Laptop meets liquid

I had a business trip to the west country last week and did something really stupid on the way back.  I accidentally knocked over a bottle of water and my computer got wet.

It killed it dead of course.

It was difficult to come to terms with to start with, I kept trying to start it up, but nothing happened.  But surely if I tried one more time ….

We are lucky in Norwich in that we have an Apple store, so on Friday, the day after I got back, I made an appointment with the ‘Genius Bar‘.  But the nice Apple man couldn’t get it to start either.  “We had better get it examined” he told me, getting me to sign a piece of paper, “We’ll contact you as soon as we have finished”.

Living without the laptop

Life was very odd, without my Macbook.  Strange and lonely.  I have the office PC of course, but the Macbook is where I do most of my writing, read blogs, visit forums, surf the internet, and twitter.  It was a bit like having lost an arm.

The family were not sympathetic.  “You can talk to us now” said my teenage son gleefully, despite the fact that he spends most of his time staring into his Dell Studio laptop and frequently fails to answer us when we speak to him.

My husband has never liked the laptop (“that white thing”) taking my attention away from him, and invariably glares at me when the startup Bongg goes off.  No sympathy there then.

Repair or replace?

The estimate for the repair bill came through, as £701.  Yikes!  Apparently practically every part in the machine needed to be replaced.

“How much would a replacement laptop cost?” I asked.  The answer was £849 plus £79 to transfer to the data over.  So for an extra £200 odd I could have a new machine.  One with twice the RAM, a bigger hard drive, improved performance …

Happily the damage was covered by insurance subject to a £100 excess, so effectively I could have a new machine with all my data  transferred over for just over £300.  And I would not have to wait for the parts to arrive and my machine to be repaired.  It was not the time I would have chosen for a computer upgrade, but there was no question which option I would choose.  The only worry was whether my data had survived the water damage.

So Wednesday I went in and paid them, and yesterday and I collected my new machine.  Its great!

The old and the new

The nice Apple people were able to recover the data and it had all been copied over and set up for me.  So on opening the machine up it was just like having my old laptop back.  All the software I had downloaded from the internet was there, all my bookmarks, the saved passwords for web-sites.  Even the tabs on Firefox were still open.  Just like before.

But the machine is so much better.  The screen is much brighter, its like its been through the wash (which is saying something as the old screen was pretty nice).  It seems to work faster.  And the computer itself is nicer.

One thing in particular I like is that there is a shiny texture on the top but a more matt texture on the bottom, so when I am carrying it, it is much easier to set it down the right way up.  With the old machine I was always having to turn it over before opening.  Very clever.

Also the £79 I paid for the data transfer entitles me to get some training at the Apple Store.  Its called Apple One to One.  I can see that being very useful.

So not really a disaster at all, now its all over.  But I am making sure that this machine is kept well away from any liquid!

The Legal Web

Are you feeling ignorant about the internet. Worried about wikis? Baffled by blogs? Or intimidated by twitter? You need a bit of professional training and guidance.

Allow me to introduce the answer. This is the new ebook and CPD course from Nick and Delia on Modern Practice Topics for Solicitors.

Nick and Delia have been involved in and writing about the legal internet for years. Must be at least ten, probably more. Both have informative web-sites, Delia runs the best set of legal links on the internet, as does Nick, as Infolaw. Together they produce the fabulous and award winning Internet Newsletter. Every now and again they produce an ebook / CPD product and this is the most recent offering. It is very good.

The ebook is in five parts.

1. New ways to organise firms.  This is largely about virtual firms and to me was the perhaps most interesting part of the series. The first article is an introductory one by Delia, followed by studies of three different ‘virtual’ firms.

I have to say that I was HUGELY impressed with the article on Blacklaws Davis, a mostly legal aid firm based in South London and the internet. Of all the articles in the book, this is the one which stayed with me the most and made me happy to look at the ebook again for this review. What a fantastic system them have! If I were a legal aid solicitor I would be beating a path to their door. I also enjoyed the article by sole practitioner Dick Jennings, and quite agree that SPs can be far more innovative than the (often patronising) larger firms.

2. Social Media for law firms. This is an intelligent look at the usual suspects, blogging, twitter, wikis, facebook and LinkedIn. Well worth reading if you are thinking of using these platforms but don’t know much about them.

3. Referral and Marketing companies. This section did not hold many surprises for me as, actually, I wrote much of it! My articles are on Quality Solicitors (which you can read on this blog >> here), Contact Law (which you can read on this blog >> here) and LawNet (which you can read >>here). Delia did an article on TakeLegalAdvice and Justin Patten did one on legallybetter.com.

4. Your website – accessible, interesting and productive. All law firms with a web-site (and that should mean all law firms) would do well to read this section. The first part looks at making websites accessible for disabled people. The second is about ‘converting browsers to business’ and looks at the AIDA principles of marketing. The third looks at online legal drafting software company DirectLaw, creators of that ‘destructive technology’ Rapidocs. Finally there is an article on client satisfaction surveys.

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Another very helpful and interesting look at an important subject which can be a bit (whisper it) boring … It features articles by Nick Holmes, David Gilroy and Susan Hallam. (Although I just use Scribe now.)

So there you are. If you fancy finding out more about all these topics AND getting five hours CPD, you want to hop on over to Nick’s site >> here where you can read more and buy it online.

Have you bought this or any other of Nick and Delia’s ebooks? How did you find them?

I wrote earlier about a search engine optimisation (SEO) service I had started using (and which I am still using) called Scribe.  Well the people behind Scribe have now produced >> a rather good report on SEO which you can get here.

The report, as you would expect from the bloke who set up the Copyblogger site, is very well and clearly written.  It explains how SEO works, what the search engines are looking for, and why it is important.

The last part discusses (of course) the SEO optimisation software Scribe.  The software has moved on since I bought it when it was first launched.  They are now re-launching it and there is a new special offer.  You can read about it in the report, and it is worth thinking about if you write a lot on blogs and web-sites.  I use Scribe all the time now, and have found that my visitor numbers have risen as a result.

However it is entirely up to you.  But do read the report as it is free and you will find it very helpful.  You can >> get it by clicking here (affiliate links).

I don’t know about you, but I find I am using the internet all the time. I am constantly looking things up, checking facts and the law before I write something, or seeing what new blog posts have been written by others. And I want to get there quickly with no tedious looking up.

So I was delighted to find out about the Conduit free tool bar service.

My first thought was, as always ;), for my Landlord Law members. Some of them have complained that the navigation on the Landlord Law site is a bit opaque (others have complimented me on its simplicity so you can’t please them all). “Here” I thought “is a way to give them an alternative method of finding things “. So I constructed a nice toolbar with links to all the main Landlord Law pages. You can read about it here.

Naturally I downloaded and used the Landlord Law toolbar myself, and very useful if was too. But I began to get frustrated by it. Because I had designed it for landlords, whereas I am a solicitor. I wanted access to sites I use professionally such as the UK Statute Law Database and the CPR. I wanted a link to The Times law page and the housing section of the Communities and Local Government web-site. I wanted the Nearly Legal Blog and BAILLI. And after a while I decided that I was jolly well going to have them.

A quick email to the nice Conduit people reassured me that I could have more than one toolbar.  So I did the Housing Lawyers toolbar. You can read about it here.

It is *really* useful. I work on two computers (the office PC and the Macbook) and use two different internet browsers on each. The toolbar means that my links are in the same place on all of them, which makes life a lot easier.  Plus, if I find a new site I want, I add it to the toolbar and, bingo!  It is on all my web-browsers without me having to do anything.

If you are a housing lawyer you are welcome to use it too. You can download the toolbar from here. My Conduit stats say that there are six active users, so presumably someone other than me is using it – I hope they are finding it useful.

But if you are not a housing lawyer (and lets face it, not many people are) – why not get your own? The Conduit people promote it as a way of getting money, as you can earn if lots of people use your toolbar, but frankly all I am interested in is having an easy life. Anyone can sign up and get a nice toolbar for all their regular web sites. You can fit an awful lot on it, as you can do drop down lists, which means that different types of site can be grouped together. I have a drop down list, for example, for all the housing blogs I follow,  and another for all the sites where I can read case law.

Why not give it a go?  Let me know how you get on!

Two diametrically opposed articles have caught my eye today, about the new Supreme Court.

1. Richard Susskind writing in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers (Jan/Feb edition) talks admiringly about the court being the most technologically advanced in the UK, and describes how the Justices can call up documents and court papers with the flick of a finger.

2. Rupert White however, writing in the Law Society Gazette, says it was overpriced and poorly procured.

How can we mere mortals decide?  As Richard Susskind is IT advisor to the Lord Chief Justice, he might be a teensy bit partial though.  Problems with big computer schemes are not unknown in the legal world.  I seem to remember that the Law Society had a bit of a problem a few years ago.

Well we shall have to wait and see how things work out.

Using the internet seems a bit like magic.  You click on your computer and the fruits of knowledge of the whole world are at your fingertips.  Just like that.

And now we are told that we do not even have to store information on our own machines – we can store it all ‘in the cloud’.  One pictures a sort of golden cloud floating benevolently above the earth, radiating knowledge and wisdom to the multitide.

But its not really like that of course.  All information on the internet has to be stored somewhere, and it is not in the sky, but in a server, down here on earth, rows and rows of servers in cabinets, using up masses and masses of electricity.

So if you wish to be green (as I hope all readers do) you should try to find a company which either uses green energy, or which at least does its best to offset the carbon used, to host your web-site.

This is what I decided to do when I made the decision not to host my blog at my usual ISP, largely due, I have to say, to the rather large hosting fee he quoted.  ”No”, I thoght, “I’ll see if I can find something cheaper and greener.”

I  decided however that an essential requirement of my new ISP, as well as green values, was that the servers on which my blog was to be hosted, would be in England (where I live).  This though, I found, very much limited my options.  Most of the companies, even English ones, offering a green hosting service, turned out to have their servers in Amercia, normally in California, where the sunshine is.

In the end, it came down to two:

The first was Ecohost at http://www.ecohost.coop/. This is run by a co-operative in Manchester. Their servers are stored in a bunker in Lincolnshire, and they say they are the only UK data centre 100% powered by renewable energy.

The second was Ecowebhosting at www.ecowebhosting.co.uk. This company is located in Cambridge and their servers are in Nottinghamshire. They don’t at present use green electricity, but practice carbon offsetting by planting trees.

I did also come across another site named ‘eco servers‘, but this turned out to be part of a company called UK Fast, which I suspect is very very good, but which is also very very expensive, so this put it out of the reckoning for hosting a couple of blogs.

In the end I decided to go with Ecowebhosting, and this is where this blog is hosted now.  Ecowebhosting, although not the ‘pure’ solution, make a big effort to be green (and as apparently their trees more than compensate for the carbon from their servers, it is a pretty good effort).  And they have a fantastic website through which their service is run.  They also provide a lot of other facilities, including the ability to install WordPress easily and quickly.    And they are amazingly cheap.

In fact it was a bit of a revelation to me.  For £20 per month, I can host unlimited web-sites, using up unlimited space and bandwidth.  I can also set up as many email addresses as I want.  Plus their domain names are cheaper than I have seen elsewhere.  As well as this, Rob Percival, who runs the service, has been incredibly helpful and supportive.  Which means that I, a solicitor with no proper web training, have been able to set up and develop several web-sites and blogs extremely easily and cheaply.  And buy domain names and set up personal email accounts for my son and my Mother!  Not bad.

So as a result of this exercise I feel far more in control.  I know where my site is hosted and I know that the owner is concerned for the environment and is seeking to offset the carbon used (and persuade the data centre he uses to use green electricity, which he says may come soon).  Due to the superb facilities provided by the company and the easy (well mostly) to use web-site, I am able to host my own sites,  and others for colleagues and family.

Although the three sites listed above are the ones that I found, there may well be others.  I hope this post will inspire you too, to find and use a green internet host.

Do you use a green hosting company?  If so, do the servers live in your own country or elsewhere, and if elsewhere, do you mind this?

I can remember, back in 1994 when set up in sole practice, after I had decided to get myself a computer to run it, buying a computer magazine. It was completely incomprehensible. There were all these references to normal sounding things like windows and buses, but they did not make sense. I remember reading a whole article and not understanding a word of it. Something Had To Be Done.

I then went to stay with an old school friend whose husband ran a computer company. I told him about my problems. We decided that what I needed was a book. So we went to Waterstones and I can remember sitting on the floor surrounded by computer books while Kelvin worked out which would be the best one for me.

I read it from cover to cover on the way home on the train (it was quite a long journey), the scales fell from my eyes, and since then I have not had a huge problem. There are and always will be many things I will never be able to understand or do, as I am a solicitor and not a trained computer/software engineer, but somehow I have always managed, eventually, to sort something out.

I think the important thing is to want to do it, and then not to give up. Also remember that the designers of (most) software are writing it (on the whole) for ordinary people to use, not computer genius’s. This means people like us ought to be able to understand it. Once you get in to the way of understanding how things are done in software (there are a lot of conventions and standard ways of doing thing), you can generally sort of find your way through it.

Often once you understand something, you find out that it is not actually as difficult as you thought, and indeed you may wonder what it was you ever found difficult!

NB The book I bought is well out of date by now, but if you are a complete beginner, probably something like Computing For Beginners: The Basics Explained in Plain English would be a good one to start with. It has quite good reviews on Amazon.