I Heart Tech

The Gentlemen of Jackson

I'm sitting at the Jackson Miss airport waiting to head home. I've been here all week working with a great small firm who is looking to move from GroupWise to Outlook and then make sure they are using their tech to the fullest. It was great, they were great. Everyone was so nice and so happy. I love small firms.

While here, I had the pleasure of laughing till my stomach hurt with  two of Jackson's finest (and funniest) attorneys - Hunter Twiford and Hugh Tedder. (We had a fourth for a while, but kicked him out at the sight of his SLIVR - this party was for Treo lovers only.) We sat around beaming eachother applications (business related, of course) and business cards. I was really embarrassed that my damn Treo resets itself every time I try to beam my own business card. They wouldn't let it go. MEN. LAWYERS.

I have to give props to Hugh for teaching us one VERY cool and useful tip about the Treo's onboard calculator. It has an Advanced Mode function that does everything under the sun. To get to it, open Calculator then drop down the menu's and tap on Options, chose Advanced Mode.

   

First the Tablet Lawyer...Now This

Just when I thought it couldn´t get any better, along comes the PDA Lawyer! How great is this blog!? I learned about it thru Jonathan Stein´s The Practice Blog where Grant Griffiths (aka The PDA Lawyer) posted this guest post about his love affair with a Treo650. Of course, I can totally relate. His wesbite also links to another great resource for law students and lawyers alike - the New York Law School´s JurisPDA site.

I´ll take a moment to wish you all a wonderful holiday this week.  I am still in Uruguay and yes, they do have the internet here! I´m paying 10 pesos ($.41an hour - no that is not a typo)  to log on at an internet cafe here in Minas. This afternoon I´m off to the beautiful beaches of Punta Del Este. Happy Thanksgiving!

Perfect Match: Packet8 and my Treo

Has my absence made your heart grow fonder? That's what they say happens, you know? Aside from getting ready for the NOLA Tech Revival -which starts tomorrow! - one of the many projects that has kept me away was co-authoring a  Technolawyer TechnoFeature with my dear friend Ernie the Attorney. We tend to tinker a lot with all kinds of tech and as you can tell, we like to share what we learn. So we wrote a piece about our experiences with various VOiP tools - both web based calling and internet phone calling. It comes out on Tuesday, May 30 (you'll have to subscribe to Technolawyer to receive it via email and shame on you if you aren't already a subscriber - their newletters rock). But writing it made me think to expound here on one of the points we made.

Like Ernie, I use Packet8 VoIP  for my office phone and it's great. This business of only having one line - a cell phone - doesn't work for me. I try to protect my cell phone number like I do my main email address and my social security number. I'm not kidding. I manage technology, rather than let it manage me. Sorry, I digress...the point is, I have a Packet8 phone for my office line. I have it configured so that a voicemail message left by a caller is immediately forwarded as an attachment to my email inbox. This means that no matter where I am, I will be notified of a new message and be able to listen to it. How? Well, thanks to my most fabulous  Palm Treo 650 . I use Versamail (and actually Chattermail also) on my Treo to get email messages for my various email accounts. Both of them allow me to download attachments such as  documents, pictures, and now voicemails. Check out the  screenshot of my VersaMail inbox displaying the email from Packet8.  The Treo comes equipped with a WAV player - which is the file type Packet8 uses to send voice mail messages as attachments. On opening the email message and tapping on the attachment, the voicemail message plays. How cool is that?