Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Thursday, February 4, 1943. The Afrika Korps retreats to Tunisia.

The Afrika Korps withdrew from Libya to Tunisia.

This event came within the week of the German's surrendering at Stalingrad and while it was not as momentous, it was certainly a sign to all who cared to read it that the German effort was now well past its high water mark.  The Germans were in a full, if controlled, retreat on the southern part of the Eastern Front, and were in a full, if controlled, retreat in North Africa as well.  Envisioning a scenario in which these could be reversed was difficult, and indeed it proved to be impossible.

That Rommel's forces were in retreat is noteworthy in and of itself, in that Rommel, given the separation from the continent, felt at liberty to ignore Hitler's no retreat orders and thereby avoid the same fate that had just fallen to Paulus.


Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz (née Błaszkiewicz) was born on this day in German occupied Plungė, Lithuania.  After the Second World War the Polish family was part of the massive Soviet forced resettlement of Poland, and movement of its borders, and they moved to Poland.  She was highly athletic and turned to mountain climbing by accident when a motorcyclist stopped to help her when her own motorcycle broke down, and she met another mountaineer he was transporting.

Highly accomplished as a mountain climber, she was a difficult personality on expeditions.  She disappeared while on a climbing expedition to Kangchenjunga in 1992.

She was a computer engineer by occupation.

Also a computer engineer, and also born on this day, is American Ken Thompson, who invented Unix.

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

I'm surrounded by electronic communications devices. . .

 and I don't like it.

Richmond and Backus Co. office, Detroit, Michigan, 1902.  This is obviously a law office.  A set of CJS's are on a rotary shelf.  On the window sill are a set of corporate seals.  The bookshelves on the left are barrister cases.  The office is sort of a mess, like most real law offices are.  Missing, however, is the dread telephone.

This week I started using an iPad.

This isn't because I love the latest and the greatest in technology,  I don't.  Not at all.  In fact, I tend to be a contrarian on it.

This is partially as I just view tools for their utility.  I don't understand, for example, why people trade in perfectly functioning cars they own for new ones. The old one would have gotten you from point A to point B just as well in lots of instances.

"Well, it's new!"

Yeah, so what?  You spent money on something you didn't need to get a job done, something you already owned did.

M'eh.

But I have a computer in my home.  Two actually, as I have my own laptop that I got for work purposes back during the first part of the pandemic.  I already had a work issued one, and I frankly can't really tell you know exactly why I thought I needed my own, but I did.  It might be because things were really topsy-turvy at the time, and a person with a good workplace laptop risks somebody purloining it for a temporary purpose that become permanent, or in some instances you actually need to in order to run things for trials.  Indeed, I took my own and my issue laptop to a trial in August in Denver and I mostly used my own in my hotel room, not my issue one.  My issue one I took to court each day with me, but I didn't use it much there.

Anyhow, I never saw need for an iPad, even though my daughter has one and loves it.  She uses it for school.

Then, one of my younger confederates at work, upon whom I depend a great deal, bought a surface and started using it as a notepad.

A high-tech notepad.

I was impressed, to say the least.

I'm pretty much afloat in paper all the time, and it's easy to take notes and not recall where they were or memorialize what you need to do from them.  This can address this problem pretty efficiently.

And so now I have one, and I used it for the first time yesterday, the day I got it.

It is an improvement, although it reemphasizes my horrible handwriting.

I'd gone to fountain pens due to my poor handwriting, and they do help. This takes me back to writing too fast, so it's retrograde in that fashion.  But it's an improvement nonetheless.

And once I figure it out, and I will, it'll do a lot more than that.

When I started practicing law, we didn't even have computers.  We got them the first year I practiced, and it wasn't even super clear what we were using them for. They didn't have internet connections, and while the internet existed, it was dial up and all that.

Shortly after that, we did get dial up internet and soon after that, I got a computer myself, with an internet connection.  It was actually my second, as I'd had one without a dial-up before that, although why is really an open question.

Soon after that, the "Blackberry" came in, which served various functions for those who had them.  I never did, but I did have something similar that was passed down to me by a more senior lawyer who had upgraded to something else on the Afghan Warlord Principal.[1]   I can't really recall what the thing did, other than that it stored contacts.  It wasn't a phone.

Soon after computers came in I started to type out my own work using them.  There was huge resistance to this and I was repeatedly ordered to dictate my work.  I did quite a bit of it, but I ended up abandoning that soon after we had computers.  Indeed, when I dictated I tended to write out, by hand, what I was going to dictate, first.  Anyhow, I was the first in the office to abandon the Dictaphone.  Now, I think, there's one semi retired lawyer left who uses a variant of one.

Dictaphones replaced direct dictation, which had been common before that.  With direct dictation the author dictated to a secretary who could take shorthand notation by hand, and then that person, usually a "she" in later years, transcribed it using a typewriter.  Before that, when secretaries were still "he's", that person usually wrote the document out by hand. People who did that were called "scrivener's" and were hired for their good handwriting.  Even today in the law we use the term "scrivener" as a substitute for author, because it's fun.

For notes, lawyers wrote everything out by hand on long yellow legal pads.  Many of us, myself included, still do.

But those days are ending.

Dictaphones have gone away, for the most part, and nobody is employed as a scrivener any longer.  The era of the true secretary, whose job was taking dictation and doing transcription, is over as well.  Scrivener's as an occupation no longer exist.[2]   

Where all this leads I can't say, but I really don't like being tied to electronics so much.  I do like being able to publish myself, as in here, but I'm at the point, I think, where I'd rather not have to be on the constant office cutting edge of technology.  Some people love it, even tough, long term I worry it'll be our destruction.  I'm not one of the ones who love it, even though I've been a fairly heavy adopter of it.

On that, however, it's odd how the initial adoption sometimes came by force, and then sometimes obliquely.  My first home computer was really a toy from my prospective.  I probably played Solitaire on it more than do anything else, but it came with games.  My justification for getting it was that it would be a great home word processor and much better than a typewriter, all of which is true.

The internet at home was the same way.  It was a toy.  Now I have to have it due to work.

I resisted smartphones at first, but at some point it was no longer possible not to have one.  How many I have had by now I couldn't say, but it's quite a few.  I've adopted to the text world, and I'm glad that it lets me keep up with my kids in college, sort of.  And I like having, oddly enough, a little pocket camera, which of course it also is, all the time, something that's reflected on these blogs.  And I really like the iTunes feature, oddly enough.  Indeed, I had a little iPod before I had an iPhone that I used for music.  I think that I started listening to podcasts after I had my first iPhone, and I really like them.

But, given it all, while I don't like romanticizing the past, if I could place me and those I love back a century, before all this stuff, I'd do it.

I'd probably be the only one I know, however, who would.

I wonder, if I ever retire, what of this stuff I'd keep?  I don't think I'd keep it all.

Footnotes

1.  "The Afghan Warlord Principal".  Years ago I saw a photograph of a body of men, all armed, in Afghanistan.  They were tribesmen fitted out to fight the Soviets. Some were boys.  The boys carried ancient rifles, and if I recall correctly one had a muzzle-loading rifle.  One man, squatted down dead center, had an AK47, the only one so armed.

He looked like he was 80, if he was a day.

He had the most effective combat weapon not because he was the most effective combatant, but because he was senior to everyone else.  Much technology in any one office setting works the same way.

2.  To my surprise, although I shouldn't have been, it exists as a last name, however.  

Makes sense.

Thursday, July 15, 2021

UW and the Computer


The University of Wyoming approved the creation of a School of Computing, with programs up to the Ph.D. level.  All undergraduates will be required to take at least one computing class as part of their undergraduate curriculum.

This seems to me to be a good addition to the university, as opposed to the eliminations in degree programs we wrote about yesterday. And the requirement to take a computing class, in this day and age, also makes a lot of sense to me.

Having said that, I really think the general elimination of a foreign language requirement, which was fading when I was there, is a really bad thing.  I had to take two semesters of a foreign language (I took three) but I recall there was a way to opt out of it, which generally almost all the geology students did.  I like foreign languages, and I'd had German in high school. I think that generally a foreign language was a high school requirement, or nearly a requirement, when I was there, and I'd had two years of French in junior high.

One of my lasting regrets is not having followed up on both of those topics, French and German, while in university beyond the extent to which I did.  And I wish I could speak Spanish.  I've picked up bits and pieces of languages here and there since then, but I wish I was really fluent in one, or more than one.  And its hard to appreciate the extent to which only speaking English is really limiting on a person, or at least a professional, later on.

My parents had both had to learn Latin in school.  My mother spoke French and English, having learned French both in school and in the culture in which she grew up in.  My father learned Latin, as noted, in high school, and German in university.  His father was fluent in German due to where he'd grown up.

I'm not, I'd note, hopping on the "education was better back in the day" bandwagon, which operates very similarly to the "the "X" bar was great back in the day, but now" type of argument.  Due to my family's association with it, I know what education here was like in the 40s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s, and from that I think it hit a low point in the 60s-70s (up to the early 1980s) but its really rebounded, and it's better than ever here, in my view.

But I'm concerned about university education across the nation, which has suffered greatly from the infusion of cash into the system that started with the GI Bill and which carries on. That may sound odd, but the addiction to government bucks that came started to erode universities starting in the 1970s.  Not universally, by any means, and UW remains a very good school.  Nationwide, there's a rethink going on with some now criticizing that system and others, like Bernie Sanders, delusionaly believing that if its universally funded everyone will go on to great jobs.  That belief is fatally flawed for numerous reasons we'll get into some other time, but we'll note that 1) there's no such thing as a free lunch; and 2) things that are advertised as free lunches usually are bad lunches.

Anyhow, the other thing I'm really concerned about is the seeming lack of a willingness to deal with an obvious budget crisis in Laramie.  I agree that some programs need to be cut, and overall I can't opine on that.  I'm encourage that this new program, which seems to be grasping the future is being created.  I wish that other programs that UW, a land grant college, could springboard into Wyoming's future could be created as well, and I have some ideas what those may be, which perhaps I'll post about some other time.

Be that as it may, the school is mired in a now obsolete funding model that isn't going to fix itself.  I know that a lot of legislators grasp that, but others refuse to do so publically.  The state has stuck its head in the sand on this consistently and that sure hasn't helped.  We've criticized the change that's roaring before us and that's not helped.  We've even attempted to sue our way out of it, and that failed. 

Winston Churchill once stated that Americans could be counted on to do the right thing. . . once all other options had been exhausted.  Let's hope that's true of us.  For the meantime, this is an encouraging development amongst a flood of bad ones.

Related threads:

Facing economic reality. The disaterous neglect of the University of Wyoming's budget.

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

The dangers of absent minded "liking".

So, I have this friend that's a big fan of the Adams Family and uses one of the characters names as an email handle.

And I have an Instagram account.

Instagram sends you recommendations when people follow you. Follow you back.  

I rarely post on Instagram, but some folks follow me for some reason.

Most of those people I know, of course.  So its photos of their travels, family, kids, etc.  

And some of them are outdoor themed.  I have pages I've liked that are outdoor photos, hunting photos, gun dogs, and the like.

So when I got a recommend, with the same or a really close email handle to my friend, I just absent mindedly hit a "like" and forgot about it.

I was a little surprised, as my friend isn't very active on social medial. Hardly active at all.  And I sort of associate Instagram with people who like to take photographs, which I also don't associate with this friend. But, none the less. . .

Well, several days went by.

Instagram apparently recommends things you've liked to your friends, which includes my wife, who sent me a text later about "you might want to unlike (or whatever the word is) this page".

Well, sure enough.

The page I'd like, and hadn't looked into or vetted in any fashion, was run by somebody who has a distinct interest, maybe a exclusive interest, in boobs.

Now, I'm still not entirely certain it isn't my friend and in some ways it makes some sense.  Years ago I had to tell this fellow, who is otherwise an extremely nice person, hey, don't email me boob photos.  He didn't do this often, but he did occasionally, and always off of a work computer.  They were of the joking meme type, as in "Police Bust", which would be a topless model in some sort of police uniform.  Hah, hah . . . whatever.

But the link my wife sent me was more of the simple big boob type and that would really surprise me.

So, lesson here.  

Don't "like" absent mindedly.  At least check what you like, if you are going to like anything, least you find that your recommending something that you don't recommend.

Technology is truly ruining everything.

Friday, March 8, 2019

Some random observations

1.  My tower computer at home, which I use for nearly all of these posts has been ill.

I was just going to not post while it was being repaired (which it now is, I just need to pick it up), but as I've had my laptop at home this week, I've made a few entries on it. 

I've found that as good as the laptop is, it's really the pits to use as your solo computer.  I could remedy that in various ways, but as this is temporary, I'm not going to.

2.  Readership has really started to fluctuate here on a daily basis, with the general direction being down.  I predicted that earlier, even though I've kept up with a lot of century delayed real time posts. . That was predictable.  As the story of the immediate post World War One world starts to dominate, it looses its appeal for many.

Indeed, it's hard to follow.  Right now, for example, a century ago, Germany had quit fighting the Western Allies but was fighting the Poles to some degree and was also fighting the Red Army, the latter due to the requirements of the Allies who had not been able to fully field forces in the Baltic's.  So the war had never really ended for the Germans, even though they'd been required to partially demilitarize, and even as they were fighting among themselves with arms that had been bought by the Imperial German government for its army but which were now in use by everyone against each other.

It's hard to follow.

3.  A newspaper that keeps claiming its circulation hasn't gone down because of its electronic presence really ought to have an electronic version that really fully works.  Yes, it should.

I"ve been reading that electronic version this week as the weather has been bad which has kept the newspaper from being trucked up early from Cheyenne.  Late delivery has been pretty common, not occasional like the Tribune claimed it was going to be.

4.  One advantage of using the laptop is that I can type this stuff out from the kitchen island, which means that my view is of the sunrise.  Not the basement wall.  I like that.  Due to my short stature and the general view, the view is really of the skyline, not so much of the houses across the highway.  I like that as well. 

5.  When I'm really busy, I'm really irritable.

Perhaps that's why I found myself irritated by some American neo Gandhite spouting off about the novelty of a March "fast for peace", which is apparently a monthly thing.

I don't know that much about Gandhi, but if you are a member of the one of the Apostolic faiths, which have always fasted, the neo hip American mis-discovery and misunderstanding of Eastern religions is irritating.  I know something about the independence of India and its' worth noting that on this day in 1919 the British government in India extended the proclamation of the wartime declaration of emergency specifically because it was concerned about Indian independence movements.  Gandhi, fwiw, supported the British effort in World War One.  During World War Two there was an active independence movement in India which was ineffectual  but which allied with the Japanese and which formed an army under Japanese control to fight the British.  Independence following the war was an inevitability, already agreed upon prior to the war as a fact but not as to date, and would have occurred with or without Gandhi.  British withdrawal from India was one of several really good examples of the British extracting themselves from their collapsing empire in a really brilliant fashion in which it looks like they were pushed out, but they were basically running out.  Appearing to be pushed out looks better, frankly, from an immediate and historical prospective.

Since independence, Indian has not been a model of pacific behavior.  It's fought wars with its former territorial fellow, Pakistan, and its fought a border was with China.  During the early Cold War period it flirted with being a buddy with communist movements here and there which weren't in its own democratic long term interest. 

6.  The United States could go nearly 100% carbon neutral in less than a decade simply by mandating nuclear power plants be built and vehicles be carbon neutral, which would mean largely electric.

Nuclear power is completely safe, or at least as safe as other power generating methods, and is proven.  It'd work easily.  It won't be done as the greens have a non scientific fear of nuclear power.

Indeed, in real terms, the Western world's fear of nuclear power is the global power generating equivalent of being a no vaccine advocate.  It's non scientific and harmful  A person can't be a real green in any meaningful sense and oppose nuclear power.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Intel, the semi conductor company, was founded

as NM Electronics by former Fairchild Semiconductor employees Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore on this day in 1968.

The rumblings of the computer revolution were beginning to be heard.

In Canada, the mailman wasn't being heard as the employees of Canada Post went on strike. For businesses near the US border this meant compensating by renting post office boxes in nearly by US locations.

Alexander Dubcek went on national Czech media to inform his people that he'd continue his democratic reforms as Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia in spite of pressure form the Soviet Union to stop it.

And Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil announced the discovery of oil in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, which the companies had made some months prior.

It was a busy day.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

Why was this blog turned off for awhile?

And I may again.

This blog gets, normally, about 250 hits a day.

The past couple of days its been getting thousands of hits.

Mostly from Russia and the Ukraine.

Hmmmmm. . . .

That's odd.

I suspect bots, but I don't want this appropriated for any reason, so I turned it off for awhile today to try to check out what the heck is up.  And as I'm cautions, I may do that again.

I like blogging, obviously, but this isn't going to serve as a target or a platform.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Tools of the trade. . .


Fountain pen innk, computer screen, speaker hooked to computer, on a secretary desk that's well over a century old. 

What I look at most of the time, most days.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Behaving like its 1957 when its 2017. . .

is probably not going to work for you.

 How your entity appears, and how people react to it, if you have a website that looks like it was supposed to function twenty years ago and isn't interactive in any fashion.

I'm not going to be super specific in this post, as I'm a bit miffed quite frankly, but whether you like it or not, and I mostly don't, the front door for your office, organization, church, synagogue, club, etc., is not your front door.

It's your website.

And if your website doesn't work, but just sits there with a URL, your door is boarded up and says something equivalent to "closed".

The reason, I'll note, that I'm posting this is a direct experience for over a year on this topic with it being said, several months ago, "it's fixed".  It is not.

And by not, what I mean is that if you have front page to your website that has links that take you to vague generalities, but a person who, for instance, might have something scheduled needs to check that, or links don't work, why did you bother in the first  place?

In the modern world, if a person is under 40 years old, they don't check the "yellow pages" and they aren't going to call you for information either.  They're going to go to your website and if that website is a dumpster fire, they're moving on.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Bandits

Net Security calmly whacking the beast of hackery. . . or something like that.

From the New York Times:
SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers are discovering that it is far more profitable to hold your data hostage than it is to steal it.
A decade-old internet scourge called ransomware went mainstream on Friday when cybercriminals seized control of computers around the world, from the delivery giant FedEx in the United States to Britain’s public health system, universities in China and even Russia’s powerful Interior Ministry.
Oh great.

It would seem that things like this are getting more and more common, and will become an increasingly severe problem.  All we can do, it seems, is to be vigilant and hope that technology to counter such things stays apace, which it only does barely.  Today, and probably all week along, all sorts of companies and individuals will be paying ransom to recover their computers, basically.

Who are they, and where do they come from?  They aren't easily identifiable, like Pancho Villa or Baby Face Nelson.  They're more like vikings of old, or the endless groups of roaming bands that once rode out of the east. 

An example, I guess, of how the more things change, the more they stay the same, or close to it.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Ah crud

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Ah crud: Lex Anteinternet: Ah crud : I went to edit my big new post on the status of the election and. . . wiped it out. Ack. And then I lost a Wo...
Just before the phones went out.

Hmmm. . . . 

Monday, February 15, 2016

Lawyers and the Challenges of the Electronic Age

Recently I was reading a commentary by a young lawyer that was on working conditions. The commentary was not on technology, but it raised a really important point that is often missed, and indeed that relates directly to work environment.  As this blog tracks changes on an historical basis, and this is a pretty big one, it's well worth looking at.  That is, how has computerization and the Internet, both of which we've explored here at great length in the terms of the law, impacted work expectations vs. reality.  It's a bit disturbing in some ways.

 Lawyer, in this case an African American lawyer, the way it was.  Now this scene would be very rare, in a suit and tie, he's going through the books, the way that thousands of lawyers once did.  Now it'd be rare to find a lawyer dressed like this, and in a law library.

First of all, let's look back a bit.  Unfortunately, in doing this, I have to jump around a bit, so bear with me.

Law firms have been around as long as lawyers, that's no surprise. But the nature and position of lawyers within firms is quite a bit different now as compared to earlier eras.  If we go far enough back, let's say into the late 1700s, we'd find that most lawyers worked as general solos or in firms of just a few men.  There was no "Big Law", that category of firm so beloved by the ABA and whose fates sends the ABA into fits of angst.  A lot of other things were different too, and one of them was, by and large, that young would be lawyers basically apprenticed with firms "reading the law".  There were some professors who taught law but the big law schools, or for that matter, the small law schools, didn't exist.

This type of firm basically evolved along into the 20th Century, with there of course being modifications and changes depending upon where a person was, and the big firms, those darling beloveds of the ABA, did start to appear.  But much was different about the practice at the time.

Now, all lawyers kept libraries depending upon their ability to do so. And indeed, the law library remains the stock visual element in film in depicting lawyers, in their firms, at work.  And for a real reason.  The first thing any lawyer did in his own office was to resort to his own library.  If answers couldn't be found there, he might resort to the county law library or, if there was a Federal court, the Federal Court law library.  Beyond that, and perhaps surprising in context, the value of libraries was so appreciated by lawyers that it was very common for lawyers to use the libraries of other firms.  All this was true when I was first practicing.

 Typical court law library, this one in a Federal Courthouse in Seattle.

Now, leaping back to law firms for a second, up until after World War Two, while there were very large firms in big cities, by and large most law was quite local, and this remained the case well into the 1990s.  What wasn't the case, however, was the predominance of the "billable hour" and the business model of the modern firm.  

Billable hours have actually always existed to some degree. There's a reason that Lincoln said "a lawyers time is his stock and trade".  But following World War Two, and really more into the 1960s, there were other models as well.  Most of those simply died off, and in spite of the fact that some lawyers propose other models from time to time, the billable hour is firmly entrenched and it isn't going anywhere.  Lawyers, charge by the hour.
 
 Private lawyers' club library, New York.  This club apparently had quite the reputation at one time, but I'm not sure if it is still around.  If somebody knows of The Lawyers Club in NYC, let us know.

Now, getting back to the libraries, when we consider big projects or big litigation prior to the real dominance of the Internet, what that meant is that young lawyers assigned to research projects, or for that matter more established ones who were doing the same, spent hours and hours in law libraries reading, and then reducing their research to writing.  To give a typical example, a senior lawyer on a case would assign a project or a brief to a young lawyer, who would then spend several days, perhaps even a week of eight to ten hour days researching it, and then he'd reduced that to a written product by dictating (not typing or writing) his work, based upon the copies of cases he'd made and his hand written notes.

Common office scene up until the 1990s.  Secretary (in this case blind) typing while transcribing.  You can still find a few lawyers using Dictaphones, but for the most part this process is one of the past and a lawyer's first product is rendered in print from a computer.  Quite a few lawyers my age and younger, and I'm not young (age 52) generate nearly all of their finished written product themselves.  Voice has returned and is returning, however, in the form of dictating into the computer itself.

It took a long time.

Inside of firms, this was the norm for decades. Firms became highly acclimated to it, and so did the lawyers that grew up in that environment.

And what that meant is that a young lawyer assigned to very few cases actually, simply by default, engaged in a lot of work and thereby rendered quite a return. It wasn't some sort of conspiracy, it just was.  So, to put out one substantial summary brief a single lawyer might have 60 to 80 hours of time.

Now, that's all changed.

With the computer and Internet, the law library is a thing of the past to some degree.  Most more substantial firms still  have one, but quite a few solo practitioners do not.  And they don't need them.  If they have a Westlaw or Lexus account, they have the equivalent of a massive case law, law library, at their fingertips. They also have access, if they are willing to pay more, to the treatises that used to be one of the real pluses of a bigger law library.  But case law is a big deal.

Frankly, I think the product isn't as good as it was before the computer, but the speed at which it is produced is massively increased. Given our prior example, that 60 to 80 hour work product is now reduced to 20 or so hours.  That is, the average good young lawyer can probably do in 20 hours which once took 60, in terms of research and writing.
So one good lawyer is much more efficient than ever.

But, as the business model never contemplated this, and as most of the bigger firms are dominated by lawyers who came up in another era, and as overhead has not gone down, the work hour expectation has not been reduced.

This was the point of the complaining young lawyer.  Wherever he was, he was complaining that where he worked the older lawyers had expectations based on what things were like when their careers started, and things were now different. I'd never considered that, but that's really quite true.

Added to that, however, the younger lawyer probably hasn't considered that while libraries were always expensive, a time has gone on, overhead for firms has increased in every way. So, the business model is not only based on an earlier era, to some extent (and definitely not in all firms) but it may be necessary.

Indeed, the only area this isn't true is for solo practitioners, for whom costs should be way down. With a Westlaw account their libraries are as good as most big firms, and now that there's no real need for scriveners or secretaries, the one having yielding to another, and both to some degree to the computer, in a solo's office, they ought to be more competitive than ever.

All of which makes the ongoing super sized white shoe firms a real oddity.  They do keep on keeping on, but mostly it would seem due to reputation and history.  Mid sized regional firms ought to be a lot more competitive in terms of product than the big firms the ABA has on its perpetual worry list.  True, the internet lets these firms penetrate everywhere, which is something they do use to their advantage.  But the extent to which the advantage is perceived, as opposed to real, is another factor.

Anyhow, by way of that young Internet lawyer's example, he probably has to be working on a lot more things at one time to keep up his requirements than his fellows of 30 or 40 years ago.  And that may explain why so many of the "Millennial" generation lawyers don't stay in firms long. It wouldn't be the only reason, but part of one, I suspect.

On a totally different topic, another interesting is problem has become that young staff members becoming so totally acclimated to the electronic age that they operate in the assumption that the law, in terms of materials and evidence, is in that age.  It isn't.  I've really been noticing that recently.

Many documents are produced only in the electronic form now. A disk comes in the mail, or a thumb drive, or maybe somebody just dropboxes records to another lawyer. That's all well and good, but at the broken bottle end of the law, depositions and court, paper rules.  You can't turn to an witness and say "See!  See Mr. Witness, here in an electronic form within this piece of plastic is that letter that you wrote that says. . . .".

Nope, that's happening with paper.

But that is, interestingly enough not obvious to the totally electronically acclimated.  Recently I've noticed that I have to say "print out" rather than "give me" when getting ready for a deposition, or somebody will think that giving me a thumb drive is adequate.

Indeed, I'm not  the only one, I suspect, that's experienced this, as I've been in more than one deposition recently where a lawyer will say "look at this photo on my computer".  That's a totally worthless line of questioning in a deposition.

While on the topic of electronic acclimation, I've now noticed that the cell phone checking addiction that is common with teenagers has spread to lawyers. I've been in more than one deposition recently where lawyers are continually checking texts on their cell phone or looking at it.  I'm convinced that cell phones are a truly hideous invention and won't be good for us long term, and aren't good for us now.

Finally,  I note that a debate has broken out about a recent study which concluded that if legal services were fully automated the population of lawyers were correspondingly drop 13%.

Not so say some, including the New York Times.

Perhaps the missed story is that this has already happened, and impacted the lawyer population, and lawyers incomes, already.  I've addressed this above, basically, but automation is hitting big time and exactly at that time during which there is a surplus of lawyers.  If one lawyer can do the work in 1/5th of the time, this has to have an impact.  It hasn't reduced the population of lawyers yet, but like gasoline, lawyers are a surplus product that we continue to oddly generate irrespective of a lack of demand. We could do some things about that.  We could make the bar exam tougher, but instead we're making it travel, like the UBE, arguably making the situation worse.  Or we could reduce the number of students going through the system, indeed we could probably reduce that by half and not suffer.  Or we could make a legal education tougher.  There seems to be an idea it's really tough, but that's not really true.  Given recent opinions by the US. Supreme Court, making law school tougher and inserting some serious courses on the philosophy and history of law might be a good idea.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Hmmm. . . blog glitch

I have no idea why I have that odd snipped in the post below, and I can't clear it up.

My apologies, some computer glitch going on there.

Monday, November 30, 2015

Eh? Oh Cyber Monday

I'd forgotten that Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday.

As I don't pay much attention to such things, I'd sort of dimly recalled that there was a computer sales hootenanny, but I didn't remember when. I sort of thought it was Saturday.

It's today, Monday, as people return to work, and shop with their work computers. Seriously.  Makes sense, I guess.

So there you have it.  Thanksgiving, with Black Friday creeping into Thursday night of Thanksgiving.  Black Friday.  Then Small Business Saturday, followed by Cyber Monday.  Black Friday seems to have been a disappointment, I guess, and so there's big hopes pinned on Cyber Monday.  I guess it's the equivalent of what catalogs were, with much more ease of purchase, back when I was young.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Blog Mirror: Unplugging My Way to Recovery

Esther J. Cepeda writes on Unplugging as a way to recovery, and somewhat ironically she means unplugging electronic media.

There's a lot to be said for this, and not just from a health perspective, but also from a mental health and philosophic prospective.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

(Over)acclimating to technology

One of the things that gets cataloged here a lot are technological changes.  How technology, specifically computer technology, has worked a change in my own daily life became abundantly clear to me this pat week. Frankly, I don't think all of the changes are universally good either, which may seem surprising for somebody who is running a blog.

 Amishman, 1940s.  The Amish are a well known North American religious group (Anabaptist) that have restricted their use of technology. Widely misunderstood, the religious concept at work has to do with the use of things that would reduce a human's humbleness and therefore their focus on devotion.  As we become more and more technological, the more a person has to wonder if the Amish don't really have it right on at least recognizing that technology may offer, at some point, as many dangers as it does benefits.

For one thing, this is a new computer.  This computer came about as I recently went from a Pentax K-x to a Pentax K-3.  It's a great camera, but I'm frankly still learning how to use all of its features, and as it's a fairly complicated camera, I probably never will.  Be that as it may, I like it.  And part of the liking it is that not only can you take really good pictures with it, but you aren't leased to film, the way we were with earlier film cameras.

However, because of certain new features in it, it wouldn't work with my old computer, which was truly ancient.  It was in the category of PC's that had an operating system that was supposed to be updated some time back, as it was no longer supported by Microsoft, but as it was working, and as computers are expensive, I didn't do it.  Well, I finally had to as the software for the K-3 was not supported by the old operating system. So one technology lead to another.

That meant, for a variety of reasons, that I was without a home computer for about a week.  That should have been no big deal, but it was oddly unsettling.  This was, in no small part, because I've grown used to checking the computer early in the morning, when most of this stuff is written, and also checking it sometimes in the evening as well.  In other words, I've become habituated to that, and anything you are habituated to you do in place of something else.

Indeed, anything that you are habituated to, you are dependent upon to some degree.  I could easily live in a house with no television, and I only listen to the radio while in a car (although now I frequently listen to podcasts, which is another habituation) but the computer I really noticed not being here.  Not good, in some ways.

Taking this further, last weekend I was in Denver.  I'm not really keen on Denver, but I was there with my family and we went to REI, the big outdoor sports store.  REI has a great store, and a great catalog.  I first became acquainted with both through a college friend, who was a big outdoorsman (and still is).  We went down to Denver, probably in 1983 or 84, and went to REI, which we did frequently thereafter.

At that time, REI was in one of the neighboring towns around Denver, not Denver proper, although where one begins and the other stops is questionable.  Most people would have said we were in Denver.  At any rate, it was in what had been built as a grocery store at the time, but it was amazing, or perceived that way in any event.

Now, REI is in Denver, in a trendy nice area near the aquarium, and it's new bigger store is in a building that had been built as a power plant a century ago.  It's a nice store, but visiting it just doesn't have hte same excitement it once did.  There may be a variety of reasons for that, including that I"m just older, but while there I texted (technology again) my old friend and noted that I was there, and that it just wasn't as exciting as it had been back when.  He texted back that "the internet has ruined the experience".

 Spacious interior of the current REI outlet in Denver.

I hadn't thought of that, but I really think he's right.  It has.  Not completely, but partially.

Now, when you want something, there's none of the sense of scarcity of the item  or the wonderment in finding it.  In a way, of course, that's good.  But at the same time, there was something sweet about finding what you wanted, or even what you liked but didn't know you wanted, and which was difficult to get.  The effort, or just the surprise, meant something.  Now, that's all gone.  In its place, we look up everything on the net and know its whereabouts right away.  Again, that's not universally bad by any means, but it has given us a false sense of super abundance that makes us less appreciative of anything we have or seek to acquire.  That would include, I feel, even the acquisition of knowledge, as now we just "Google it".

While in Denver, as I have several times recently, we made frequent use of the Google Maps navigation feature which allows for voice directions.  This is a nifty feature, but I've found its had a direct impact on my sense of place and direction, both of which have always been very good.

I've always been able to navigate my way around any place, including any city, simply by looking at maps and mentally planning a route.  Now, because of Google Maps, I frequently don't, just having my Iphone do the work.  I've found that this has actually messed significantly with my sense of place and direction, as when I depart from it, I don't have a real good sense of where I am.  Usually, if I go to a place once, I know how to get there, but now it would seem this is less certain.  I don't like it.

Fortunately I can get back to normal simply by not using it, but it was disturbing to see how very quickly I'd become acclimated to it. This is particularly disturbing as I feel that this is one of the many technological things that has the impact of taking us a bit further from the natural world, really, which as I noted the other day has the impact of creating a world that's contrary to our natures.

All in all, while technology definitely has its benefits,  I do question if we can reach the point where it's overall detrimental to us.  Indeed, I think we may have already done that.  We don't have a really good history of self restraint.  Most of us will not take the view of the Amishmen, and it risks making us less in tune with where we are, or even who we are.  Indeed, an entire younger generations doesn't notice where they are or who they are with at any one time, as their heads are buried in their phones.  This trend is not only negative, but to paraphrase from Pogo, we have met the enemy, and its our technology.  Not completely, yet, but partially.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Lex Anteinternet: Random Snippets: Blogger difficulties

Lex Anteinternet: Random Snippets:: Odd how this program works, a slight addition and a bumping up of the past item moved all the prior items to the next page. No idea why. ...
Every once and awhile, this program (Blogger) just gets oddly glitchy.  Some feature that has worked forever, will quite working. Right now, a couple of the page feeds don't work. When this happens, I have to take them off, and reload them a couple of days later.  It's as if they acquire a memory and cease functioning.  Once they function, they work again fine forever.

Now, it's viewing any half way long post on the front page as being really long, and rolling over to the next page.  Again, no idea why.  There's longer posts that haven't done that.

Hopefully it returns to normal somewhat soon.

Random Snippets:

Odd how this program works, a slight addition and a bumping up of the past item moved all the prior items to the next page.

No idea why.

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And still doing it, but not for the next page.  Hmmm. . . . .