April 22, 2007

Welcome to Issue #265 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!

Keeping Your Firefox Add-Ons Up to Date
If you use Firefox, no doubt you also have taken advantage of the hundreds (thousands?) of extensions, or add-ons, that increase the functionality of the browser. Keeping all of those add-ons updated with the latest edition can take some time; thankfully, there are two ways to streamline this process. The easy way can be found in your Tools menu in Firefox. Go to Tools, then Options, then Advanced, then click the Update tab. Under "Automatically check for updates to:", make sure "Installed Add-ons" is checked, then click OK. Another option is to install yet another extension -- this one is called the Update Notifier. Both tools work well at keeping your add-ons current.

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

We're making our way through the top 8-10 things that can cause your computer to slow down. This week: a failing hard disk. The early signs of a hard drive failure can be tough to spot; they are usually pretty subtle. One good way to see if your hard drive is failing is to run Scandisk or Chkdsk -- just go to Start, then Run, then type in either "scandisk" or "chkdsk" (without the quotes). Your computer will check your hard drive and determine whether it as any "bad sectors." If you notice a bad sector where a good sector used to exist, this could be a sign your hard drive is failing.

Another great tool I use to monitor my hard drive's health is HDD Health -- it can tell you at a glance whether your hard drive has any problems.

If you *do* have problems with your hard drive, you should make sure immediately that your data is backed up. Then get in touch with your computer manufacturer to arrange for a new hard drive -- your computer might still be covered by a warranty.

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!

Emergency Nurses Association
This site is the home for the national association for professional nurses dedicated to the advancement of emergency nursing practice. As with most of these sites, a great deal of the materials are devoted to association members, but that doesn't mean us legal researchers can't get some value from it. There's information on how to get certified as an emergency room nurse, some good resources on emergency preparedness, articles on the future of emergency care, government and advocacy pages, information on injury prevention, news and links, research, and more.

LitiLaw
This is a relatively new site from Lexbe, a company that provides litigation support services. Litilaw offers a free collection of hundreds of recently published articles of interest to litigators and legal professionals. You can search for an article using keywords, or browse by subject. The subjects include Procedural Law (pre-trial, e-discovery, evidence, ethics), Substantive Law (on topics from admiralty to tax), and Practice Management. Litilaw is a great site with good articles available, but it's missing one crucial element for modern legal research sites: an RSS feed that can alert researchers to new articles on specific topics.

MetaGlossary
Sometimes you just need to know what something means -- a word, a phrase, or an acronym. The site now defines over 2,000,000 terms and phrases, and it's easy to use. Just enter your search query, and you'll get back a list of definitions, and the web pages from where they are defined. You can rate the definition and email it to a friend, if you like. If you're using the Firefox browser, you can install a MetaGlossary plug-in that will allow you to run queries on a toolbar.

National Center for Biotechnology Information
If you're feeling particularly brainy, head over to the NCBI for the latest information on molecular biology. This agency creates public databases, conducts research, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information -- all for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease. There are dozens of databases here on various topics of molecular and genomic biology. There's even an RSS feed where you can get updates on the latest goings-on.

Oklahoma District Court Records
The Oklahoma courts are doing what I wish more states would get together and do with their court records: making district court dockets available online, all in one place. The records are available from participating counties -- it looks like about 50 of 77 counties are participating. Most records are available back to 1997-1998, and are updated either daily or monthly. I wish Oklahoma would do what PACER does for the federal courts -- make the actual court records available online. But still, this is a great site.

Have I mentioned Word Shoot before? If so, it's worth mentioning again -- it's a great game for improving your typing skills.

In Ellipsis, you have to protect your sphere from being destroyed, by shooting at the boxes attacking you from all sides.

Well, that’s it for Issue #265 – 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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