Crimes Quiz No. 2

The second quiz and second gradable moment for me in law school.  After the first one I realized I was no longer the master of multiple choice, or multi-state if you prefer, questions.  More systematic studying was needed. This has always been a weak area for me. In college, I read the material, reviewed class notes, usually and that was enough.  Now, whether its the novelty of thought and material, or just the sheer volume of material, I'm concerned. One thing I have been sharing with everyone is scribd.com. There is an outline, or multiple outlines for various law classes. If you need examples, or additional materials to study from, they are already prepared.

Any other good tech ideas since the last post? 

Get a good flash drive. Actually get two.  A 2GB or less to backup/recover your computer.  While many computers can boot from a USB drive, most cannot boot from a USB greater than 2GB. You can get a larger one for other files that are not critical, but I would argure that all the things you create in lawschool are going to be critical to you at some point. At some point you are also going to run out of room on the 2GB drive pretty quickly, so get two.

Check out this site for things you may need. http://onlinecollegedegree.org/2009/03/11/flashdriveedu-100-free-and-useful-portable-apps-for-college-students/

Keep them safe, add a return to sender label. Think about portableapps.com for them.  Add OperaTor to it.  I never thought I'd need to surf anonymously, or get around a locked down computer. Then I needed something from my gmail account only to find that gmail is blocked on the computer lab workstations. The flashdrive and OperaTor got me to my assignment, and printed it out. I would have just used the flash drive to transfer it from the laptop to one of the lab computers, but the laptop chose that moment to have a serious BSOD on boot, twice. I'm thinking about a Mac.

Useful site

http://www.lawnerds.com/guide/outlining.html

A little short post on how to outline...see above.

I'm a month in...and treading water at least

While I'm glad I didn't do this straight out of college, it is difficult with a family. What is a good work life balance? Does that even apply as the economy continues to disintegrate? I don't know, I haven't had time since I started to do much else besides read. My hulu.com queue has 48 shows as of last night. The organization that I thought would work, hasn't but other things have. Here's a list:

1. Remember the Milk--This task tool is fantastic for organizing. You can create as many task lists as you want and they can have as many tasks as you need. You can expand on this by assigning due dates and tags to tasks to make search lists with specified criteria. I entered all my reading into class specific tabs with the due dates. I tagged them all as reading and created a search that found all tasks due within the next 7 days tagged reading. No flipping from syllabus to syllabus for me. 
2. Saving notes/briefs as HTML--This has been a partial success. I don't recommend it for notes as they usually need further editing. For case briefs it's ridiculously handy. You can open all you case briefs for a class in multiple tabs of a browser making it easy to switch cases when necessary. The killer feature is in the browser though. Increase your font size with ctrl|shift|+ so that you can read it at a glance while discussing the case in class.
3. Anki--this was a late find, thanks to lifehacker.com. It's basically a flashcard program for your computer, but is also availble for smartphones as well. You type up flashcards, and go from there. 
4. Cornell Notes Templates--I'm probably not using them quite right, but they are great for organizing class notes and reading notes.