Articles by Tom_Ziemba

One of the chief complaints I hear from legal nurse consultants about Gmail is that unlike Outlook, Thunderbird or other email clients, you have to be online to access or work with your Gmail email. If you’re a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant who wants to use your Gmail without the Internet (like when you’re on an airplane or in some inferior coffee shop that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi), follow these steps:

1. Log into your Gmail account.
2. Click Settings in the top right corner of the screen.
3. Click Labs in the top right corner.
4. Look for the selection for Offline Gmail and set the button to Enable and then click Save Changes.

Your web browser will then reload and there will be a new link that says Offline^0.2 in the top of your Gmail screen. Click on that new link and follow the instructions (you’ll need to download Google Gears but Google will help you) and download your Gmail email. Before you know it, you’ll have offline access to your Gmail no matter where you are! If you ever work from an intermittent wireless connection this could be a lifesaver. Of course, you can’t send or receive email while in offline mode.

Keep on Techin’,

Tom

Certified Legal Nurse Consultants using Windows XP have long envied that cool rotating menu the Mac OS X Dock has, that floats around the bottom or top of the Mac screen and fans out your icons. It’s a much better looking menu than that darn Windows menu that pops up when you click the Start Button. It also beats stashing short-cuts all over your Windows Desktop.

Now there’s a cure for Mac Envy – visit RocketDock.com and you can download a customizable version of the Dock made especially for Windows! This is not an official Windows or Mac product so you use it at your own risk. Remember to be careful, always back-up your computer as well as any files before you place them on the RocketDock. I’ve had mine for about two weeks and I love it! I’m sure you’ll love it too (it freaked out my Mac-user buddy).

Keep on Techin’,

Tom

Be honest you Certified Legal Nurse Consultant iPhone^® users, it’s hard to be cool when you’re suffering from “fat finger syndrome” isn’t it? You know, having trouble typing on that slick touchscreen that makes all of us lesser CLNC^® Crackberry users envious. Remember how we laughed at you on the ski slopes while we poked away at our tactile keyboards with the eraser of an upside down pencil while your gloveless fingers stuck frozen to your screen?

Now, there’s a way you can type on your iPhone any time, even while wearing mittens. Ten One Design has come up with the Pogo^TM stylus, a simple, easy to use stylus that actually works on an iPhone. It’s $14.95, well worth the money and will give you the edge on your other iPhone-enabled friends (and you’ll maintain your cool).

Keep on Techin’,

Tom

A couple of months ago I jumped on an airplane to Las Vegas for the Institute’s CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Program. I normally work on flights. I carry my own water, jack my iPod^® Classic into my Bose^® sound-reducing headphones and crank up Prince. I’m so self-contained that the only thing that can ruin my flight is when the guy in front of me leans his seat back into my lap so he can sleep.

Even before we take off, I have my laptop on my lap waiting for the double bell that allows real business travelers to work and fake business travelers to sleep (or suck down as many free drinks as they can if they’re in first class). Vegas can be 3½ hours from Houston and this time I got lucky – no sleepers. I cranked up the laptop, got to work, didn’t look up until final approach into LAS and I didn’t think anything of it.

In Vegas, I was comparing flight notes with another staff member who told me her laptop conked out somewhere around West Texas, about 1½ hours into the flight. We have the same model laptop so I was a little confused why I could work for 3 hours and she couldn’t (no it’s not just stamina). I volunteered to take a look at her laptop (it makes me look good even though it’s my job). After two minutes, I figured out her issues, at least the ones related to her laptop. One of those issues was the strain on the laptop’s battery.

Based on this experience, here are some steps and tips to extend the life of your laptop batteries whether you’re flying across the country, working in the medical library or soaking up the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks^®.

Keep a Low-Power Profile

• Right click My Computer on your desktop, click Hardware and click Hardware Profiles. If you’re undocked, copy the profile you are in and rename it to Undocked-Normal.
• Click Start, Settings, Network Connections and Panel and disable your Wireless Network Connection. (When you’re in the air or out of range of the wireless Internet, the computer will keep trying to connect and runs down the battery trying).
• Highlight the current profile, click Rename and name it Undocked-No Wireless.
• Dim the laptop screen a couple of notches. You don’t need a tan while you work, so maximum brightness is not necessary.
• Click Start, Control Panel and Power.

• Next time you boot up your laptop it will give you a choice of which profile to select so if you’re out of range of wireless, pick the Undocked-No Wireless and your laptop battery will get extended life.

Stick It in Your Ear

• Don’t listen to music on your laptop – get an iPod or Zune^® and use the ear-buds or a Bose headset.

Empty It Out

• Don’t watch DVDs or listen to CDs on your laptop and make darn sure you don’t have a CD or DVD hiding in the built-in player.

Ditch It and Stick It

• Pull out the CD/DVD player and replace it with a second battery.
• Buy the battery with the highest number of cells (6-12) and look for a high watt-hour (WHr) rating. The more cells and higher WHr, the longer it will last.
• You probably won’t be listening to CDs or watching DVDs on the road but if you think you will, just toss the modular player in your computer case and only use it when plugged into a wall jack.
• Some computers have portable battery packs you can attach – consider one.

Juice Up Every Chance You Get

• Use your charger right up to the last second in the airport or Starbucks. Any time spent on the ground using your battery is less time in the air on your battery. Don’t be afraid to top off unless you have an older non Li-ion battery.
• Once you’re on the ground, run the battery(ies) completely down and charge them overnight. Do this each night. It’s always good to run through a full power cycle as often as possible.

Make New Friends at the Airport (You Won’t See Them for Long)

• I carry one of those goofy power plugs from my local hardware store that allows me to plug three cords into one wall plug. If I need to juice it at Starbucks and some sandaled, goatee-type is already plugged into the wall socket I can usually talk him (or her) into letting me share by plugging in the adapter so we can all make nice.

I’ve flown New York City to San Diego on one charge using the above methods and highly recommend them. The only problem is my batteries last so long I can’t use the dead-battery excuse so I can shut down and dig deep into the latest Lee Child thriller.

Here’s one last tip. If your airport doesn’t have free Wi-Fi (a lot do), find the closest airline club, one club-member benefit is usually free, unsecured, wireless Internet. You’ll locate it quickly by looking for the laptop owners crouched against the club’s wall desperately downloading email.

Keep on Techin’, (and I’ll see you at the wall socket!)

Tom

As a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, do you use Google^® to search on a regular (or exclusive) basis? If you’re like me, you’re tired of seeing only 10 results per page. You know, scan the page, click next on the Gooooooooooogle link and then see the next 10 links, repeat – next 10, repeat – next 10, repeat – ad nauseum and if you’re as tired as I am of that basic white Google homepage that offers little in the way of excitement other than an occasional logo change, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. Open your Internet Explorer^® or Firefox^® browser and point it to Google. Next, create an account with Google. It’s quick, easy and it’s free (plus they know all about you anyway – they’re Google after all).

After you create your account, go back to Google and click on iGoogle (in the top right corner of the page). You may not need to, it may take you right to iGoogle^TM. When you get to iGoogle (you’ll know) you can select a theme from the “Create your own homepage in under 30 seconds” box. Check a few of the options in the Select Interests box. You can change them later. When you’re done click on “See your page.”

Once you do you’ll see that your new iGoogle homepage has changed considerably. There will be new content like a useless clock, perhaps weather, news from CNN or perhaps your local paper or The New York Times. Ignore these changes for now, we’ve got important work to do.

First, go to the top of your new iGoogle homepage and click on either Preferences or Search Preferences (depending on which one you see). You can then tell Google to display 100 (really 100!) search results per page. You can also tell it to open search results in a new window. This is way cool – your original 100 results remain in place and each link opens in a new window. This way, as you evaluate each result for a case you’re working on for your CLNC^® business, you don’t lose the original results and can close each page (or follow its links) as you wish. Save your preferences and go back to iGoogle.

Next, you can select your theme or change your theme. You’ll have pages and pages of customizable themes (header images and page colorations) that will change the way you look at Google forever (or at least until you change themes). Vickie loves trekking and hiking in the mountains so she selected a cool theme that reminds her of the Bhutanese Himalayas. I’ve got an electro-techno-looking theme that charges me up. Some themes are static – the same all the time. Other themes change throughout the day. (Try Pocoyó for a fun, changing theme). You can search the themes by keywords to find one you like.

The Institute has also developed a theme specific to Certified Legal Nurse Consultants. You can get the iGoogle CLNC^® theme by logging into the NACLNC^® Community. Once logged into the Community, click Member Seal and Other Downloads. Select the iGoogle CLNC^® theme to easily upload it to your iGoogle homepage.

Now that iGoogle’s looking different, your next step is to address the new content that’s been added to your homepage, courtesy of iGoogle’s Gadget APIs (you’ve learned a new tech word. Now, instead of saying “I can’t go out with you Friday, I’m washing my hair,” you can say “I’m staying in Friday to use Core JavaScript Features and Standard XMLHttpRequest class objects to customize the APIs for my iGoogle homepage.”)

The APIs allow you to drag and drop, add and delete and even resize feeds on your iGoogle homepage. To take advantage of this, the first thing to do is navigate to Vickie’s Blog and click the Subscribe to Feed link at the top left. Now, instead of subscribing by email, select the option under Subscribe Now! to read the blog with your iGoogle or My Yahoo! web-based reader. It’ll then take you back to your iGoogle homepage and should show a box listing the last four headlines. You can then grab the “Vickie’s Blog” box with a left click and drag it anywhere on your page. Use the little icons in the top right of each feed box to delete a feed from your page or to move it around your iGoogle homepage.

Now visit other blogs, news sites (NYTimes.com) or alert sites (FDA.gov) and add their feeds to your homepage. Do a Google search for medical-malpractice news and feeds or other types of cases that interest you to find a wealth of news, facts and opinions. Almost all of these information sources for your Certified Legal Nurse Consulting business can be added to your new homepage. On mine I keep the local weather, a stock market ticker, global and local (Houston Chronicle) news and legal feeds. As you learn of new, interesting feeds you can add them, deleting the feeds you no longer need.

I haven’t tried this in IE8 yet, but in my Firefox browser I have multiple tabs that open each time I start Firefox. My homepage and primary display tab hold legal feeds, my secondary is tech feeds (natch!) and the last is news and current events (like movies). Every time I open a browser, I take 2-3 seconds to scan the headlines and then get to searching. One more tip is to use both IE8 and Firefox. I’ve set IE8 to Google, and Firefox to Yahoo!^® and I’ve got different content on each browser. My ultimate search destination (legal, news or research) helps me select which browser to open.

This blog has primarily been about Google but, with the exception of themes and colorizations, you can customize Yahoo! just as easily as you can Google.

Remember, use a combination of search engines to get the best results. You’re cheating yourself out of information gathering otherwise. Customizing your homepages will put more information at your fingertips. Just make sure it’s useful.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Any legal nurse consultant who owns a computer running the wonderful Windows^® operating system (OS), has, at some point been faced with the little pop-up that tells you something to the effect that “high-priority updates are available for your computer, would you like to download and install them now?” My answer is a whole-heartedly qualified “Yes! I sure would in certain situations.”

I live behind a firewall, I’ve got eight real servers, a couple of virtual ones and any number of different “legacy” (geek-speak for older) programs running across 25+ computers at any given time. Before I can do an OS update or upgrade, I’ve got to make sure it doesn’t “break” anything (geek-speak for causing an older program to no longer run correctly) causing your users, then you, much pain and grief. This update/upgrade issue is compounded by our numerous websites designed to be viewed with various versions of any number of different browsers (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) running different web services to collect and transfer data. So, when Windows asks me if I want to add a new service pack to my XP operating system, or high-priority updates to my Office programs or even to upgrade to a new level of Internet Explorer, I have to step back and think about it.

However, if I was a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant running Windows XP or Windows Vista and the Office family of productivity software (talk about an oxymoron!), I’d have a different answer. As an individual user not connected into any “legacy” software and whose system is working with existing printers, scanners, etc., I would install every service pack for Windows XP and Vista that comes down the line. Service packs are upgrades to the operating system itself and usually contain fixes for other issues that have arisen since the last service pack. They’re designed to cure deficiencies in the original program and make it into something safer and more stable than the prior version. In Windows XP’s case service pack support has been discontinued and only high-priority updates will be issued in the future. Service packs are a way to upgrade to a newer and better version of your operating system (keep your Vista service packed up). If you’re worried that an existing program won’t run correctly after a patch, do a Google search before you download and install the latest version to see if the new service pack is contraindicated for your software. If not, go ahead, download and install that sucker.

Even Apple offers OS upgrades (and patches) designed for the same purpose. According to an article in The New York Times, researchers at Symantec found 26 vulnerabilities in the Mac OS X in 2008 versus 27 for Windows Vista. The takeaway? No matter what OS you’re using – keep it current.

High-priority updates are different than service packs. High-priority updates are just that – fixes for something Microsoft has deemed a high-priority problem. Believe me, if Microsoft thinks it’s high-priority, it is (or was six months ago when it was identified and Microsoft started working on a patch [geek-speak for "emergency fix"] for the issue). Download and install high-priority updates. Always. Period. End of story. Your computer won’t be completely safe, they never are, but it will be as safe as can be as long as it’s fully patched and packed up.

How do you go about setting this up? There are a couple of ways. The easiest is to go into your Windows Control Panel (Start, Settings, Control Panel or Start, Control Panel depending upon what start menu you use) and adjust your Automatic Updates to download and install updates automatically. Then, every Wednesday night, or whatever time and date you set, your computer will contact Microsoft’s servers to check for updates and it will download and install the updates automatically. This is a great way for a CLNC^® consultant to keep his/her computer up-to-date.

If you don’t trust Microsoft to do this (and not everybody should), you can open Internet Explorer and go to windowsupdate.com and follow the instructions to check your computer against the lists of the most current service packs and updates. The computer will do so on its own, just give it permission to install the necessary applets and give it some time. Without releasing any private information to Microsoft, your computer will be checked and a list of “high-priority” and “available” updates will be generated for your computer. I usually select just the “high-priority updates” and then review the list to see what Microsoft feels is high-priority. You can deselect any that you don’t think you need, and then let the computer install them. Sometimes it takes a couple of reboots but I feel much safer afterwards.

If you have a company-issued computer or work for a company and access various programs through a virtual private network (VPN), you’ll want to check with the IT department to see what the company policies are on updates – automatic or otherwise – before you install anything. After all, you don’t want to be the one to “break” the system! Otherwise, if you’re using your own computer – go ahead and patch and pack it up!

Keep on techin’,

Tom

From the beginning – let me disclose a conflict of interest, I’m a Firefox user. I’ve flirted with Apple’s Safari but find it is too slow to render its pages, and it’s got the worst search function ever designed for looking for text on a web page (although it does tell you how many matches there are on a page). I’ve customized my Firefox browser to include my favorite blogs, news and RSS feeds and, even though it’s a little slow to open the first time you fire it up each day, I love the fact that I’m tuned in to the world every time I jump on the Net. It’s great the way I can do tabbed browsing, with a simple right-click opening pages from my Yahoo! searches in a new tab so I’m not clicking forward and back to get to my search results after a page pans out. It’s also cool to be able to look up forgotten passwords for websites that deleted my “cookies.”

With my built-in bias, I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer (IE) 8. I’ve had IE7 installed for some time and have always found it a little clumsy. In fact, the only reason I have used it is to access the Windows^® Update website and keep my Windows XP OS and Office programs patched up. I didn’t like IE for general web surfing and had a latent fear of all its vulnerabilities I’m always reading about. Firefox seemed like the best way to practice “safe surfing.”

Now that Microsoft^® has released IE8, a number of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants have asked me whether or not they should upgrade. My answer is an unqualified “yes.” IE8 is probably the best version of the IE browser that Microsoft has released. It’s supposedly safer than ever and when you open a new tab, instead of seeing a blank page, you can choose to open previously closed tabs as well as other options. It offers a so-called smart address bar feature (that I’ve turned off in Firefox and dislike in Safari) that offers sites from your browser’s history as you type in an address. It also has better options within the “delete browsing history” function that gives you better control over what data (even website-specific data) you want to keep or delete.

When you click on the “x” to close an individual page, it asks you if you want to close all tabs or just one. There’s a new filtering service you can select which will display a warning page prior to visiting any site that is deemed to contain malware or that might be a phishing site (security risks). Something really cool is that IE8 highlights the core domain name of the website you’re visiting to help you avoid sound-a-like or typosquatting sites. To help make this a safer browser than previous versions of IE some other security improvements have been added. On the negative side, IE8 may not display all websites the way they’ve been designed to be viewed – not everyone will catch this – but it offers a “compatibility mode” that will allow you to see a website to view the “broken” site correctly and it will remember those sites for you, switching in and out of compatibility mode automatically.

In short, any legal nurse consultant that uses IE on a regular basis should upgrade to IE8 and then keep an eye out for upcoming patches. I also recommend that you make sure you have all the current high-priority Windows updates installed prior to moving to IE8. The upgrade process is easy to download and install. It kept almost all the customizations to my iGoogle homepage (including my cool theme), RSS feeds, etc. This is a definite upgrade that I’m sure I’ll come to appreciate the more I use it and so will you.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Friday I came home from work, docked my computer, fired it up and went to check the movie times at the dollar theater for my big date with Vickie. Fired up Firefox – nothing. Opened up IE8 – nothing. Tried Safari – still nothing. Looked at the DSL modem and router – all seemed fine (all das blinkenlights vas blinken und flashen). My first reaction was that my end is working, it must be that the Internet is down.

Since I was in a hurry to catch up with Vickie for dinner and a movie I didn’t have time to adequately diagnose the problem. Now, I can go a month without cable television. I only watch “The Weather Channel” anyway (it brings my blood pressure down getting “Locals on the 8s”). But the prospect of a weekend without the Internet terrified me. How would I know what was on eBay, what the Octomom was up to and how was I going to download the latest LOLcat in my Fam-spam?

All through dinner and Star Trek I thought about the problem. Was it limited to my computer? Did I have a cable pulled out? Had I paid the bill? Was there any construction on the street yesterday that could have cut my lifeline to Google? Was the Internet really down (there wasn’t anything on the radio about it) or was it something even more sinister?

I put it out of my mind and managed to have a fitful night’s sleep. The next morning, after a cup of healthy green tea to stimulate my mental processes (well process anyway), I attacked the problem fresh. First, I rebooted my computer. Still nada. Second, I fired up Vickie’s computer and, while it was booting, checked all the cables running into my dock/port replicator – all were in place and my network connection light was blinking properly. Third, I looked in the system tray in the bottom right of my screen to see if my LAN (local area network) connection was functioning – LAN was okay.

Fourth, I checked Vickie’s computer – no Internet there either. Problem duplicated so I know it’s not isolated to my computer alone (good news – maybe).

Next I called AT&T to hear the Internet outage report. No problems in my local area. Even though AT&T gave me a clean bill of health, I called them back, punched through all the voice-prompt systems and finally talked to Elvis from Bangalore. Elvis (who’s actually a really nice guy in Toronto who can’t pronounce “Toronto” in Canadian), tells me that he is showing a strong signal going to my router. In other words, it’s not AT&T’s fault I can’t get online, it’s me.

“So,” I ask Elvis, “what’s the next logical step?” He tells me it’s easy – just reboot my modem and router and see if that’s the issue. That’s what I was hoping not to hear; that’s the dirty job, involving crawling under the desk through a passel of dust bunnies to check all the cables on my DSL modem and my router. Elvis wasn’t up to it (but he did offer to stay on the line until the issue was resolved) so someone else had to do it. Vickie was still downstairs drinking healthy green tea oblivious to the impending disaster that would befall us if I couldn’t get the Internet back on. The job fell to me. Everything else had tested negative, it was time to tuck my red cape into my shorts, take Elvis’s advice and pull the plugs.

First, I unplugged the router then unplugged the DSL modem. Das blinkenlights are no longer blinken. I waited a minute to allow any dynamic memory to clear itself out. Once everything was still (not blinken) I took a deep breath, plugged the DSL modem back in and let it fire up (start blinken). Then I plugged the router back in and let it acquire a signal from the modem (and start blinken). Next, still holding my breath, I walked back to my computer, fired up the browser and…Yahoo! It’s back! I started breathing again, thanked Elvis profusely and got on with my day. I also have a WAP – a wireless access point (to give me wireless in the backyard) plugged into the router so I rebooted that too just for good measure.

What’s the takeaway for the Certified Legal Nurse Consultant? When your Internet is unavailable, don’t call your computer manufacturer’s help line. Instead follow these steps:

1) If you have a second computer sharing your network, see if it can connect to the Internet (I know, I didn’t do that first).

2) Reboot your computer to make sure it’s picked up any connections.

3) Check your physical network connections (your LAN) to your computer (skip if you’re connecting wirelessly).

4) Call your Internet service provider (ISP) to see if there are any network outages affecting your area.

5) Reboot/restart your cable or DSL modem and any router/hubs and/or WAPs you have plugged into that modem.

Internet outages are rare – the issue is usually something simple, so attack the problem in a logical order and you should get a simple and fast resolution.

Here’s another takeaway – if you’ve gone to VoIP (voice over internet protocol) for your legal nurse consulting business your phone calls are going through your Internet connection. This means that when your Internet is down you’ll need a cell phone or a landline to report the problem!

Keep on techin’,

Tom

In my “PC to the Cleaners” thread, I’ve dusted you off, cleaned out your private data and today I’ll speed up your computer (at least infinitesimally). My final topic on cleaning is how to clean up (and out) your hard drive.

When you first buy a computer for your legal nurse consulting business, it runs so fast that we wonder why we struggled to live with our old computer. But what happens? The longer we use the “new” computer, the slower it gets. Why? The answer is simple – the more you work, the more data you store on the computer. The more data you store, the longer it takes to find the data you need.

First of all, think of an old vinyl record – 45, 33 or 78 rpm – whatever you grew up with. On a vinyl record, all of the data (the music) is in concentric tracks and you can immediately find a song by dropping the needle onto the correct track (anyone born after 1980 is probably lost by this point). At the risk of oversimplifying, think of your hard drive the same way. Your hard drive begins with its data in localized, easy-to-find places. As you use the computer and the hard drive spins, data is opened and saved into different spaces on the hard drive. Some portions of the data go into vacant spaces and some overwrites older data. At some point the “tracks of your data” are no longer in nice easy-to-find areas – they are spread out all over your hard drive. The more data on the drive, the longer it takes the computer to find and pull together the data when you open a file, photo or document.

What makes up these large quantities of data? First of all there are all those legal nurse consulting reports, LOLcats, photos, slide shows of flowers, movies of people doing stupid things and other attachments stuck onto your old sent and received email (if you use Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, etc. where copies of email are kept locally). There are also all sorts of old photos, files, file fragments, unused or partially uninstalled programs and other debris that have collected on your hard drive over time.

By cleaning out the junk or no longer needed files, you will free up hard drive or disk space you can then use to store new data. This speeds up the rate at which your computer accesses data (well not really, but it makes it easier for your computer to find so it seems quicker).

Simple things first: Go into your “sent” folder in your email program and delete any email more than 60 days old for personal email and 1 year for your CLNC^® business (or pick dates that work for you). Do the same for your received email and file attachments and dump anything you don’t need. If you can sort email by size (usually with a Size bar at the top of your email program’s window) go into the “sent” folder and click the Size bar until the largest email files are displayed first. Then delete any email with a large attachment (anything over 300 KB that you do not wish to save). If you want to keep an attachment, save it into the proper file on your hard drive (you’ve probably already done this and have a duplicate copy still attached to an email anyway).

Next, delete any unused or duplicate photographs, music, drawings, images or other files you have accumulated over the years. If you don’t feel comfortable deleting those photos from your 2001 summer vacation in Poughkeepsie (the photos you haven’t looked at since you came home) you can burn them to a CD/DVD or move them to a network storage device or portable hard drive, if you wish.

As you surf the Internet for information you need for your Certified Legal Nurse Consulting business, copies of all the web pages you visit are stored (cached) on your hard drive to make subsequent viewings faster. There’s no reason to keep these so you can set your web browser to clear the “cache” files on your web browser after every session and free up that disk space. Internet Explorer 6.0 and later can be set to do this automatically. Go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced Tab, under Security. Select the box next to Empty Temporary Internet Files Folder when browser is closed and click OK. If you are using the Firefox browser you can look under Tools, Options, Privacy and Private Data Settings.

When a Windows^® user deletes a file, photo, etc., it goes into the Recycle Bin on your desktop to give you a chance to recover it, in case you have second thoughts. On a regular basis you should empty those “trash” files from your Recycle Bin. This maximizes your hard drive free space by freeing Windows to overwrite those files and the space they used to occupy. The files aren’t really deleted – Windows just pretends it can’t see them so it shows them as “free” space and eventually overwrites them.

To speed up file access you can consolidate your files into the My Documents folder. Here you’ll find subfolders such as My Music and My Pictures and you can create additional folders for word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc. By consolidating, you’ll make files easier to find, and you may only need to back up the one folder rather than having to hunt all over your computer for files to back up. (You can then set your Microsoft^® Office programs to open into the correct “default” folder so you won’t have to fish around.)

To gain back even more hard drive space, delete the “shovelware” from your computer. This is what I call the preloaded, “limited time only,” or preview software the manufacturer dumps onto computers due to licensing deals. It also includes the stuff you’ll never use. To get rid of it, open the Control Panel, go to Add and Remove Programs and remove any program you’re not using and don’t plan to use. Be careful though – just because you don’t recognize a program doesn’t mean you don’t need it (or won’t need it).

As I said earlier as you continue to create and save your reports for your attorney-clients, and delete files, Windows fills the “deleted” spaces with newer files, often scattering files across your hard drive? This causes Windows to run slower as it searches your hard drive for those fragments and pulls them together into your file. If you run a defragmenting program on a regular basis it will reconsolidate your files and programs so Windows doesn’t have to look for them. It’s kind of like putting the record tracks I talked about above back into the correct order for each song. After you delete no longer needed programs and data, you should run a defragmenter.

Windows^® XP has a good built-in defragmenting program. Before you run it though, you should empty your Recycle Bin. Then run the defragger from the menu bar by clicking Start, then Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, then Disk Defragmenter and finally click Defragment. The program will start up, run and you will need to close it when complete.

I recommend defragging at least once a week. Any more often than that is simply compulsive. Any less than once a month is criminal. The key to keeping your computer running fast and smoothly is regular maintenance.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

My last tech tip for your legal nurse consulting business was to clean it up, and my recommendation was to blow it out – your keyboard and air vents, that is. Today we’ll look at some different aspects of cleaning up for your CLNC^® business. This time it’s your data, not your dust.

Every document, PowerPoint^® presentation and photograph you create or edit personally or as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant contains what is known as “metadata.” Metadata, or hidden data in Microsoft^®-speak, may include information about the file in which the metadata is included – in other words it’s data about data and may contain information about the quality, creator and/or characteristics of the data it’s contained in. Try this: open Word, click “Open” like you’re opening a file. Then single left click on any file followed by a single right click. In the menu that pops up scroll to the bottom and left click “Properties.” That shows you the underlying metadata telling you when the file was created, edited, who authored the document and when the file was last accessed.

Let’s say you use a legal nurse consulting file template created by someone else to create a document. Are you the author? Not according to the metadata. The author, should we look into the document properties, is the person who created the template – not you. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if an attorney-client asked you who really wrote your report and someone else’s name showed in the Properties as author?

There are ways to avoid this. If you’re using Office 2007 you can inspect the metadata included in any document, clear it out and edit in the “correct” information (or you can choose to delete it). Simply open a Word document. Click the “Office Button” in the upper left corner then click “Properties” to see the simplest metadata. You can edit this to include your correct information. If you really want to get advanced, click “Document Properties” above the display of properties to see all the editable types of metadata you can store on a document. Another way to see the metadata is to close the document, navigate to the document in your Windows^® Explorer (not Internet Explorer^®) then right click on the document and left click on “Properties.” Now, left click on “Summary” in the “Properties” tab and then, click on “Advanced.”

Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has also given us a couple of ways to remove the metadata when you finalize a document. If you’re using Vista, it allows you to do it simply by bringing up the Properties box and the metadata can be cleared from there. In Office 2007, to clear out the metadata, open the Word document you wish to take to the cleaner. Click the “Office Button,” click “Prepare,” then click “Inspect Document” (if it asks you to save the document, do so) then click “Inspect.” The results box will show the different types of information stored in your document. You can then click the “Remove All” button by each type of information to remove that info. Reinspect the document and you’re ready to send it – without the metadata.

Almost every Microsoft Office 2007 document, PowerPoint and Excel document can be purged in this manner. If you’re using Office 2003/XP, there is a plug-in available from Microsoft to remove metadata just like Office 2007.

Beside Word documents, CLNC^® consultants routinely send out contracts as Adobe^® PDF documents rather than Word documents so as to be sure that the party receiving them cannot edit them. Adobe PDF documents also contain metadata that can be removed or edited prior to sending. Simply open the document with Acrobat, click File, then click “Properties” and you can edit the data. You’ll need Adobe Acrobat^® 8.0 or higher to do this (or a third-party application).

If you’re not scared enough by your legal nurse consulting documents, wait until you see what’s hidden in your digital photos! Try this. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to any photo stored on your hard drive. Right click on the photo to select it and in the menu that pops up, scroll to the bottom and left click “Properties.” Now, left click “Summary” in the “Properties” tab and then, here it is, left click “Advanced.” You may see the date the photo was taken, the type of camera, whether a flash was used and more information. Some of the newer digital cameras can even add GPS data to tell where a photo was taken. Think about that next time you snap a vacation pic – if you like the spot you can always use your GPS to navigate back to the exact spot the photo was taken (and so can anyone who you share that photo with via email or on the Internet).

Luckily there’s a simple application named JPEG & PNG Stripper that you can download and install on your computer. It does exactly what its name implies and strips the metadata from your photos. This is mandatory before posting them on the Internet or sharing them with friends/family (because they can be shared ad infinitum).

Metadata isn’t as persistent as you’d think but if you’re not aware of it you may be giving away more information than you wish to when you give away your documents and photos. Time to take steps to stop the sharing.

Keep on techin’,

Tom