This is part 3 of a 3-part retrospective on the year 2008 on DennisKennedy.Blog.
In part 1 of this retrospective, I covered the articles I wrote in 2008 and the related posts about them. In part two, I covered the other posts I wrote on this blog in 2008.
In this part three, I cover the posts I planned to write but never got written.
I decided to write this post for three reasons:
1. The idea itself came from an idea I had for a post that I didn’t write a few months ago when a meme was making the rounds in which bloggers wrote about how they chose what they posted about.
2, I’ve always loved the writings of Jorge Luis Borges in which he wrote book reviews of books that didn’t exist. This is a small homage and it’s better than my old idea of writing software reviews of programs that didn’t exist. I realized that people would really believe the reviews and that might not be a good thing. You probably noticed all the excitement over the “keyboardless” Mac joke today. You do have to be careful about taking ironic approaches on law-related blogs.
3. I actually have notes of blog post ideas that I have jotted down throughout the year.
And it also gives me a chance to put a bit of closure on the one post that I didn’t write that I’ve thought about for the last few months: the dreaded Part 5 of my series on My Next Laptop is an iPod Touch.
Here’s part 5, in a nutshell. The iPod Touch as secondary laptop worked almost exactly how I planned. When I travel, it’s great. I can go to conferences and carry only the iPod Touch rather than a backpack and a laptop. At the public library, I can get on the WiFi and check my Amazon Wishlist to see if books are available at the library. Checking Gmail, Google Reader, weather, news and the like whenever I have access to WiFi is great.
There’s just one problem. For me (and in part, but just in part, it’s because I’m using iTunes on Windows in connection with the iPod Touch), iTunes remains one of the quirkiest and most frustrating programs I’ve ever used. Unless I exit out of iTunes and reopen it before I sync to the iPod Touch, the time and date will be set randomly. Google it and you’ll see that that’s not an issue unique to me.
Bottom line: I’m a huge fan of the iPod Touch and it extended the range of my laptop and serves as a second laptop in a great way in situations where I travel or have access to WiFi. However, I’d suggest that people might have better luck with iTunes on a Mac than on Windows or might expect some odd behaviors in a Windows environment. I mean, I can live with it OK, but it is frustrating (and I have to take a big deep breath and say a short prayer before I install an iTunes update) even for me, and I doubt that others will want to be as patient as I am. On the other hand, it all might work just fine for you, and that’s the quirkiness I refer to. By the way, my experiment was purposely done in the Windows environment, so there’s no need to give me the “get a Mac” advice. However, I’d enjoy reading your post if you try the same experiment in a Mac environment.
On the posts I didn’t write.
As I said, I pulled together some of my notes on blog posts I had planned in 2008. I often think up posts on my bike rides. Some of them get written. Some of them get noted. But there are a lot of unwritten blog posts scattered to the side of Grant’s Trail.
Here’s the list I pulled out of my notes, plus a few I remembered as I was writing this:
Here’s What’s Bugging Me about iTunes Now (just joking)
Legal Ethics and Web 2.0
Three Inexpensive Technologies I Really Like and Use Myself
Reflections on Raymond Chandler
Four WInds
Blog/Blawg 2.0
An Audience Survey
My Favorite Podcasts
Recommended Podcasts for Lawyers
The Power Cord is the Weakest Link
Using Extension Cords to Make Friends at Conferences
Projector Tips from Projector Failures I’ve Known
The Best Skills a Lawyer Can Have
Using the LazyWeb
Some Reflections on my Experience with Twitter (and Facebook and LinkedIn)
The Difficulties of Staying on Topic on Your Blog
Thoughts on Editing Podcasts
What Can ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption Show Teach Presenters
Why I Love getAbstract
Getting Deeper into Podcasts
The Library of Nineveh
Various Reflections on Books I’ve Read
A Guidebook for Fourth Generation Legal Technology
Marty Schwimmer is a Genius . . . Again
My Recent Conversation with Tom Mighell
Revisiting Open Space Technology
Improving Brainstorming Sessions
A Fond Memoriam on BlogWalk (Thank you Jack Vinson for inviting me to one of my favorite events in my whole blog history)
Open Source Programs Lawyers Might Use
My Facebook Friending Policy
Reconnecting with Childhood Friends Via the Internet
I Just Finished a 50-mile Bike Ride
A Fresh Look at RSS
Why I Hate Using Old Versions of Software
Finding Great Podcasts
The Hardest Thing(s) about Writing a Book
I Love FireFox and Tabbed Browsing, but Too Many Open Tabs is a Hazard
Tony Colleluori Reminded Me What the True Benefits of Blogging Are – see this post
How to be a Better Mentor

That’s the list. I’m not sure I’ll go back to any of these (some would be long posts), but if I see that there might be interest in some of these, I might work on writing a post on the topic. Also, I haven’t done a “By Request” post for a while, so if you have a question that I might answer as a post, let me know in the comments to this post.
On to 2009. Coming soon: my annual legal technology trends article/post.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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