Recently in work Category
I didn't do a round robin letter this year, but as I always enjoy reading the ones that I receive I've succumbed: here's a very brief round up of my 2007.
Reading
68 books read - from S is for Silence to The Closers; mainly the usual mixture of fiction (predominantly modern / historical / crime) and autobiographical travel.
Travel / Holidays
Big trips
- Iran - on a Wild Frontiers recce tour, in May. Fantastic.
- China - an October fortnight travelling with Hazel from her dad's Shanghai base; plus a week of work.
Short trips and weekends away
- Brecon Beacons - bringing in the New Year with Phil's Bristol crowd.
- Forty Acres - for the annual birthday parties weekend.
- Saltaire - to catch up with Cat in early June
- Seville - with Fiona and Catherine in mid June.
- Walton on the Naze - twice (May Bank Holiday weekend and the week leading up to the August Bank Holiday weekend); both times a bit on the chilly/wet side.
- Bristol - for Tim and Helen's wedding on the SS Great Britain. Glorious.
- Milan - for Jess and Mike's wedding. We travelled there/back by train. Altogether very lovely.
Work
Still at Simmons & Simmons where I spent the first nine months of the year as the elexica editor and the last three seconded to a new role of Knowledge Management Business Manager.
Home and family
Still happily esconced in the Barbican with Phil; still happily doing Aunty Mary duties to Barney (10) and Rosa (8). Dad and Jean both well. I'm off to Hereford for a relaxing weekend with them in January.
Plans for 2008
Currently only features travel - 2008 is the year I'll finally get to see some of the Silk Road in Central Asia. Nothing booked yet, but it's The Trip for the year. Hoping to squeeze in a week in Libya too to maintain my one a year quota of visits to countries in the Axis of Evil. Luckily work have introduced the option of buying additional holiday.....
I'm mooching around websites that are produced using the various content management systems NR are looking at, and on the Cathay Pacific website I spotted their Viewing tips link at the foot of the page..... and I think it is a really nice, general user-oriented page of information. One to remember....
Painless Software Schedules, from Joel on Software, courtesy of Phil.
Another busy Friday, but am full of chips and mushy peas (oh so healthy) which is slowing me down... and I don't think that I'm going to get the scanning proj plan done, which was on my To Do for To Day.
but I have ticked off:
1. meeting with Finance, BMS and Personnel to flesh out the list of values for Years of Legal Experience field
2. Prepare Personnel for launch of S&S International Who's Who
3. Briefed Milano on CD Narrative Report progress and agreed actions for launch
4. Completed actions from yesterday's website development meeting
... and I might even manage to add:
5. Make requested revisions to flow diagrams for Alumni programme
Have spent today on adrenalin overload thanks to the in-at-the-deepend website development project starting today. Fortunately it went well, and all my paranoia seemed a bit OTT.
Tomorrow I'm going to need further adrenalin fuelling as I've not even started putting together my project plan for scanning and at 3.30pm I have to sit down with Dez and talk him-the-ex-army-man through it.
So with that I'm going to shut up, shut down and shove off!
Training courses and resources this time:
Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Acrobat 5 in 24 Hours
Silicon Beach Training Adobe Acrobat Training course
Adobe UK Certified Training Centres
(Google hitlist)
Over the past few weeks, I've been retracing my steps along that all-to-familiar path of How to Improve the Firm's Scanning Facilities. Without a huge spend. However, this time, we've achieved the all-important step of approval: the Powers-that-be have ordained that scanners are required.
So having looked at upgrading the photocopiers^H^H^H^H^H^multi-functional devices (too expensive), setting up HP scanners for the departments (processing is too slow), and converting the TopCall fax scanners (...just right.... but expensive....), I've now started to look at the training side of things.
Worryingly, I'm beginning to be regarded as the Expert on All Things PDF/OCR. Not that I mind being seen as an expert, but I know that I'm not! So I've taken some time today to read up a bit on scanning, PDFs and extracting/repurposing text.
These are the useful things I found:
Planet PDF AcroTip No. 73 - Turning paper into searchable PDFs, using Acrobats Capture plug-in.
Gemini - PDF content extraction tool
AcroTip 21 - How to extract all text from a PDF at once.
Planet PDF Tools List.
Mark Anderson's Adobe Adcrobat v5.0 Toolbar Icons <- this is excellent
and he's got pages on PDF Web Links, and More Acrobat Tips
Vision + Work - Stephan Jaeggi of Prepress-Consulting's white papers on PDF workflows in the printing industry (although they are quite old now, and refer to v4.0):
Basic
Management
Creation
Production
But what I'd really like is basic training-type information, covering the different types of output, and how to make the most of the features, particularly text-searching/extraction, so that we can show the lawyers and secretaries just what they can do with Adobe Reader 5.0.
I should just play around with Adobe Acrobat Reader myself!
Well, Nick vetoed Syndirella so I'm just going to compile a list here, and then carry on linking to useful and/or interesting items in the archive. Starting off with:
Lawrence Lessig, and his piece on losing the Eldred case.
Hundreds of thousands of books, movies and songs were close to being released into the public domain when the US Congress extended the copyright by 20 years in 1998 under pressure from giant corporations. In Eldred v Ashcroft, the plaintiffs, organised by Lessig, sought to challenge the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
They lost.
Lessig also links to Doc Searle's highly readable analysis of the underlying reasons why Lessig's team lost for the American Open Technology Consortium .
And TechnoLawyer's IP Meme's newsletter led me to COPYFIGHT: the politics of IP.
.... as in my I've got around to rounding up links to Technolawyer and LLRX articles, reviews or places they've linked to from the newsletters which have accumulated in my Technolawyer folder (thereby illustrating the major plus and major minus of email filters) over the past 6 months.
The main criteria for making it from inbox to blog are that the item applies to a topic which is pertinent to my job (I'm a London-based Business Analyst, working for Simmons & Simmons), including:
- knowledge management
- document management
- scanning and OCRing
- resources for the mobile lawyer
- intranets
Bear in mind that both TechnoLawyer and LLRX carry a strong US bias - but that shouldn't be taken to mean that the content is of no relevance beyond the borders of North America.
SingalongaPatate
Tis just lovely, and it's on it's way to my french classe right now, mes p'tites patates.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for November 11 landed in my inbox today - discussing Intranet Usability, and the costly implications of the lack thereof.
Nielson's Summary:
The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more.
On my To Do list is the plan to review the S&S intranet against the findings of the Nielsen Norman Group study
Personnel still have a bee in their bonnet about not being able to type in names and addresses with accents etc. Their ideal solution would be to have a keboard with all the foreign characters and accented characters on the keys. - see entries passim.
It came up again today in a vendor presentation, so I decided to google "Alt Key Codes". First up was David R. Wilson's cribsheet (Google HTML version)
So now I'm going to test those key codes in Oracle.....
As part of my analysis into using email to circulate newsletters etc, I went to talk to the elexica editor, Jonathan Maas, yesterday. He mentioned that he subscribes to LegalWebWatch, so I've just emailed their editor asking to be added to the mailing list(s) for the IT / TMT sector. On verra.
I did another search on our quest for personnel's international characters, and found a site dedicated to International Accents and Diacriticals, featuring:
"Theory, Charts, & Tips for the QWERTY keyboard (mostly Windows) - Platforms, software applications, operating systems, versions, and user preferences influence how one works with accents and international characters"
The MS Word functionality was news to me, but makes perfect sense! Not quite as simple as having a keyboard with "letter+accent" keys, but more logical than alt codes, and faster than resorting to the character map.
Xara3D support have a useful crib sheet for typing accented and international characters.
At our weekly BSAPM meeting today, Peter mentioned that our Personnel department are stuggling entering all the weird and wonderful non-english characters that feature in people's names these days.... not surprising given we've 16 offices world wide, but hey.....
We pondered the existence of a specially built keyboard which features keys for all the standard accented letters (they must have a name but it's 6.45 and fishy beers await me at the Toucan if i get there soon!).
One quick google later ("Foreign Character keyboards") and I found Vance's ESL_Home: Foreign Languages besides English on the Web.
Again, i've got some catching up to do, but my prompt for a quick entry and true blogging, was this: Scanning Text with OmniPage Pro OCR. The joke's in the URL, given that I came across it whilst looking for OmniPage Pro's homepage to include in an email the Tokyo office.
Bloody hell- they're drilling downstairs again. Do I have a 2 hour lunch break, and only work 10-12, 2-4?? I think not. Those sandwich wraps had better be worth it.
One of the online resources I find useful at work is TechoLawyer. I subscribe to a few of their newsletters, and rate TechnoGuide and LLRX as good sources of information on IT issues in the legal environment.
TechnoLawyer is predominantly a US legal community at the moment. That's still useful, given that the old dotcom adage that, where technology is concerned, looking at the US is a bit like looking into our own UK future a couple of years hence. In any event, I've not found any comparable source of information for UK Legal IT, although uklit, a yahoogroup for IT Managers and Directors from UK law firms, comes closest, but still no cigar.
Prompted by a question from Tom, I dug out this article about wirelss (in)security in the City.