Now that the 2009 Hurricane Season is officially upon us, I am looking forward (if that’s the right expression) to testing out how this iPhone app works. I bought it some months back so only have historical data on it, from 2008 and prior, but it promises great things.

The app — “Hurricane”, from Kitty Code LLC — displays all 2008 Atlantic storms and tapping any storm gives a plot of its position over time, the maximum (sustained) wind speed, the time and date of any given plot point, the barometric pressure at the eye of the storm, and the direction the storm was moving in when the measurement was taken.

The data goes back to the mid 1800s — 1914 seems to have been a good year, with only one storm (Hurricane No Name 01) and even that one only peaked, for a short time, at 70mph. 1933, on the other hand, was bad, with 21 storms, of which 2 were Cat 4 and a number Cat 3.

OK, you can get the same data elsewhere for free (the app is $3.99) but it’s pretty cool to look at and worth a price of beer in my money.

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DiscoveryResources has published a list of 20 top e-discovery predictions for the coming year.

These in particular struck me:

5. Software as a Service will start gaining inroads due to lack of credit and a reluctance to make capital purchases.

i.e. hosted discovery services. I’ve been using these for about 5 years now and the people I am currently with, Trilantic, have proved good, responsive and, which the clients especially like, inexpensive. The days are gone when these people had you over a barrel and could charge pretty much what they liked — now there is more flexibility and the hosting charges themselves are so low that they are pretty much a no-brainer, even for cases that are not particularly document heavy.

12. e-Discovery providers will discover diversity and alternative billing.

See above.

13. There will be a dramatic increase in international e-discovery (e-disclosure) requirements due to the financial crisis, arbitration, class actions and competition law.

I think this is going to be linked generally to a more intrusive (invasive?) regime of regulation that will be ushered in by the Obama Administration and by the exigencies of the post-crash landscape.

19. Insurance providers will get involved earlier and more visibly in the e-discovery process.

Definitely so. At least on the bigger cases, though it may be more difficult to justify internally on disputes that don’t appear so large or complex. One problem here is that it is not always immediately obvious that a case will become that difficult/costly until you are quite a way into it, and the temptation is (in the UK at least) to defer the decision to go electronic for a while. Of course, the further you go in a case without going electronic the more difficult it is finally to take the decision, and the more benefit is lost as a result of that delay. I push for early adoption where I even suspect it would help.

20. Law firms will be sanctioned for not having their own e-discovery houses in order.

I am not sure whether ’sanctions’ here means some actual costs penalty against them, but if so I think we may be a little way off that in the UK. However, I’ve recently seen, for example, an arbitration tribunal suggest quite positively that a party complaining of being swamped by the other side’s documents might do well to adopt (as it had not done until then) an electronic system to deal with the papers, and I think we will see an increasing number of such suggestions until, in a few years time, it really is the norm and thus sanctionable if not adopted.

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One Janis Krums (a man) went to rescue people from the Hudson, and sent this picture via Twitter, believed to be the first of the crash.

Citizen journalism — and perhaps useful to crash investigators and insurers.

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Following on from my recent post on my Windows XP setup and apps, here is a similar take on the Mac.

Stuff that is mostly the same as on Windows

1. Firefox, largely with the same Extensions as for XP

2. Evernote — has largely replaced Yojimbo for me, though that is largely for the portability between systems.

Mac-specific

1. DEVONThink Pro – this is not a million miles from Evernote, though it is vastly different in terms of searchability, organization and the ability to pick out strands and threads of thought. Where Evernote is 1-dimensional (and excellent), DT is more 3-D in approach (if I can put it that way).

2. Tinderbox – “Tinderbox stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.” It’s an odd program in many ways, and takes a bit of getting used to, but it can be very useful in circumstances where nothing else will do. I’ve written about its practical applicability to, e.g., legal work here.

3. Skitch — how often do you want to post a picture on your site, or email it to someone? Often, if you’re me, and Skitch is easily the best clipper for this. Easy to resize graphics and has a handy drop-shadow tool as well. I’ve junked SnapzPro now.

4. Textmate — best text editor. I often use it to write html in Markdown, and the project management while not as good as BBEdit is sufficient for me.

5. TextExpander – like PhraseExpress for Mac, use it to trigger words, phrases, code etc. Indispensable.

6. PDFPen — from the same stable as TextExpander, it’s a useful tool for dealing with PDFs.

7. TaskPaper — Jesse Grosjean’s excellent, simple, lightweight task tracker. Fed up of all that GTD malarkey and faffage? Use TP. It has just enough in it to be very useful and enough NOT in it to stop you futzing with endless options and parameters.

8. Scrivener — bit of an oddball choice, this one, as it’s mostly designed for writing books, screenplays and so on. But I found it’s writing interface excellent for doing away with distractions (full screen, nothing extraneous) and its research are is good for jotting down notes and collating source material. “Literature & Latte is not a software company… [It] is one guy with lofty writerly ambitions, who has written a piece of software designed to aid in the process of writing”. And a great job he’s done of it, too.

9. Quicksilver or Launchbar — get to anything on your machine or a website you’ve visited in a simple Command+Space. Once you’ve used it’s almost impossible to go back to not having it installed. I was a longtime QS fan but I’ve recently switched over to LB which, while it’s paid for, seems more robust.

10. 1password – because life’s too short to spend it trying to remember all those pesky passwords. I’ve only recently come to this, but it quickly proved invaluable.

11. SuperDuper — top-notch and easy backup app. Don’t leave home without installing it. I also use ChronoSync, but less so now. However, their new v4 looks good.

12. AppZapper — easily get rid of all those apps and their attendant doo-dads that you tried out but didn’t like. Makes a great noise, too!

13. Transmit — the Mac king of ftp apps. Had it for ages and wouldn’t be without it. Very simple, very secure, very reriabrl (nod to VW Golf ads of early 80s)

14. CSSEdit — Mac OSX does not have many CSS editors. This is the best, and very good.

15. xScope – you may not need this app very often, but when you do, I doubt you will find anything to match it. What is it? “a powerful set of tools that are ideal for measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts”. Very useful for making minute adjustments to website designs.

I’ll think of more, I’m sure, though everyone has their favourites and I’m sure there are alternatives to many of these.

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As I’ve recently moved to a new firm, I thought I’d set out what I found I needed to install to make me most productive. In no particular order:

1. Dual monitors — big 24″ screen mostly centred in front of me for work on documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, doc review etc; 19″ monitor slightly offset to the right with Outlook permanently filling the whole screen. Once you’ve tried this system it’s hard to go back and others seem to agree that it adds greatly to productivity. Best thing in my setup is being able to see out of the corner of my eye whether an incoming email is worth breaking the train of thought for or whether it can be left till later — it’s just not the same if you have to switch to Outlook to check what the notifier just told you. And now that monitors are pretty cheap, it’s easier to justify.

2. Firefox — probably lots of people reading this will need no persuading. I haven’t used IE for…well, a very long time. Favourite extensions include:
* Tab Mix Plus — allows easy tab management, inc Undo Close Tab (which I seem to use a lot), and Open All Tabs in the same place when you re-open Firefox (a real boon).
* del.icio.us — for all your bookmark needs.
* [twitterfox](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5081) — checking and sending tweets
* ForecastFox — do I need to wrap up or take umbrella when I go for a coffee?
* DownThemAll — download manager
* Ubiquity — “An extension that allows for the use of dynamic commands in Firefox”. Hard to describe succinctly but useful.

3. Fineprint — absolutely indispensable, a software printer that allows you to control printing much more subtly and powerfully than normal. Basically, you print to it as if it were a normal printer, then it prints to whatever physical printer you decide, once it has processed (as automatically as you wish) any extra commands. That sounds a bit of a mouthful, but it is invaluable for (a) printing 2-/4- or 8-sheets to a page, (b) double-sided (depending on printer) and (c) deleting ‘wasteful’ pages, especially on Web pages and emails where you often have an irritating 2 lines of garbage that demands an extra page. This is a mature app and one I simply could not be without.

3. PDF Factory — from the Fineprint stable. Basically does the same thing but ‘prints’ to PDF. Top notch.

4. Evernote — “allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.” What more can I say? I keep receipts here (print email to PDF with PDF Factory, then send to Evernote), caselaw, To Read items, plan travel etc etc. ThinkWasabi has a great series of 1001 Uses of Evernote (in Spanish).

5. RoboForm — similar to 1password for Mac, this app securely remembers all the details you care to give it and can spit them out at your command. Can be used to automatically log on to website, fill in your personal details in web forms etc etc.

6. ActiveWords — Again, a top app. It takes a little setting up but once your favourite words are in, it saves a load of time. I use it mostly as a word or phrase ‘trigger’ though you can also use it to launch programs etc. So, for example, I use the phrase “In the circumstances, …” quite a lot in correspondence, so just have a trigger “itc” which automatically expands to the full phrase. Can also be used for whole chunks of text that you might use a lot (e.g. different email sign-offs or your website address) or the rather long name of that firm you work for!

7. ClearContext — an add-in for Outlook that really expands its usefulness. Auto-assign items to folders (very handy), quickly setup rules based on an email, see all contacts involved with a particular folder/project etc etc.

8. Clipmate — another old favourite of mine and, again, something I cannot live without, even though I only scratch the surface of what it can do. Essentially, a clipboard extender.

9. A good text editor — this is a bit more difficult, but I sometimes need something a little bit more than the Windows offering (which I can’t even remember). I use Textmate on the Mac and am currently trialling e-editor, which is a sort of Windows clone of that brilliant editor.

10. Highrise — from the 37 Signals stable. Not really an app as such, but an online CRM service.

Once I have all that set up, [I am rolling](http://www.eventsounds.com/wav/rolling.wav).

Anyone have any other suggestions?

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Apologies in advance for the painful obviousity factor (POF) of this (probably about 87 on the POF/Richter scale), but it was new to me even though I’ve used MS Word for aeons.

I’m working on a couple of docs that have got to about the zillionth revision stage now, and wanted to print off the latest draft just showing Mr X’s amendments. Simple enough (once the Boy Wonder had shown me ;-) ).

1. Load up the Reviewing Toolbar
2. Go to ‘Show’
3. Go to ‘Reviewers’
4. Pick the one(s) you want
5. er, that’s it

That instantly reduced a 73 page document in a confusing multitude of colours and underlinings to a 42 page doc in black with some green markings from that reviewer.

I can see a lot of use for this.

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Well the new FT front page is much better than the old, easier to read, less corrupted by ads, better laid out.

Be nice if they would transfer the look to all other pages, too.  I should have thought it would be simple enough to redo the CSS sheets for the whole lot, and not just the front page.

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ReRisk now with added Twitter — see Rapido News items in the side bar over there —>

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Amidst all the doom and gloom, the early trains into the City packed with office workers keen to be seen to be keen, the belt-tightening, expense-cutting, travel-slashing and so forth, it’s occasionally worth remembering that there are different perspectives.

Here’s Steve Jobs on how Apple chose to get through the last downturn:

We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.

Via Fortune.

That point — they weren’t going to lay off people because they’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — seems to me one often overlooked or forgotten, but very much worth keeping rather nearer the front of management’s mind.

Of course, if you’ve just hired any old Tom, Dick or Harry, it may not matter to you so much — but then your business is probably headed down the tubes anyway.

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I’m honoured. Lexis Nexis have chosen Re Risk as one of the Top 50 insurance law-related blogs in the whole world. I’m willing to bet there are only 37 in total, so being in the Top 50 is great.

Here’s how they describe us:

Features provocative insight on risk, re-/insurance and future thinking with a particular bent toward complex commercial issues, large reinsurance disputes, professional indemnity claims and general liability issues. Published by Jolyon Patton of Halliwells.

From Governor of Hong Kong to Blood and Guts is pretty good, I think.

And, as you all know, Re Risk falls four square inside this glowing description:

“These blogsites contain some of the best writing out there on insurance on coverage, catastrophic loss, regulatory compliance, life insurance, health care and insurance issues in general,” said the LexisNexis Insurance Law Center. “They contain a wealth of information for the insurance community with timely news items, practical information, expert analysis, frequent postings and helpful links to other sites. These blogsites also show us how insurance issues interact with politics and culture. Moreover, they demonstrate how bloggers can impact the world of insurance law and insurance industry issues.”

Thanks Lexis Nexis. I owe you.

For that list in full, go here.

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