March 4, 2007

Welcome to Issue #260 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!

The Circus that is Patent Law
Here's another site I've been meaning to mention for awhile -- it's FedCirc.us, a patent caselaw portal. The ringmasters here are the gang from Rethink(IP): Matt Buchanan, Doug Sorocco, and Steve Nipper. The depth of information is terrific here -- in addition to daily case summaries, you can subscribe to practice alerts, browse cases in several different formats, and read articles. If you don't have that much time, Gimme Ten! allows you to quickly scan the ten latest case reviews. This is a great resource for patent law.

Vanity can help you find your friends
Long Time Lost is an interesting type of search tool -- it doesn't actually search at all. It acts more like a message in a bottle for friends with whom you have lost touch. Just enter the name of a long-lost friend, and Long Time Lost will make that search available to Google and other search engines. Then, the next time that friend does a vanity or ego search, your message will pop up, and your friend will be able to reconnect with you. The site reports that 148 people have already reconnected as a result of the search tool. It seems to me that this is a tool that depends upon the size of your lost friend's ego....if he or she doesn't do a vanity search on Google, they won't know you're looking for them.

Back up your Drivers
A couple of months ago, I had to reinstall Windows to fix a file that had become corrupted. It wasn't terribly difficult -- the only thing that was a pain was reinstalling all my programs. I also had to reinstall something I didn't even think about -- all of the drivers for my hardware -- graphics card, sound card, DVD drive, etc. I wish I had known about Driver Collector -- it's a free program that scours your hard drive for drivers, and allows you to back them up to a CD or thumb drive. What a great way to get all of your drivers together, in one place.

Becoming a Firefox wiz
Check out this handy Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet, which lists out a whole bunch of shortcuts, tips/tricks, and list of file locations for Firefox.

Text Messaging, Via the Web
Are you a text messager? I admit, I find sending SMS text messages to be a great way to communicate with someone when I can't call, or when I don't want to send a full e-mail. If you have kids, they're likely big texters. Here's an easy way to keep in touch with your kids and others, without having to enter text messages on your tiny phone. Check out Joopz -- once you register for free, you can send text messages to any phone number, or to a group of phone numbers. Even better, Joopz keeps a history of the text messages on the site, so you can come back and see them later. (for you lawyers in the audience: look, it's another place to look for electronic discovery!)

Blawgs of the Week
Here's a selection of some of the law-related weblogs I mentioned this week on Inter Alia:

Keeping your mobile data safe is increasingly important -- here's a tip for those of you with Treos, or Palm devices. To lock down your device, just select Security on the main page, then choose a password. Now you can set the device to Auto-Lock when you turn it off, at a preset time, or after a preset time delay. This way, if you accidentally leave it somewhere, it will hopefully lock down before anyone has a chance to get to your personal data.

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!

New Hampshire Registered Offenders Against Children
Every now and again I feature a state's sex offender registry, and this week it's New Hampshire. You can search for specific individuals by name, or just click on Submit to see the entire list. There aren't that many in New Hampshire, apparently. For each offender you'll get the last reported address, identifying information, and the crime of which the individual was convicted.

US Courts
The next stop on my tour of government sites will hopefully be familiar to most of you: the U.S. Courts site is the place to start when you want to find information on the federal court system. Here you'll find links to all federal courts, as well as rules, forms, and resources for each court. Especially helpful is the area on Federal Rulemaking, which contains text and commentary of revisions to the various federal rules. There's also a section called Defender Services, which offers information for federal public defenders.

University of Texas CLE
My alma mater offers quite a bit of CLE in Texas, and it's held all over the state -- you can find out about the latest continuing education programs on this page. You can also view CLE courses online; there are a couple of hundred recordings and electronic files available for a la carte viewing. If you join the eLibrary for $195/year, you'll have access to over 5,000 professional papers, PowerPoints, and mp3 files.

Juris ($$)
I love the people at Juris -- they are friendly, terrific people. But that's not the only reason why you should check out the company's product. The Juris Law Practice Management Suite claims to allow your firm to increase per-partner income, by providing instantly digestible financial information about your firm. You'll also want to check out More Partner Income, the blog of founder Tom Collins -- it provides great, free information on law firm management and finance.

Dermatology Times
This site claims to be the leading newsmagazine for dermatologists -- but that doesn't mean us researchers can't use it. There are tons of articles on this site, in categories such as clinical dermatology, cosmetics, cutaneous oncology, dermatologic surgery, and more. If you want to know more about the business end of dermatology, there are also practice management resources available, too.

Sling is a slimy, strangely addicting game, where you have to protect the power sources of Oozeville.

If you're feeling poorly and can describe your symptoms, head over to the WebMD Symptom Checker for possible answers. If you're a hypochondriac, you might want to think twice about going there.....

Well, that’s it for Issue #260 – 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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