July 26, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

I know, we’re all tired of learning how wonderdrugs can enhance our lives, and make us look and feel like we’re years younger. And, of course, how many lotteries have you won? That’s all that’s ever in our spam folders, right? Wrong.

It’s a good idea to read the periodic summary you are (or should be) receiving of the contents of your spam folder. Why? Because spam filters are not perfect, and sometimes they filter email you actually want.

For instance, in the last week, my spam filter determined that one bill, two new client inquiries and an email from a credit card processing company were spam, plus some other newsletters I actually wanted to receive. If I hadn’t read the daily email I receive listing the contents of the folder, I would have missed these items, and probably lost a new client or two — who would have wrongly assumed I just didn’t bother to respond to their inquiries.

I know that Spam isn’t part of my diet, but reviewing email spam probably should be.

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July 15, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

The first What You Didn’t Learn In Law School (two day seminar) sponsored by the Managing Partner Development Institute was by all measures a huge success. As a result, my partners (Ellen Freedman, Mary Beth Pratt and David Sorin) and I are planning the next Institute, this time for Pittsburgh. The tentative dates are January 11-12, 2008 (somewhere in Pittsburgh). I’ll keep you posted.

Plus, we’re just days away from launching our Managing Partner Listserv. I’ll keep you posted about that too.

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July 15, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

Lately, I’m the poster child for backups and restores. Yup, another story. I finally took Ellen Freedman’s advice and installed Copernic at home — it’s a far better desktop search engine than Google. I did it while also ridding my home computer of Norton Anti-Virus (which slowed it to a crawl at times) and installing the easy-to-use CA Internet Suite 2007. Google Desktop Search, however, didn’t want to uninstall and instead, after much frustration, I tried a variety of self-help options (don’t do this at home!) and then rebooted. Windows rebooted, but Explorer (the program that lets you access everything on the computer) was completely unavailable. I had a desktop, nothing else.

So, I embarked on a program to restore the computer. Five hours later, it works. Why? After trying some simple solutions — they simply didn’t work — I began to get creative. First, I had to verify that everything had been backed up properly, then I re-backed up all my documents so that if I had to reinstall Windows XP, I wouldn’t lose all of my and my family’s work. Then I tried restoring just the Registry — not enough. Then I restored all the Windows files and Google Desktop. That worked, but of course my installation of CA Internet Suite had to be redone. And Google Desktop is still there — and won’t go away.

But thanks to my backup, everything went well.

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