Amazon

Holy sockpuppets, it turns out you can! I know that more than a few Certified Legal Nurse Consultants have thrown themselves on Amazon.com’s Kindle^® bandwagon. Others are waiting to see what other ereaders come on the market (like Apple’s iPad^®). Amazon has struck first by making Kindle-reading apps for certain BlackBerry^®s, the iPhone^®, iPad^®, any Windows^®-based PC and even Macs^®!

You can read “kindlized” books like Vickie’s Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn’t Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now and shop for other Wall Street Journal bestsellers directly from your laptop, desktop or phone. You don’t even need a Kindle to do it. If you do own a Kindle, you can use it to access your books, newspaper and blog subscriptions (like Vickie’s Legal Nurse Consulting Blog). Amazon even created software that will sync between your Kindle and other device to keep your “last page read” and annotations up to date.

So, Amazon made the first move out the box and it looks like it’s a good one to keep their market in the face of strong competition.

Keep on Techin’,

Tom

I like to joke with Tom that, “Sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit.” Right now I’ve just finished sitting at my desk, not thinking but gazing at a gift that my nephews gave to me for Christmas a couple of years ago.

It’s a gift that has rapidly become one of my favorites – a digital photo frame. Normally I’m not a fan of digital gifts (especially if I’m getting them) because they represent two learning curves – first, Tom has to learn how to use it (and he gets noisy about stuff like that), and second, learning how to use it myself (and suffering through Tom’s rapid-fire training).

This time though I absolutely fell in love with this gift from the minute I opened it. I love photos and, if you’re like me, you have lots of digital photos of your trips, your family, your friends, your pets (or plants) and anything else that passes in front of your camera. And, if you’re really like me, these photos stay in your camera or sit on your computer’s hard drive, never to be viewed by anyone (until Tom comes and moves them off my hard drive to create more space for my music). With this simple gift to yourself you’ve got the opportunity to turn those pixels into fun and instant renewal as you relive your favorite memories.

Vickie and Tom in Bhutan

First thing you do is create a directory or file folder on your computer called “My Photo Frame” or something similar. Then spend about 15 minutes a day pouring through your old photos from vacations long-past. Use the preview feature in Windows^® to view the photos. You can copy the photos you like directly into the new “My Photo Frame” folder. Once you’ve gone through all of your photos, it’s time to pull out your old albums (or storage boxes) to see if there are any printed photos you want to scan and add to your growing collection.

Next, open the photos with Microsoft Office Picture Manager or any other photo editing software you have and edit, crop and save the photos in a lower resolution. This isn’t hard to learn and if you mess one up you can always copy another over it and try again.

Once your photos are saved to the “My Photo Frame” folder, it’s time to toss out the memory chip that came with the frame. It’ll be the cheapest memory chip with the smallest amount of memory the manufacturer could find. Next go to Amazon.com and buy a 1 to 8 GB memory chip (or larger) that’s compatible with your frame. Memory chips are so cheap you can buy two. Your computer should have a slot for the chip, if not you can buy a cheap USB adapter that’ll hold the chip so you can load your photos onto it.

Now plug the chip into your computer and drag your photos onto the chip. You may have to consult the dreaded documentation to see if there’s a special naming convention for the photo display folder or directory. I like to copy the photos to the chip, not move them so that if something happens, I can reload them over and over again. After you’ve loaded the photos, pop the chip into the frame, plug in the electrical adapter and turn it on.

Often there are all sorts of settings, like how long to display a photo, whether to display them in random order, automatic on-off, etc. All those are up to you. What matters is that you’ve just created a constantly changing stream of memories. Each time we take photos, I select some favorites to drop into my frame’s file. I’ve even converted at least some of those boxed-up photos into an assortment of fun.

This is the perfect gift for a parent, grandparent, sister or even a great attorney-client. You may even want to buy one for yourself and capture your CLNC^® business with photos of your favorite attorney-clients and anyone else who has helped you grow your CLNC^® business.

Success Is Inside!

I haven’t gotten into the “cloud” yet. Something about keeping my documents in the vast reaches of Cyberspace doesn’t appeal to me. But for a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant who needs to move documents from one computer to another, I tend to prefer “sneakerspace.” This is where USB flash drives (or memory sticks) stand out. I don’t like to email confidential documents and burning them onto a CD is time consuming. Instead I jack a USB drive into one of the spare ports on my computer and drag the document(s) onto the drive. The hardest part is remembering to get the drive back from the recipient. It’s also another way to carry or send a set of your important data, reports, presentations, graphics, etc., from one location to another without having to carry a laptop or burn multiple CDs.

The first and smallest form of USB memory is the flash drive. A couple of years ago these were expensive – today I get USB memory sticks in the mail as gifts from vendors! There are no moving parts – just a solid stick of memory (like in your digital camera). If you buy one, SanDisk^® makes a great 4GB USB flash drive called the Cruzer^® Micro that retails at $35 (nobody pays retail anymore – I’ve seen them as low as $10 on Amazon.com ). First thing I do with mine is delete all the programming that comes preloaded. If 4GB isn’t enough for you they also come in 8GB and 16GB models. Go for as big as you can afford to lose (yes, you do lose them). Other manufacturers are Kingston^® (8GB DataTraveler about $18) and Corsair^® (Flash Voyager series – 8GB – about $25before rebate or 64 GB – about $125 before rebate. Make sure whatever flash drive you buy is USB 2.0 for faster data loading and transfer.

If you really want to have some fun with your USB flash drive – buy a USB Geek Teddy Bear for $17. It’s only a 1GB flash drive but the draw is that the drive is hidden inside a 3″ x 4″ teddy bear. You pop its head off and jack the bear’s neck into your computer. The decapitated bear looks really funny and it will definitely get plenty of attention at the next continuing legal education conference you attend to meet attorney-prospects.

Portable hard drives or pocket drives are the next step up in the world of portable data. These are small (20GB or so) external hard drives. Prices start around $40 and go up. Western Digital^® has a 500GB My Passport^® series selling for just over $100. After you load all your music onto your iPod you can drag it off your computer and onto one of these, freeing space on your hard drive. You can also store all those unedited photos from your vacations and keep one drive (or partition if you speak geek) as an archive for your reports and the research you’ve done for your attorney-clients. Many of these come with software that will allow you to automate back-up for your data at a time of your choosing.

If you really want to step up in the world of storage, shell out for a Terrabyte (1,000GB!) external hard drive (available from a variety of manufacturers). Some plug into your home network allowing you to back up all the computers in your home on one drive. Others may only connect to one computer at a time. Some of the more complex drives are even RAID Level 1 with data redundancy and hot-swappable drives (if you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t need to know – yet).

Remember, it’s not “if” your computer will fail, it’s “when.” Murphy’s Law says it will go at the worst possible time. The savvy legal nurse consultant is always prepared. You’ve got an Epi-kit in your purse now, you can keep your data there too.

Keep on techin’ (and always read the reviews before buying),

Tom