April 9, 2006

Welcome to Issue #229 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!

Getting to Zero
As a semi-faithful follower of David Allen's Getting Things Done method of personal productivity, I have come to be a reader of 43 Folders, Merlin Mann's blog on "simple ways to make your life better." He has a great section on his blog called Inbox Zero, which is a series of posts "looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way." You'll find some great tips here for keeping your Inbox lean and mean.

A New Way to Manage E-Mail Conversations
So there's this new service called 9Cays that aims to make group e-mail conversations a bit easier to read. Once you're registered, all you need to do is add a 9Cays e-mail address to any e-mail that you send out. 9Cays will automatically create a web page for your e-mail conversation, which will hold all the messages. If another e-mail gets added to the conversation, that person is automatically added to the 9Cays page. I'm interested to see whether this has any utility for lawyers. The service is not completely secure right now -- there's no password, so anyone who knows the URL of the conversation can read it. But it might be a nice way to collaborate on a topic, and then have a printable transcript of the conversation.

Blawgs of the Week
Here are some of the law-related weblogs I featured this week on Inter Alia:

During the month of April we're spring cleaning our computers, and this week we'll talk about Processes. These are the programs that either 1) begin running when your computer starts up, or 2) are running at any given time on your computer. It's important to know what processes are running on your computer, for a few reasons. First, you might have spyware or some other ugly program running without your knowledge, sucking up your computer resources. Second, many programs try to load at start-up when you don't really need them running -- they take up valuable memory, which then leads to your computer running slowly.

How to find the processes running on your computer? The easy way is to just press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and click on the Processes tab. You'll see the programs that are running, as well as how much memory they are using. If you need to terminate a program that's hogging your resources, just highlight it and click End Process. WARNING: some processes are necessary to run your computer, and terminating them could cause your computer to malfunction. To determine whether you can safely terminate that process, check out ProcessLibrary.com -- it's a great resource for learning about the programs that are running on your PC.

To have more control over your start-up programs and processes, consider downloading a startup utility. I use CodeStuff Starter, which gives you considerable power to modify your startup programs and processes.

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
NIOSH is a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it's responsible for conducting research and making recommendations for the prevention of work-related injury and illness. The easy-to-use tabs across the top will take you to information on Industries & Occupations, Hazards & Exposures, Diseases & Injuries, Chemicals, Safety & Prevention, Emergency Preparedness & Response, and Data & Statistics. There's also a Site Index you can browse by letter. Each page will take you to a wealth of links on the topic of occupational safety.

New Jersey Sex Offender Registry
Here's another state page that allows you to find our sexual offenders who may live in your neighborhood. After you accept the extremely long Terms of Service, you are given a broad choice of search criteria -- by Geographic area, by individual, vehicle, recently added, fugitives, and more. You'll find information on the offender's address and particulars about his/her conviction.

World Intellectual Property Organization
The main objective of WIPO is "to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among States and, where appropriate, in collaboration with any other international organization." There's really too much here to do it justice in a brief paragraph. The home page divides things up into four categories: About WIPO, News and Information Resources, Activities and Services, and About Intellectual Property. You'll find e-mail lists, statistics, publications, databases, the Internet Domain name dispute resolution service, lots of educational resources on copyright, trademark, and patent law, and much more.

Proximity ($$)
This company specializes in providing demographic data for decision makers -- business, school systems, government agencies, and other entities. The service primarily makes use of the 2000 Census data -- some is for free, but for others you will need to register. You can make your own maps and incorporate your own data, analyze markets, and look at particular demographic trends. Check it out.

Family Law -- Summarizing the Law in Fifty States
This is just a small part of the ABA's Family Law Section site, but it has some great information. Here' you'll find a set of tables summarizing the certain family law issues for all fifty states. You can check out custody criteria, grounds for divorce, property division, third-party visitation, and other topics. A nifty way to compare family laws amongst the states.

Did you know that today is Martyr's Day in Tunisia? Well, if you regularly consulted the Earth Calendar, you would.

Have some fun with this taxi passenger in Entertainment Anytime (my favorite is the letter M).

Well, that’s it for Issue #229 – I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.

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