Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Musings about office technology from an intellectual property lawyer
I imagine that most readers have been closely following the launch of the Webb telescope and the successful deployment of its solar panels. As we all know, it is headed toward a particular place in space called the Earth-Sun Second Lagrange Point, shorthanded as L2. I was intrigued to learn that L2 is actually a crowded place. Continue reading “L2 is crowded”
Life is filled with reasons to be gobsmacked. We all read recently of the death of Michael Nesmith, one of the members of The Monkees, at the age of 78. He left many marks on Western culture. I personally think that of the many strong marks he left on Western culture, the strongest were:
But what gobsmacked me was to learn that Michael Nesmith’s mother was the inventor of Liquid Paper. By now in the year 2021 we are sort of accustomed, or maybe even resigned, to learning over and over again that somebody who was female accomplished something back in the days when many members of society seemed to assume that only males could accomplish things. But it was his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper, which inspired all of the later typewriter correction fluid products. Of course nowadays because of word processors and computer printers, we have a whole generation of today’s youth who maybe have no reason to know that there was even a problem for which a typewriter correction fluid product might be the solution.
Typewriter correction fluid played an important part of my professional life for decades. In the early days of my law firm, we went though many bottles of typewriter correction fluid.
You can read about Bette Nesmith Graham in this Wikipedia article.
A smart watch is a watch that connects by bluetooth to your smart phone, and does lots of smart things. It was not so long ago that your usual smart watch cost many hundreds of dollars. Recently I saw that there are lots and lots of relatively inexpensive smart watches on the market. I decided to give one of them a try. I was astonished to find how many features a person can get, and how clever the watch can be, for a quite modest purchase price. Continue reading “Inexpensive yet clever smart watches”
There are only about 900 slots still open for tomorrow’s ethics CLE program Securing electronic communications.
If you wait too long to register, maybe you would be the 901st and you would find the webinar to be full. Yeah, right.
Anyway, maybe somebody is scrambling around to pick up a couple of CLE units before the end of the year. Maybe even a couple of ethics CLE units before the end of the year. If so, this might be just the ticket. For more information, or to register, click here.
The year was 1964. I was a student in Mrs. Seiler’s elementary-school class in a school in rural Iowa. Mrs. Seiler introduced a new topic that we students would be learning about for the next few weeks — the metric system! Continue reading “Yes the US was going to join the metric system”
What’s wrong with the third sentence quoted below?
Duke Energy Renewables and Colorado Springs Utilities are developing a new solar energy generating facility in Colorado Springs.
With more than 220,000 solar panels on about 700 acres, the new Palmer Solar project will generate 60 megawatts of electricity for Colorado Springs Utilities’ customers. It generates enough electricity to power approximately 22,000 homes per year.
If you are a law firm, and if until recently you did your banking at BBVA USA bank, you already know most of what I am now describing. The acquisition by PNC bank of BBVA USA bank was a disaster. We are now in the process of dumping PNC Bank. If you are a law firm and you formerly did your banking at BBVA USA, I’d guess you are likewise now in the process of dumping PNC bank. Continue reading “BBVA USA bank to PNC bank acquisition was a disaster for law firms”
Update: I am pleased to be able to report that after about six hours, the server finished the “repair”. The new drive is now a full member of the RAID-1 array. The server has carried out the first of what will be a series of periodic SMART tests on the drive and it passed the SMART test. All is once again well with the server.
I was minding my own business when I heard a faint beeping. It turned out to be one of our Synology file servers. I could see on the blinky lights on the front of the server that the “status” light had turned from green to amber, and the light for “disk 1” had turned from green to amber. What did I do next? Continue reading “A beeping file server”
I have written about how the swallowing of the service provider Afex by Cambridge Global Payments (aka Fleetcor, aka Corpay) has been a disaster (blog article, blog article, blog article). One of the most recent developments is that, perhaps in retaliation for these blog articles, a manager at Afex unilaterally decided to close our Afex account. This of course required figuring out how much money was in our account at Afex and then transferring it to one of our accounts at some bank account. It now looks like the manager did his math wrong, transferring an incorrect amount of money. And the so-called EZTrack web links that are supposed to tell us the status of the money transfer to us do not work. You can’t make this stuff up if you try. Continue reading “Afex even more down the tubes than that”
However bad I thought the swallowing of Afex into Corpay (Fleetcor, Cambridge FX) was (see blog article and blog article), I was mistaken. It is worse. I cannot in good conscience suggest that any Afex customer spend even a moment trying to preserve their customer relationship with Afex. Here are the latest disasters. Continue reading “Afex even more down the tubes”