Reading Time: 2 minutes
My websites and apps are behind the Cloudflare firewall. I use the web application firewall (WAF) to block anything and everything that shouldn’t be coming through. One periodic request was the quarterly re-issuance of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. These are a free way to secure your internet connections but it was a bit fiddly to get…
Continue Reading SSL Certificate Issuance and Cloudflare

Reading Time: 5 minutes
For better or for worse, Google’s constant nagging about my shrinking storage space worked. I had already dropped most of their other products but have been using Photos to share images, and Mail has been my primary address for awhile. I’ll continue to use both products but I used the download your data function to export…
Continue Reading Eating Google’s Takeout from GMail

Reading Time: 4 minutes
I was still traveling so I missed the AALL announcement about this artificial intelligence (AI) keyword glossary (members only). It was a project I had worked on, so of course, I was glad to see it get shared publicly. But it had also been a great collaboration, which is not something I’ve always been open to.
Continue Reading Dream Work

Reading Time: 10 minutes
I’ve just finished Shaping the Bar by Prof. Joan Haworth. I think it’s a must-read for law librarians in any work context. As I moved recently from a public law library to an academic one, I’ve been trying to get up to speed on changes I’ve missed. This was a text I’d seen mentioned a…
Continue Reading A Chance to Mold the Profession

Reading Time: 8 minutes
I’m at the end of my first full week at a new role in Chicago. I had been in California at a public law library for just over 2 years and it was time to move on. There were a lot of reasons, mostly personal, and I had come to the realization that I was not…
Continue Reading Dearly Departed

Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people about myself and my family over the last half decade. It’s not something I was terribly comfortable doing. In part, this was because it was a persona constructed for the purpose of those interactions. I am now at a point where I can shed that persona. But…
Continue Reading Tell Me About Yourself

Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am sure I am not alone in my experience with magical thinking in law libraries. I’m sure it’s not unique to law libraries either. We operate in an environment where the people who oversee our libraries often know how to use legal information, perform legal research. There is a danger when people who have experienced…
Continue Reading The Distraction of Magical Thinking

Reading Time: 5 minutes
I had an epiphany while sitting in an AALL conference session. As is often the case, I had heard something and it had sparked a thought that distracted me for a moment. I’ve posted here before that I’m not a huge fan of the concept of succession planning. I think, now, that a lot of…
Continue Reading The Warp And Weft of Resilience

Reading Time: 7 minutes
My brother was a Russian hostage. That is now in the past but I am still processing it. But as his release started to appear on the horizon, and I was preparing for the media, I put a lot of thought into how to maintain some control in these final moments. It’s one thing to own…
Continue Reading Hold the Reins

Reading Time: 9 minutes
It is not uncommon to lump similar people together, based on their job titles, or similar organizations, based on their outward facing appearance or context. I tend to avoid this. Even statements as simple as “library directors do X” may be sprinkled with caveats. Do they? Do all directors do X? One thing that I think…
Continue Reading Tailor Your Outcome

Reading Time: 6 minutes
Multi-factor authentication is now a permanent part of life. Unfortunately, it is implemented in so many different—and not always secure—ways that it can require a lot of tools to manage. I had done pretty well until recently by relying on Duo’s products. They have a really nice free MFA (or 2FA) authentication option that allows you…
Continue Reading Dueling Authenticators

Reading Time: 6 minutes
I was hired during the COVID-19 lockdown. My interviews were entirely virtual, which was great because I was living in a different country from the law library. There was an exacting testing regimen to cross the border. Virtual suited me fine. The one thing that I missed was to be able to see the library, but…
Continue Reading From Each, to Each

Reading Time: 5 minutes
How do you measure website interactions when you don’t control the website? I had this challenge recently. It’s a pretty easy technical challenge but I wanted to add a bit of flare. It was an opportunity to either learn a new product, like Canva, or see what I could do with a tool I already knew,…
Continue Reading Flair for an Intermediate Analytics Page