Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Prism Risk Management Blog
Check out the latest post on the Prism Risk Management Blog: Survey Finds that Fewer Employers are Conducting Criminal and Credit Background Checks on Job Applicants
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Prism Risk Management Blog
Check out the latest post on the Prism Risk Management Blog: Cyber Risk Insurance: When Conventional Liability Coverage Might Not Be Enough
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Prism Risk Management Blog
Check out the new post on the +Prism Risk Management, LLC Blog: Copper Theft Presents Significant Risks to Businesses
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Prism Risk Management Blog
Check out the latest post on the Prism Risk Management Blog: International Privacy Group Issues Recommendations on Cloud Computing Policy
Friday, August 24, 2012
Mobile: Be Careful with You ZAGGFolio
A few weeks ago, I put up a post about my new ZAGGFolio keyboard case for my iPad2. So far, I've found the case to be fairly useful. It the keyboard came in quite handy for taking notes at the AGRIP Conference in Colorado Springs and work working remotely in the Denver Airport. My one warning, however, would be to not drop the case. Earlier today mine fell from desktop height and the result was several keys popping off of the keyboard. I was able to get most of them back on, but one of the direction keys seems like it is just itching to pop back off.
- The take-away: my ZAGGFolio didn't fall very far for a mobile device, but turned out to be surprisingly fragile. Be careful if you have one. I still recommend it, though, as being handy for note taking and remote work involving a lot of typing on the iPad.
Food: Bert's BBQ Returns to Campus Area
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| T-Man at Bert's BBQ |
The campus location of Bert's BBQ burned down about five years ago. It was a dark day for Austin. However, Bert's BBQ is back with a new campus area location. Having taken over the space of the Wing Stop on 24th, it's convent to those in the downtown area. More importantly, though, it's nice to see Bert's bounce back and have a second store open after the loss of the original location on MLK.
I enjoy the three meat (brisket, sausage, ribs) plate. However, my favorite item at Bert's has traditionally been the T-Man (a mixture, of beans, sausage, cubed brisket, and BBQ sauce). What I haven't tried yet (for reasons I can't explain) is the Turbo, a bowl containing the T-Man in addition to the ingredients for a Frito Pie. I plan to remedy this oversight at some point next week.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Food: Taos Cow Ice Cream
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| Sign for Taos Cow |
In my experience, all sorts of outdoor activities can make one hungry for ice cream. Fortunately, if you're in the vicinity of Taos, New Mexico, you can take care of this craving with some locally made, all natural, and hormone free ice cream at Taos Cow. Located on NM Highway 150, you can't miss the sign as you slow down to drive through Arroyo Seco (between Taos and Taos Ski Valley). We stopped in after a trip up to Taos Ski Valley for lunch. I had the cookie's 'n cream, which was less creamy than Amy's but still quite delicious.
In addition to ice cream, the Taos Cow website says they offer the following:
A wide range of products, and certainly a good place to stop on your way to/from Taos Ski Valley.
Travel: Colorado
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| Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs |
It's good to be back in Austin after an excellent trip to Colorado.
For the past three years, I've gone up to Colorado for vacation. In 2009, I hiked to the top of Mt. Elbert with my mountain climbing buddy. In 2010 and 2011, I went to Denver, Boulder, and Estes Park with friends. Both of these trips included a lot of fly fishing, hiking, and road tripping around the mountains.
This year, my trip to Colorado was more business oriented as it was center around the 2012 Association of Government Risk Pools ("AGRIP") Institute for Management and Leadership conference. The conference was held at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs. I hadn't been to that part of Colorado in a long time, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. Furthermore, the conference was full of very informative seminars. I have been a regular at AGRIP's Fall and Spring conferences since 2007, but this was the first summer Management & Leadership session I'd attended. I walked away with some very valuable information, as well as quite a few ideas for tweaking things at Prism Risk Management. I also left with ideas for the Texas Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative and Oklahoma Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative programs. I'll get into some of these concepts in detail on the Prism Risk Management blog over the next few weeks.
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| Mt. Elbet and Mt. Massive in Colorado |
Owing to the business nature of my Colorado trip, I had compressed time to travel around the mountains for fun. I did take a day to drive the following route:
- Glenwood Springs to Aspen
- Aspen to Twin Lakes (via Independence Pass)
- Twin Lakes to Leadville (in the shadow of Mt. Elbert and Mt. Massive)
- Leadville to Frisco
- Frisco to Grand Lakes
- Grand Lakes to Estes Park (via the Trial Ridge Road in Rocky Mtn. Nat'l Park)
- Estes Park to Ft. Collins
This route took me about 9 hours, but there were significant breaks in driving for photography. The Twin Lakes to Estes Park portion of the contained several portions of a by-way called "Top of the Rockies." If you have a short time frame and want to see some spectacular mountain scenery in the vicinity of Denver, I highly recommend the route listed in the bullet points above.
Prism Risk Management Blog
Check out the new post on the Prism Risk Management Blog: Water Scarcity Means Risks for the Enterprise and Public Sectors. If you're interested in recent actions of the LCRA or the Texas Water Development Board, this is a good post to read.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Prism Risk Management Blog
Check out the new post on the +Prism Risk Management, LLC Blog: Generic Top Level Domains and Protection of Your Trademark Rights
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Events: AYLA August Docket Call
The Austin Young Lawyers Association ("AYLA") will have it's next Docket Call happy hour on August 16th at Cedar Door. I'm pleased to say that of the sponsors will be the Foskitt Realty Group.
AYLA members can take advantage of the sponsored tab while it lasts. If you are a young lawyer in Austin but aren't a member of AYLA, then join online or sign up at the door. Annual AYLA dues are only $50 and quite a value.
Note: Dave Floyd is on the AYLA Board of Directors. Statements in this blog reflect his personal opinions and not necessarily those of AYLA as an organization.
AYLA members can take advantage of the sponsored tab while it lasts. If you are a young lawyer in Austin but aren't a member of AYLA, then join online or sign up at the door. Annual AYLA dues are only $50 and quite a value.
Note: Dave Floyd is on the AYLA Board of Directors. Statements in this blog reflect his personal opinions and not necessarily those of AYLA as an organization.
Pat's Promise Event
A few weeks ago I posted a note about Pat's Promise, the organ donation awareness, education, and advocacy group started by my friend Pat Butcha. Pat started Pat's Promise after receiving a life saving liver transplant in March. Much progress has been made, so save the date for 9/9. That's the day that Pat's Promise will hold in Zilker Park a rally for organ donors. Stay turned for more information about this event, and be sure to follow @PatsPromise on Twitter for updates from the man himself.
Mobile: ZAGGfolio for iPad 2
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| iPad2 in ZAGGfolio Case |
I decided to buy the ZAGGfolio case for iPad 2 after it was recommended by employees at a couple of different stores. I bought my ZAGGfolio for $99 at Best Buy, after considering it as well as the Logitech Keyboard Case. I went with the ZAGGfolio because it seemed more robust and it covered the back of the iPad.
I've found that the ZAGGfolio is great if you want to use your iPad like a netbook (see photo). I find the keyboard surprisingly easy to use, and thus I've had a much easier time taking notes on my iPad as well as composing lengthy business emails. For example, next week I'm going to the AGRIP conference in Colorado, and I expect to leave my laptop in the hotel room while I use the iPad exclusively during seminars (Evernote for iPad is great for taking notes; afterward, you can attach additional files to your notes).
What the ZAGGfolio is not great at is treating the iPad like a tablet. The case only allows you to use the iPad in landscape orientation in conjunction with the keyboard. When you try to fold the keyboard section behind the iPad section (to hold the iPad like a regular tablet) it feel like you are about to break the ZAGGfolio. Needless to say, this is distracting. Thus, you are better off taking the iPad out of the case if you want to hold it while you read content. Also, if you want to use an iPad while walking around, ditch the ZAGGfolio. While these aspects of the ZAGGfolio seemed to aggravate some of the authors of product reviews I read, so far I've found it to be an acceptable trade off. If I'm going to sit and type a lot of information into the iPad, the ZAGGfolio is great. If I want to use the iPad primarily for reading, if you want to use it while walking, or you want to pass it around at meetings then Smart Cover is better option.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Apple OS X Mountain Lion: I Just Upgraded
On Friday afternoon, I decided to upgrade my MacBook Pro to the new Mountain Lion OS. I had planned to wait, but after reading about one dozen highly positive reviews I became too curious about the new OS to wait.
Buying Mountain Lion was easy. It was $20 at the Mac App Store. The download, however, took over two hours. I'm not sure what the hold-up was. My office network is usually quite fast, thus I assumed Apple's servers were a little overloaded from a rush of Friday afternoon downloads. Once downloaded, though, everything installed smoothly.
Overall, I like Mountain Lion. My MacBook seems to be much faster now that it's installed. I haven't experienced any unusual problems with applications I regularly use. Among these are:
- Word 2011
- Outlook 2011
- OneNote (through a Windows Virtual Machine)
- Omnifocus
- Evernote (Mac desktop client)
- Picasa
- Chrome
- Filemaker 12
- Pages
My copy of Mindjet warned me that it may have trouble with Mountain Lion (and thus to save work frequently), although I have yet to encounter any problems.
I'm very happy with the new Pages interface with iCloud. It's now quite easy to leave a document in the iCloud folder and have it easily accessed by Pages on my iPad. I'm also looking forward to syncing Notes through iCloud. As for the rest of iCloud, I haven't made much use of it. I can see the utility in the keeping the Calendar and Address book on it; however, all of my contacts and calendar items are already synced through an Exchange server. I don't use Mail, but rather Outlook 2011 as a mail client. Because I don't use the built in Apple productivity apps, Mountain Lion's new marquee "Notification" center is pretty useless to me.
Mountain Lion's built in productivity apps look nice, but since I also use a PC and most of my company uses PCs we have found that the Exchange server works best for us. Also, this means that I'm not bound to any proprietary system for syncing phones, tables, and computers as Exchange works with Apple devices and Windows PCs as well as Android and Windows based mobile devices. Generally, most of my files are stored in formats which would work on a Windows platform (the main exception being those in Pages and those on programs from the Omni Group).
The above being said, I still prefer to work in the Mac OS environment and plan to do so as long as it's practical. I've been quite pleased with Mountain Lion on the MacBook. While I haven't used most of the touted bells and whistles (i.e., the 200+ new features) I have found already that it is providing a fundamentally faster and better platform for the applications I use frequently. And, I'm very pleased at the ease with which I can work on Pages documents between my Mac and my iPad.
More to come as I keep working using the MacBook...
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