Reading Time: 5 minutes
When you self-host your own website or have it hosted on someone else’s hardware, it takes up a small part of your brain. I chose to put my websites on other people’s equipment because that mental occupation was a bit more than I wanted to handle: was it running, how was…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
I wrote my first editor’s note for AALL Spectrum. It was a lot harder than I expected. As you will know if you follow this blog, it was not due to writing publicly. I’ve been reflecting on the differences and, frankly, I’m not sure that future columns will be any easier…

Reading Time: 4 minutes
A long time ago, I worked at a software company that developed a law practice management system. I was about to head off for law school and had my first PC. It was pretty great. The internet existed but it was still something that I only connected to when I needed…

Reading Time: 6 minutes
One thing that I attempt with this blog is to share what I know. It may not be much and it may not be exactly what someone is looking for, but I always think that knowledge is accretive. Like a puzzle, a bit gets added here and there until the picture…

Reading Time: 4 minutes
I was adamant that the artificial intelligence was wrong. My family had given me a bird feeder that came with a camera. As the birds appeared, the camera would take pictures and make an assessment of the bird’s species. It gathered a location for the camera, so it could geo-locate its…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
My student evaluations came back from my first semester back teaching. I had sort of forgotten that they might exist, since the prompt for them had hit the students before the end of term. Then there had been the final grading, and commencement and, frankly, this was all in my rearview…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
Mozilla has brought Pocket to an end, an acquisition it made in 2017. Although it was an award-winning read later app, Mozilla felt “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved”, whatever that means. The outcome appears to be that people who use Firefox can see Mozilla’s…

Reading Time: 7 minutes
The last eight months or so has seen a lot of upheaval for me. It came at a time when a big project came to an end, which was fortunate. But I moved states and moved my lodging twice. I started to live with my wife again after a few years…

Reading Time: 6 minutes
The grades for this semester are in. I am not a fan of grading although I was glad of the opportunity of potentially having an impact on students. I though the final exams were better than the early work they were doing, for the most part. I feel confident of their…

Reading Time: 7 minutes
The semester has come to an end. I’d picked up a course to teach at the last minute and so that is also now complete. The pacing in an academic law library is quite different from what I’ve experienced in other organizations. Far more ups and downs but also coupled with…

Reading Time: 6 minutes
One recurring thought relating to artificial intelligence is its impact on new staff. The promise of AI is that it will routinize the lower value work, the repetitive tasks, and allow knowledge workers to focus on higher value projects and outputs. This is great, but it begs the question of how…

Reading Time: 7 minutes
I’m still in my first year at my new role and it’s budget season. This is one of those perennial experiences that you would think would become routine. If you move libraries, though, you find that each organization does it differently, even if they use the same words. At the same…

Reading Time: 5 minutes
One of the things I’ve learned both from self-hosting a server inside my home and from using commercial hosting is that I want bad actors as far from my server as possible. When I migrated my hosting company recently, it was primarily for cost reasons. I was delighted, though, to find…