) is not as nice to use when reading.  I miss the elastic to keep the cover closed.  It was much easier to attach the light for night reading on the K1.

I plan to record another video soon to discuss what I like and don’t like about the K2 compared to the K1.

Google Tags: kindle 2, amazon, unboxing

Pet Peeves – Simple Offense Real Punishment

I was just reading an article in the Houston Chronicle about how some Texas legislators are going to attempt to pass legislation that regulates when/how cell phones and other mobile devices can be used in a car.  I will say right now, I think this is a good idea.  They also plan to address things like reading a book and putting on make up.  I agree again that this should be high priority legislation.

What makes me sad, and is a big pet peeve of mine, is that even if these laws are somehow miraculously passed they won’t have decent enough punishments to deter people from the acts.  Enforcement on things like this is just to hard.  I don’t want to have the police burdened with monitoring cell phone usage, just does not make sense.

Instead, I think we need very strict punishments based on the outcome of choosing the wrong action.  If you get into an accident while using your phone or applying makeup you should have to pay a hefty fine and surrender your license for a period of time.  For sake of example lets say the fine is equal to the total amount of damages from the accident.  If you knew that on top of having your insurance go up, your car wrecked that you were going to have to fork over an additional $6000.00 would that make you less likely to talk and drive?  Tack on a real (no work exception) 6 months license suspension on top to make sure the point gets across.  I say the second time you cause an accident, you lose your license permanently.

Just seems crazy to me that we pass these rules, and rely on an over burdened police force to try and enforce them.  I don’t know what the real punishments should be, but I know that if I can talk on the phone and occasionally have to pay a 100 fine that I am likely to not be deterred.  I want to see punishments that actually hurt the people who break the laws.  Don’t even get me started on drunk drivers (1 strike is plenty for them).

I don’t believe we should ban in car phone use, but hands free voice and dialing functionality should be a requirement.

Columbia Games Deal

I am a big fan of Columbia Games.  I have six of there games sitting on a shelf across the room from me right now.  Thanks to a change to their $149.00 game bundle, I am looking to add three more.  Normally, the EuroFront series of world war 2 games are not available as part of the buy 3 games deal.  The games normally sell for $99.00 each(there are three of them) or on special for $279.00.  However, for this week only you can get the games as part of the bundle.

That gives you the entire European theater of WWII in all of it’s block game goodness for only 150 bucks.  50% off retail is a good deal any way you cut it.  I have often looked at these games as I am told that they give a very good feel for the genre without being overly difficult to learn.  I am already a fan of block games so I know that this particular style suits me.  The price has always held me back before, but I think it is time to act.

When they arrive I will have a 4’ x 6’ playing board upon which to fight out many battles, as well as over 500 blocks to get stickers on.  That should keep me busy for a few nights.  As with all my game purchases I just need to find an opponent or three to play against.

Interwoven and E-mail Management

Yesterday I had the chance to attend a presentation by Interwoven where they discussed many of the changes that are forth coming in the 8.5 release of the Worksite product.  The discussion initially focused on the merger (the iManage name is coming back) and on the product in general, but it quickly turned to the primary e-mail management discussion.

Interwoven seems to be realizing that there are a lot of personal knowledge management schemes out there, and that those schemes do not always mesh with the goals of the firm.  This is a good thing in my opinion.  I believe that the best way to get people to participate is to leverage the tools and work methods they already use.  We need to guide them to the best paths we can, but in the end it is their responsibility to do the walking.  If we can take what they have already done, and use that information for the good of the firm then we have made the lives of those on both sides a bit easier.

The bulk of the meeting discussed that Interwoven 8.5 will include 5 new e-mail filing methods meant to leverage the way people are working, and to get e-mail stored into the central Interwoven system.  The five new e-mail methods are:

1. Server Side Filing:  Interwoven Communication server will change over from handling SMTP email messages to acting as a go between from Outlook to Exchange.  The Communication Server will actually move, in the background, messages from Outlook to Interwoven.  Basically, this makes the e-mail storage process quite seamless for users.  They will move/copy a message to a folder, and the actual storage of the messages happens at the server level.  This should be true even if a large group of messages are moved.  This should prevent the problems people have with Outlook locking up when moving large numbers of e-mail.
2. Delegated Filing:  The new Outlook integration will include a delegate option that will allow a secretary to file e-mail for the attorney and assign the author/creator to the attorneys ID.  This should prevent the issue of e-mail being filed by the secretary, but not having rights granted to the actual attorney.
3. Filing Toolbar:  Outlook now sports a filing toolbar for getting e-mail stored into matter folders quickly.  A couple of standout features of the toolbar are a) the ability to file attachments individually; b) personalized matter folder recommendations.  This toolbar concept is not unique, a couple of third party vendors already offer something similar.  I think this is a good move to add this functionality to the Filesite client itself.
4. Suggestive Filing:  This is part of the toolbar, but is also available upon send.  Using the metadata and personal history the tool will recommend folders for filing that message.  Hard to say how well this will work.  It does have a “popup” piece that sits in Outlook and nags senders to actually file a message.  I am a bit fearful that people will select a default folder for the storage of e-mail messages to avoid the nag.  It was mentioned that the toolbar would be integrated into the send dialog to avoid the popup.  This feature will need some usability testing before rollout.
5. Outlook Folder Sync:  One of the nicest new features is a folder sync option.  Basically, you tie a folder you have created in Outlook to a folder in a Workspace and anything you put in the Outlook folder is automatically synced to Interwoven.  They described the concept as mapping the Outlook folder to Interwoven.  The sync is one way, so other users can use the same Workspace folder without it affecting your sync.  You will also need to manually remove previously synced items from Interwoven, deleting them from the Outlook folder is not enough to remove the Interwoven copy.  The offer three options on the folder sync: 1) to leave a copy in Outlook; 2) to file it as private (overwriting the folder security); and 3) only file messages from external users.  I see this as the most innovative an potentially useful of all of the features they are offering.

A few other things they discussed were new icons in the Outlook message list that help you to see when messages have been saved to Interwoven (even by other people which is very cool).  They also have new workspace folder icons that better distinguish when the security on a folder is not inherited from the parent folder.

They will be integrating Express Search into the integrated Interwoven dialog(s) to let people perform searches from all Interwoven UI’s.  Looks like the end of the worklist is growing nearer as Interwoven puts it’s new search interfaces in the forefront.  They are also making Offsite more robust to allow for better network detection, and to make sure that the UI is the same online and off.  Most importantly, offsite will allow for syncing of individual folders inside of a workspace.

They briefly discussed the Mobility client which has been enhanced for the Blackberry platform.  The goal is to allow filing, attaching and viewing of as much Interwoven content as possible on the device.  For none Blackberry devices they are implementing a rich AJAX based web client to do as much of the same function as they can.

Lastly, they announced a new product that I have long speculated we would see and that is Worksite Fileshare.  Fileshare is a Windows Explorer integrated client that shows the full Interwoven tree inside of a regular windows directory structure.  Basically, Fileshare will map a drive to Interwoven.  Again, we see the end of an era as this is surely the first step towards eliminating the client software and working directly with the OS.  This makes a ton of sense to me, but certainly is a long way off before we say good bye to Desksite/Filesite forever.  They did mention that using Fileshare, you will only get the metadata that is applied to the folders you store things in, and that versioning is not possible.  This does make it easy to store all of those “other” types of documents that are not normally accessible to Interwoven.  I can finally put my MindMaps in with my other documents.

Overall, i think they showed a lot of compelling changes to the Interwoven products.  We should see these features in the 8.5 release on the 12th of June.

Hate D&D Miniatures?

I have bought quite a few D&D miniatures since the game has been released.  I played once or twice, but I never really liked the skirmish game that much.  The miniatures, especially the monsters, are quite nice though.

Having such a large collection of miniatures, made me realize that I needed a miniatures rule set that would play well with these and any other fantasy miniatures I have lying around.  They are good for RPG’s, but I just don’t get to roleplay all that often.  Enter Song of Blades and Heroes.  I purchased this game about a year ago for the amazing price of only $5.00.  Your 5 bucks gets you a PDF file with the game rules, campaign system, and unit lists that you need to start playing.

This game does a couple of things very well.  First, you can use any miniatures you want with the game.  If you count the core game and all of the currently available expansions you end up with unit lists for just about anything in the fantasy genre.  Second, the game plays fast.  Once you get a handle on the rules you can play through a game in about 30 minutes. Finally, you can play the game on a small table.  Depending on the scale of your miniatures you can play on a 2x2 or 3x3 table.  I made a 3’ x 2’ setup that I think might work ok for smaller games at 25mm.

I mentioned expansions, and there are currently three that expand the bases game.  Song of Gold and Darkness is all about playing in dungeon environments, Song of Wind and Water is about playing outdoors, and Song of Arthur and Merlin (which I don’t own yet) adds the Arthurian legends to the game.  Each expansion adds new abilities and includes new unit lists in addition to the new game rules and settings.

I have made a few armies using a combination of the rules in the books and the rules for creating custom units.  Unit creation is made much easier thanks to Ray Forsythe’s Warband Builder.  This java based web application makes creating warbands for the game a snap.  Either copy the stats directly from a rulebook, or make up your own and it will figure the unit and warband cost for you.  You can grab the warband builder on the Song of Blades Yahoo group as well as discuss the game with other fans (and the games designer).  I have created a warband with a cat theme using the Rakshasa, Catfolk, Dire Lion, Blessed Hunter, 2x Hunting Cougar, and Manticore models from DDM.  You can play themed warbands or just grab a handful of your favorite models and stat them up.  I am rebasing some of my old Mage Knight Dungeons miniatures for the game.

This is a game that I really want to play more of.  To be honest, I have only played a few solo runs of the game, so I really want to get some in against a real opponent.  One last thing to mention is that the games publisher Andrea Sfiligoi also writes a ezine called Free Hack to support his games.  The magazine covers all of the games I mentioned above as well as the Mutants and Death Ray Guns game which is a science-fantasy game and Song of Drums and Shakos which is a Napoleonic skirmish game.

You can purchase copies of the game from the games home page or from the games store on Lulu.

Google Tags: song of blades and heroes, miniatures, fantasy

Firefox vs. Chrome – IMHO

Last week I got pretty excited about the news of the Feedly update.  Feedly is a Firefox plugin that works with your feeds in Google Reader to make browsing the web a richer experience.  The main change in Feedly that caught my interest was the Feedly mini.  The mini does two things that I have wanted for a long time.  The first is that it automates the discovery of Friendfeed conversations for any article you re viewing.  This is cool because a lot of good discussion has moved from a blog articles comments into FriendFeed and Twitter.  They also allow you to easily add an article to the starred list in Google Reader.  This one is super awesome, because I want to use that starred list as my reading list for the web.

I have been using Chrome as my primary browser for the last few months.  Feedly only works with Firefox.  Obviously, I had to install Firefox to try out this new Feedly.  I am back to using Chrome again yesterday and today, and I have finally figured out why.

Chrome does not offer extensions.  Chrome is just a dead simple, get things done browser.  The browser seems quite fast to me, and I rarely encounter problems with crashes (something that I regularly have with a fully loaded FF3).  Chrome just lets me focus on browsing, and I use a set of about 5 bookmarklets to interact with my most common services.  Basically, I find that the extensions don’t really add anything to my browsing experience.  They actually detract from it with all of their glitz and bling.  I spend more time configuring, updating and working in the confines of those extensions.  Even the new Feedly, which I think is amazingly awesome, is just a distraction from actually getting the stuff I want to get done online done.

I also find that the awesome bar in Firefox has nothing on the Chrome combined search/address bar.  I love that I can start typing words, not urls, and find what I want from the same bar.  It combines my history, my bookmarks, and the entire web in a way that Firefox does not.  I recorded a couple of videos that demonstrate what I mean.  This morning I wanted to go to the Worthington Games website.  When I am using Chrome I just type Worthington Games into the address/search bar and it finds what I need.  When I type the same thing into FF I need to browse to Google before I can get there.  It just makes browsing more friendly.  I think it also reduces the need to bookmark as much stuff.  Chrome just makes things easy to find with natural language searches. 

Chrome Example

Firefox Example

Google Blog Search Tags: chrome, firefox

Replacing Ma.gnolia with Diigo

It has been quite a while since I have used Ma.gnolia as my primary bookmarking tool.  Over the year or so since I stopped using Ma.gnolia primarily I have bounced around between a number of services, but most often using Diigo.  Ma.gnolia has had some troubles recently, pretty serious troubles, and I was very surprised to see that Larry and co. are suggesting Diigo as an alternative to Ma.gnolia.

I went in search of something different when I realized that most of the development at Ma.gnolia was geared towards open web standards.  I was looking for more bookmarking features, especially new ways to organize and search for bookmarks.  I was initially attracted to the 3.0 version of Diigo by the enhanced social tools and the ability to annotate web pages.  When I started using the service I noticed how it was very similar to Ma.gnolia, especially in the use of groups.  Diigo also has a lists feature which is another way of organizing your bookmarks. Lists are nice because they allow you to group the bookmarks similarly to how things are organized in Google Notebook.  There was some talk at Ma.gnolia of adding a similar feature so I was glad to see it implemented.

Diigo is focused quite heavily on research, as opposed to merely bookmark collection.  This has attracted a large following among educators, and there is a lot of focus on the site towards enhancing research.  I think this is a good thing, as it gives a very different feel to Diigo and puts features into the service that would not be there without this research emphasis.

I will say that I have never felt more “at home” with a web service as I did with Ma.gnolia.  The guys running Ma.gnolia, Larry and Todd and the others that have worked there, made every effort to be available.  I spent time in chat rooms, discussing things in groups, and exchanging email with the developers to make Ma.gnolia a better service.  I took part in Ma.gnolia’s anti-spam program where gardeners helped to keep weeds(spam) down in the Ma.gnolia garden.  While the developers of Diigo are every bit as passionate about what they are doing, and I do feel they are listening to their users, they are not as accessible as the Ma.gnolia team was.  I don’t think that I would feel the same sense of community as I did at Ma.gnolia.  I also feel that the developer team is a bit slow to respond to support questions, and they could spend more time in the forums.  I would love to see Diigo add a community rep that is dedicated to just taking care of the user questions and issues.  Todd filled this role of go between with the community and developers at Ma.gnolia very well.

All that said, Diigo has more than enough going for it.  Some new additions are planned to beef up the already impressive set of research tools.  It sounds like they plan to basically duplicate the same sort of functionality that made Google Notebook so popular.  They actually offer an importer for Google Notebooks since Google is phasing out that service.  Perhaps, in light of the unfortunate events at Ma.gnolia, the best feature of Diigo is that they auto bookmark to Delicious (and formerly Ma.gnolia) whenever you add a bookmark to Diigo.  Nice and easy way to get a backup (they also offer a backup feature, as did Ma.gnolia).

I agree with Larry, Diigo is a nice alternative to Ma.gnolia.  I still hope to see the Ma.gnolia service re-born.  I will be creating an account there when they do.

Round Tables for Miniatures?

I have been looking at some sites recently trying to decide what terrain I might want to buy to enhance my collection and to put together some nicer stuff for AT-43 and Infinity.  I started thinking about my gaming space at home and I have two tables that would work very well.  One is a 3’x3’ square table and the other is a 4’ round table.

Got me thinking, why do we play miniatures games on square or rectangular boards?  Why not use a round playing surface?  I have seen a number of round demo tables, I think Privateer Press had some nice ones for Warmachine.  A round table seems like it would be a more natural or realistic surface to play on.  A round table lacks the hard borders of a rectangle, and seems easier to design a large.    Perhaps it is just that game rules have long been written for square tables.  I don’t suppose there is any real reasons for it other than precedent.

Does anyone know?  Are round tables in someway bad for playing miniatures games?

Why I love/hate the RPG Bloggers feed.

If you having even a passing interest in pen & paper roleplaying games it is in your best interest to be familiar with the RPG Bloggers site and their very comprehensive list of RPG blogs.  They have really done some spectacular work to build up a comprehensive catalog.  I have discovered more useful blogs, and amazing content from this site in the past 6 months than I did in the year (or more) before that.  Perhaps there is just better content as of late, but this site certainly helps to keep things fresh.  I really love this site.

One problem I have with this site, and all aggregator sites like i,t is that if I subscribe to the main feed to catch all of the new goodness I cannot un-subscribe from the individual feeds that I am not interested in.  I am not interested in feeds that focus mostly on White Wolf games for example, and would prefer to unsubscribe.  Having an OPML file for the site would help, as it would make it easier to sort through all of the different member sites and pick the ones I want to keep.  A quick search tonight helped me to find an OPML.  If you are interested you can head over to the 6d6 Fireballs blog and getting a hold of the OPML they are maintaining.  It may just be perception, but it also seems like I get more full feeds when I subscribe to each site than I do by subscribing to the RPG Bloggers feed.

Overall, I really like what RPG Bloggers is doing.  They are making it easy for me to find new content.  I highly suggest you subscribe if you are interested in RPG’s.