I’ve given Twitter a pretty fair shot, following all sorts of feeds, Twittering some days a dozen or more times. First, let me be clear, Twittering is both really fun and really addictive. If, like me, you were born without any sense of impulse control, are a way out there Type A mega-multitasker, you can easily be sucked into Twitter’s so alluring vortex.

You could Tweet all day long.

Every single day.

Forever.

And not have to deal with the inherent messiness and all the issues that go along with live human contact. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until we see:

• Twittermania catalogued in the DSM IV Physician’s Desk Reference as a clinically diagnosable syndrome.
• Notwitterphobia – the fear of not being able to Twitter and being otherwise unable to communicate.
• Twaccidents - auto, bike, scooter, cycle, stroller, pedestrian wrecks caused by former Blackberridiots who are now Twidiots, Twittering whilst mobile

So should people stop Twittering? Obviously not – most Twitterers are likely able to control themselves. Should impulsive, obsessive Type A types be consciously aware of descendinginto a Twitterift in the space-time continuum, possibly never to return again in this plane of existence (a digital black hole)? Yep, probably so.

For the life of me, a few folks I follow (no names – just initials: KO, GK, EH) literally seem to Tweet 24×7. Do their spouses or children even recognize them anymore? Do they have human conversations and manage to speak to liveware in more than 140 Tweetbytes? I wonder.

Twitter is the new haiku. It’s Twaiku.
Get out Twitterers, breath some fresh air, now that Spring is nearly upon us in the Northern Hemisphere. Go to a local Bar meeting and talk with actual humans. Attend a Rotary or Kiwanis  meeting or whatever kind of meeting with fellow humans trips your trigger. Force yourself to  shake hands, look people in the eye, smile without imagining an emoticon. It’s GOOD for you. Find balance between your live and online personas (even if you like the latter better).

Todd Jordan’s Broad Brush blog lists 10 signs of Twitter addiction:

1. All of your friends’ names start with @
2. You know what a tweet is and don’t snicker
3. You tweeted while your wife gave birth
4. You tweeted while giving birth
5. Your kids have to tweet you to get you to make dinner
6. Your mom joined Twitter to chat with you
7. All you want for Christmas is unlimited SMS use on your cell phone
8. Your sign your work email, @wonky
9. You don’t read emails that aren’t highlighted replies to you
10. You name your newborn @babygirl1

So before you earn enough stripes to merit a Prozac prescription, please Tweet responsibly. After all, friends don’t let friends Tweet 24×7.

According to cnet News today, HP is now selling the “Enviro” series of laptop batteries which will fit 18 models of HP laptops. The products of startup Boston Power, HP indicates the batteries will last longer (up to approximately 1000 charges) and thus saving on landfill situations. Boston Power’s batteries are also made without any PVC and without heavy metals like cadmium, arsenic or mercury in the manufacturing process. The batters will cost $149.99 – about $20-$30 more than HP’s traditional notebook batteries.

Sounds like a triple win to me: HP gets to do some green good, Boston Power gets a massive economic boost, and consumers and the planet benefit from better mobile technology that is better for the planet – well worth an extra $20 or $30 even these days.

I love techno.pal Monica Bay‘s recent post on The Common Scold about how to tighten the belt in this whackjob economy. See her list of Manhattan-oriented survival tips here. I particularly liked the one about recycling ancient white-out as toenail polish.

As to Senior Discounts, I can’t wait until I can get an AARP card and start saving! No shame in being a “respectable vintage” (although maybe that’s a guy thing – not really caring about hitting our 50′s). Thanks Monica for a nice chuckle as well as . . . kind of disturbingly, really practical advice these days.

I’m always pleased to see my now 16 year old Paper LESS Office process continue to gain acceptance. A little radical back in 1993 when the idea sprouted, now it’s common sense and in the mainstream. The acknowledgement that ridding one’s life and practice of paper may be a pipe dream, paves the way to developing a process involving a nearly 100% reduction in the need to find and touch the paper. This is the heart of the Paper LESS Office concept – thereby allowing one to:

• Avoid wasted otherwise billable time chasing paper and convert some, most or all of it into billable time
• Stress reduction and quality of life in practice enhancement

• Be more responsive both to clients and to co-workers merely via access to a complete and continguous electronic case file

Recently, techno.pal Dave Bilinsky of award-winning Thoughtful Legal Management wrote about being Paper LESS in a British Columbian practice context here.  Dave need only to check in with my own client Douglas MacAdams, QC, of the MacAdams Law Firm, practicing eastward through the beautiful Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, BC to see the Paper LESS Office in full swing.

In the spirit of my latest “Tightwad Technology” series of CLE programs, the time for the Paper LESS Office and the Paper LESS Process is now. Cut costs, make more money, reduce practice and life stress, thrill clients and help the environment – all simultaneously. All good things. All needed now for all practices.

Read more about the Paper LESS Office process and Tightwad Technology for Tough & Trying Times in my latest CLE materials at www.microlaw.com/cle-downloads.html, free and PDFed, as always.

So thanks Dave for reinforcing the concept!

Looking forward to visiting one of my favorite cities and getting a chance to put my mostly dormant undergraduate French minor to work next month. I’ve had the great privilege of being invited to take part in the Leg@lIT 3.0 conference in Montreal on 20/21 Avril 2009 at the Centre Mont-Royal. Organized by legal techno.whiz Dominic Jaar, formerly of Bell Canada and now CEO of consultancy Ledjit as well as the Canadian Center for Court Technology, this is one of Canada’s premier legal technology events (along with the Pacific Legal Technology Conference run by techno.pal Dave Bilinsky of the multi-CLAWBIE award-winning Thoughtful Legal Management blawg).

I’m very much looking forward to the event and to seeing the stellar faculty and programming slated for presentation. My own programs focus on “Tightwad Technology,” a co-presented 90 Tips in 90 Minutes program and the latest iteration of my Paper LESS Office topic – which seems more poignant in these tought and green-needing times than ever.

And of course, a trip to Montreal would be wholly incomplete with a pilgrammage to Schwartz’s Hebrew Deli on Rue St. Laurent for the world’s most extraordinary viande fumee . . . smoked meat. My arteries are tingling with anticipation!

As the old saying goes. While I was posting recently about overhearing a Foley partner loudly talking on an Amtrak commuter train to Chicago on his cell about health insurance for some newly rescued Heller and Thelen lawyers, techno.pal Jim Calloway was reporting on almost exactly the same thing. Several months ago, one of the sniglets I posted about was “Blackberridiots”: people who become completely unconcious of anything and anyone around them when they talk, email or text on their Blackberries. Jim alluded to Maxwell Smart’s famous “Cone of Silence” in this post. Methinks these loudmouth morons are actually wearing another Cone – the Cone of Stupidity. Please don’t wear one of these in public folks? Think about your ethical obligations to your clients and your business obligations to your firm before publicly prattling on irresponsibily, loudly and annoying in public places on your cell phones. Sheesh.

WordPerfect 5.1 hasn’t existed as a product since the late 1980′s. But this venerable and venerated word processor is remarkably tenacious. I am continually surprised by the number of people I know who run it, clandestinely, on modern PC systems. Personally (and I know techno.pal Monica Bay of Law Technology News fame, will roll her eyes at this as she does every single time I mention WordPerfect – she just doesn’t believe me when I talk about the number of SSF practices that use WP Office at least part time), I have kept WP 5.1 loaded on every primary laptop I’ve ever had – it works remarkably well under XP and in one of the oddest pairings of all techno.time, under Vista).

WordPerfect 5.1 has a serious cult following these days and is supported by a number of folks who create patches for running it under XP and MOPH (a/k/a/ Vista). Take a look at “WordPerfect for DOS Updated” for all this kind of info: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/.

There is something very pure and still elegantly simple about seeing that blank blue screen beckoning your prose. No menus, no widgets, no “click me! click me!” shortcuts and toolbars to steal your all too short attention span. Just a digital piece of paper onto which your words can flow. It’s not just nostalgia . . . there’s some method to the madness. For me, I actually turn to it when I’m having a bad case of writer’s block. Something about the soothing blue background and bright white text triggers something deep within me … and the words usually flow.

If you consider that the modern Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice genre of word processing tools are so feature-bloated that much of their functionality seems like an obtuse and obscure mystery to most people, maybe this really makes sense. In a world where everything has become just too damned complicated … can a return to simplicity be a big part of the answer? I like to run technology through a simple practicality test by asking the question, “What would Ben Franklin” think?

In a new “less is more” world, the smartest thing Corel could do would be to make a PR splash and release WP 5.1 code into the public domain and then include links for cheap WP Office X4 upgrades. Am I advocating we all dump our current contemporary word processors and regress back to WP 5.1? Of course not, that’s absurd. But might it merit inclusion in your creative writing arsenal? THAT I would encourage. What do you have to lose? Find it on eBay or pull it off the shelf, but a $20 USB  3.5″ floppy drive to load it – click here to see ).

Then if you do, let me know what you think. Is it just a dumbass thing to do, or is it a breath of fresh digital air?  Is it about being current or being relevant? Is it about using well-crafted tools that work or just using tools that are newest?

In 1973 I was in 7th grade. Part of being “cool” was all wrapped up in one’s choice of sneakers. In my neck of the woods, the prestige shoes were Adidas and not just any Adidas models. Not the red-striped Viennas. Not cool enough. The then-pinnacle of tweener footware for guys at Lakeshore Middle School in Mequon, Wisconsin were the green-striped Adidas Italias. My parents wouldn’t spring for them – I had to settle for the red-striped Vienna model. I’m sure that any latent sense of inadequacy I might still harbor at age 47 is likely attributable to this fashion shortcoming 36 years ago. But I’ll cure it with a brand new pair of Adidas Italias! Part of Adidas “Originals” series, the original Italias are back – in all their green-striped glory. Check them out here – $59.99 at Amazon. Sure the economy sucks, but you can relive your glory days of yesteryear for a mere $60 bucks!

Many of us have missed our colleague and friend, Bob Butler, of TimeMatters co-founding fame. After departing LexisNexis (hey, how long could a visionary like Bob have lasted in a corporate hierarchy – longer than I had predicted actually), Bob seemed to disappear. But thankfully, one of my very favorite big thinkers is back with a fascinating venture called BestThinking.com.  There’s a quote from Bob currently in the “favorite quotes” section of the main web page that says, “Today’s unprecedented challenges call for new thinking from a broader base of thinkers.”

So what does that mean? Here’s my take on it, which I was just pleasantly surprised to see is also one of today’s “favorite quotes”: “I’m fascinated by the concept of “LinkedIn meets Wikipedia meets Google Scholar.” I really that describes the idea – it’s a collaborative online think tank, different than Wikipedia in its orientation by “thinker” instead of purely by subject. While Wikipedia is a superb substitute for traditional encyclopedias, online or paper, BestThinking is different. Experts on any subject can register as “Thinkers.” The BestThinking people then evaluate and check out the credentials self-submitted by potential Thinkers. I actually was questioned on several of the items I listed as my own credentials when I applied – impressive. So instead of just getting info by subject, one can get info by their expert-of-choice.

While free now, my bet is this could become a subscription service at some point . . . or perhaps Bob, in his endless financial wily-ness will build up an impressive base of content and subscribers and then sell out . . . imagine Google Scholars morphing into Google BestThinkers at some point? Perhaps. In the meantime, I’m a big fan of Bob’s and imagine this will make it big, especially in an economy where those who have the most/best information will likely be those who manage to turn bad times into opportunistically exploited successes.

So now that I’m a “Thinker” at BestThinking.com, I better get my tail in gear and get some of those thoughts posted! Bob, it’s great to have you back – and best of luck with this fascinating new knowledgebase venture.

OK, I’m the first to admit there’s some speculation going on here because of course, Apple won’t confirm, deny or comment on the question of its netbook plans. A Reuters article from March 11th quoted a “source” as saying that Apple will take “delivery of newly developed 10-inch touchscreens from Taiwan . . . amid talk the U.S. firm is developing a touchscreen PC.” The Taiwanese tech journal, Digi Times went even further, quoting a Chinese-language “Commercial Times” report to that effect. Digi Times further note that Taiwan’s “Quanta Computer will be the maker of Apple’s new netbook.”  Hmm . . . if true and following the hunch that where’s there’s smoke, there’s most often fire . . .

It would be rational to believe that Apple has a strong intention to play in the explosively growing netbook market in some fashion. The challenge for Apple is severalfold in doing so:

• First, it’s very late to the segment, and Steve Jobs initially did his version of the infamous Gates statement (“640K ought to be enough for anybody” or, sensationally paraphrased as “we don’t need no more steenking RAM”) when he commented that the netbook market was “nascent” and that Apple was “neutral” about it. Then of course, the netbook market exploded as one of the fastest growing PC segments in history (just in time for a tanked economy where $300-$400 PC systems were all many could afford).
• Apple can’t come in with a “me too” netbook that isn’t anything more than a “Honey, I Shrunk the Macbook” kind of product – the expectations are that Apple will innovate and rennovate the segment with something typically Apple-revolutionary.
• Apple never misses an opportunity to release a premium-priced product that is functionally superior to its segment competitors – it would be illogical to think it will pass up an opportunity for netbook ivory-towerism.

So 10″? Touchscreen? While there’s a remote possibility Apple is outfitting its retail stores with some kind of 10″ touchscreen-equipped coolness, odds are far greater that’s it’s a preview of Apple’s first netbook/tablet-type machine late this year or early next year (think the hottest holiday gift of ’09)?? The killer legal accessory to replace yellow-pads? Something leaps and bounds ahead of clunky existing tablet PCs for every lawyer to use for notetaking?
Food for thought . . . and for general salivation . . .

My good friend Nerino Petro, Jr. of Compujurist fame recently wrote a product view for the ABA LPM’s LawPractice.org – he reviewed the KeyScan keyboard scanners. Nerino gave the combination PC keyboard/built-in single-page-fed scanner a positive review. Technically, I agree – they work and the implementation is sound. And for anyone born with a complete lack of impulse control, it’s almost impossible to resist the compulsion to order one.

But actually I have one and don’t recommend it. Reason? The same reason I think these have been a bad idea since Visioneer first released one in the early 90’s. Break your keyboard and you’ve broken your scanner. How many of us trash keyboards quickly – just wear them out? Likely sooner than the scanner dies. Then what? Then you have a new keyboard and a separate and now really clunky keyboard scanner sitting next to your PC.

Also, logistically, it doesn’t make sense. There’s no auto-feeder – you insert a page a time. Then the paper path has it coming out under the front of the keyboard. This means you’re not going to get any work done while you’re scanning – you’re going to be a “human paper tray” collecting the pages so they don’t shoot out onto the floor.

It makes MUCH more sense for most people to have a dedicated sheet-fed scanner like those from the Fujitsu ScanSnap series where you can drop your pages to be scanned in the feeder, press the big green button and keep working and typing while your document scans to Acrobat.

There’s a reason that the keyboard scanner hasn’t appeared in droves on desks worldwide in the 15+ years the idea has been around . . . because it might look cool and seem cool, but in practice, it’s more of a pain and more impractical than it initially seems.

It’s such a small, flat world. I’m literally on a train to Chicago sitting across from a BigLawyer from Foley & Lardner who is talking to his office about his firm taking on 14 former Heller, Ehrman lawyers (5 partners from the San Diego office and 9 associates) as well as six former Thelen lawyers. How do I know this and how do I know who he is? Because he’s having a very loud conversation on his cell phone and earlier, left his name (which I will spare him the indentification) when we left a voicemail for someone else. I just looked him up on Wisbar.org’s Lawyer Directory since we both got on the train in Milwaukee – so no problem identifying the caller instantly as a Foley partner. The conversation, in case you’re curious, is about securing insurance coverage for the new acquisitions. Am I eavesdropping – good question. The conversation is happening on a public Amtrak train about 18″ from my right ear – hard to ignore.

I’ve got to ask . . . in this economy, how can any large firm afford to take on more overhead, regardless of what they think the long-term payoff in billable production might be? Makes one wonder . . .

And of course, the bigger issue is where and when one engages in what could be seen as confidential business discussions. A warning to the wise.

Suddenly my 10″ wireless LCD picture frame seems totally inadequate – eCost.com via their Bargain Countdown daily listing of deals has a whopping 15″ LCD panel, with WiFi capability for loading and accessing photos for $99. That’s unbelievably cheap and I’m guessing they won’t last long – it also can play movie files and has a built-in speaker – a fairly uncommon characteristic for photo frames. Here’s the link – grab one while you can!

Good news for those considering attending the 2009 edition of ABA TECHSHOW (and if you’re not thinking about it, you should be!) The early-bird registration and hotel deadline for ABA TECHSHOW has been extended to March 6! This is another chance to save up to $400 off the standard registration and receive a special ABA TECHSHOW room rate of $199/night at the Hilton Chicago.

ABA TECHSHOW offers three days of educational sessions in legal technology to lawyers, paralegals, firm administrators, IT managers, and professionals of all knowledge levels. Gain beneficial information to take home and put to use immediately. Enjoy networking with 1,500+ conference attendees during ABA TECHSHOW from April 2-4, 2009 at the Hilton Chicago.

View the complete three-day schedule and session descriptions for our 15 topical tracks at www.techshow.com or download the ABA TECHSHOW Detailed Conference Brochure here.

ABA TECHSHOW, always is an “extravaganza” experience with

* More than 50 Educational Sessions
* Two-day Expo Featuring Over 100 Vendors
* ABA TECHSHOW After Dark Reception (Thursday, April 2)
* Taste of ABA TECHSHOW Dinners (Friday, April 3)
* Deep Discounts on ABA and LPM Books
* Product Demonstration Sessions
* Free CD-ROM with Program Materials

These are the final days to receive discounted rates on both registration for ABA TECHSHOW and housing at the Hilton Chicago! Register by March 6 at www.techshow.com or download the printable registration form. Call the hotel toll free at 1-800-445-8667 and mention the group code, TEC.

And if the cost of a room at the Hilton is a financial barrier, you can secure a less expensive room in the downtown Chicago area or a short cab ride away by using Hotwire.com – I’ve always had great luck securing 3-4 star hotels this way for as little as $79+taxes per night. And if because of the tough economic times you can’t afford the TECHSHOW registration fee, you can always attend for free to see the legal product vendors in the Expo – it’s better than not being there at all! Remember too that Amtrak runs right into Union Station in Chicago from points throughout the region . . . . and Southwest Airlines flies very inexpensively into Midway Airport from all over the U.S. So there are easy, inexpensive ways to get to Chicago to see TECHSHOW!