Reading Time: 14 minutes
I have slowly been extracting myself from Google services. It’s not hard to understand why. Over time, the balance between what I had to give and what I received got out of balance. The hardest ones have been their core PIM offerings: Mail, Contacts, and Calendar. I have been looking for awhile for a groupware offering
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David Whelan Blogs
Latest from David Whelan
The Devil’s Playground
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I am trying to be more idle. I know, I know, if I was any more idle, I would be lying down. In this Puritan Work Ethic Paradise, being idle is a dangerous choice. Fortunately, it’s idleness with purpose. It is something I have tried in other workplaces but an academic environment seems particularly well-suited to
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AI Remains a Strategic Distraction
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I was running through the syllabus highlights recently as we started a new semester of lawyering skills. It’s primarily a writing and research class, with professionalism and practice technology incorporated when possible. As we touched on artificial intelligence, there were no questions and I didn’t belabor it. If law students use it, they risk making the
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Eat Your Sprouts
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve been experiencing a lot of negative friction recently with technology. Fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that our organization does not standardize. The failure to pick a product and commit resources to it means that we—well, let me say I, at least—waste time trying to navigate myriad systems. People may not like standardization for
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Customizing the OBS Studio Start Up Image
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I am a long time user of OBS Studio. It’s a video and audio management tool that works great for virtual meetings and video interviews. It intercepts your camera and audio inputs and allows you to combine multiple inputs into one single output. Your virtual meeting software will see OBS Studio as a single camera, giving
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Improve Lawyer Communications with Improv
Reading Time: 5 minutes
The law school’s senior staff meet monthly and we occasionally convert the meeting into a group training. Things as common as managing personality types or corporate finance nuances. Perhaps the most unusual at my current workplace was one on improvisational communication. It went about the way you would think but it has led me to think
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Adding the DNS Sinkhole
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I finally turned my attention to a project that had been tickling the back of my task list since we moved into this house. It was our first house with appliances, other than a TV, that were internet-capable. I turned off most of the network options so they cannot communicate but there are a couple—an old
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An Insensitive Document
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I taught legal research and writing last year and had created some mock documents for the final assignment, an open memorandum. The topic was police interrogations and so I created a fake police report, using a template from a local Illinois county sheriff’s department. It was great, because the report really provided all the detail I
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An End to All Things
Reading Time: 6 minutes
When we use computers, it often feels like we never come to the end of something. Occasionally an app will be closed down—RIP Google Reader and Microsoft Bob—but we get used to versioning. A product is created, captures an audience, and then increments while it remains solvent, whether or not it is profitable. There
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Transparency, To Be Clear
Reading Time: 4 minutes
There was a lot of good information sharing at the AALL annual conference in Cleveland. I feel pretty seasoned as a manager and leader but I always drop in on some of the sessions focused on those topics. It is not just that you can always learn something new but, perhaps as importantly, you can be
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In Step With PACER
Reading Time: 4 minutes
We have been emphasizing PACER as a primary Federal docket resource for just over a year now. This was a change from placing commercial options ahead of the official one. It is part of a complicated set of docket tools that we are making available and was a bit of an unknown, as we spotlighted it
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Playing the Long Game
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been blogging for awhile, decades at this point. This blog has the word “exploration” in its title but, really, it may be more about experimenting. One thing about experiments is that you may not see them bear fruit for a long time, if ever. Or you may get results you don’t anticipate. That was
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Like A Good Neighbor
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I had the lawn mower out over the weekend. We had a brief respite from the heat and the rain and the new sod we’d put down needed a trim. As I was finishing up, my neighbor came out with his mower and a similar mindset and we got to chatting. We’ve lived here for over
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Do Web Analytics Measure Anything Any Longer?
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The age of bots is here. While we have always been awash with automated crawlers and scrapers, it has now become overwhelming. For a long time, the reporting of website statistics in annual reports or as a service benchmark for law libraries was questionable. Now it is downright pointless.
There was always a weakness in using
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The Point of Training
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am a recent transplant to Chicago. This past spring, I learned that Chicago Public Schools have an administrative governance board at each school. The Local School Council operates as an advisory group for each principal, and is pulled from the school’s community of parents, teachers, and neighbors. The news reported that the system was short
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