Tired, aching shoulders? Thumbs the size of zucchinis? You may need to ditch the laptop and the BlackBerry you’re using and plump for an ultraportable computer instead. Weighing in at something like 2 pounds, an ultraportable won’t do everything for you, perhaps, but a near full-size keyboard and a couple of hours of battery life should get you through most of life’s “got-to-write” situations with a whole lot less… well, a whole lot less. Simply.

Here’s a site with nearly two dozen of these submicros to choose from, some fresh on the market, others yet to come. And though I’m . . . [more]

So the University of Ottawa recently became a member of the New Media Consortium, “an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of over 260 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies” based in Austin, Texas.

You’ll find some amazing content on their website which I have yet to fully explore. However, I might start off reading their 2008 Horizon Report [pdf], “that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education”.

With membership to this consortium, you can opt to join the Technical . . . [more]

This from Maritime Law Book to Slaw:

Effective June 1, 2008 Maritime Law Book will provide free access to over 215,000 cases in our 12 databases that cover every common law jurisdiction in Canada plus the House of Lords and Privy Council (U.K.).

No registration is required. And the databases are searchable.

Free access is limited to the judgment without a headnote. Also the free access does not include the MLB Key Number System.

Existing subscribers will continue to have access to our time saving headnote material at existing prices. And note that all users will now have access to

I love hearing about libraries coming up with new innovative services. This is a great (local) example:

McMaster University Library is now using WordPress and PmWiki to host blogs and wikis for interested faculty and staff. As Amanda Etches-Johnson, the leader of the project, says in a news release, this new service responds to faculty’s growing interest in using blogs and wikis to extend and encourage class discussions, group work and collaboration. See Amanda’s blog post “A toolbox for faculty” for more details on this project. . . . [more]

The University of California at Berkeley’s library has a wiki with some tutorials on how to find Congressional materials on the internet (and in their library, natch). So, for example, you can learn how to find a bill, a hearing or a congressional debate.

The instruction is delivered in a Flash slideshow (no sound). Below the Flash window is a live window on the actual web source so that you can mimic the lesson in real time. . . . [more]

I received an interesting submission to lawblogs.ca last night. Solo in Ontario: Criminal Practice is written by Bo Arfai, a 2008 call with the unenviable position of going solo post-articling. After a brief email conversation, I advised him to get some profile & contact information up on his blog, which should be in place shortly.

What I find interesting is that he’s blogging from a very human perspective. In a world where many of us consider both articling and the early years of practice in ‘big firm’ context, I have to think Bo’s immediate future & choices are a more . . . [more]

The Stats Can Daily has a report on the 2006 survey of types of residential phones. The big shift is away from exclusive use of land lines to include cell, cable and VOIP phones as well: In 2006 29.6% of households (3.8 million) used only land lines; in 2007 the figure had dropped to 24% of households (3.1 million).

Only 6.4% of households report relying on cell phones only, up from the 5.1% of the prior year. Less than one percent of households report not having any phone at all.

What’s interesting to me is that the survey, which is . . . [more]

The international NGO Human Rights Watch recently published a report on the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics that states that the “corporate sponsors of the Olympics risk lasting damage to their brands if they do not live up to their professed standards of corporate social responsibility by speaking out about the deteriorating human rights situation in China.”

The report targets the 12 highest-level corporate benefactors of the Beijing Games, known as the TOP sponsors (“The Olympic Partner”): Atos Origin, Coca-Cola, General Electric (GE), Manulife (parent company of John Hancock), Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Lenovo, McDonald’s, Omega (Swatch Group), Panasonic (Matsushita), Samsung, . . . [more]

Ron Jones of Law Librarian Blog reminds us about the 4th edition of the bibliography of online Canadian federal government databases released way back in January and containing some 488 datatbases available online. . . . [more]

Sunny Woan, a JD student at Santa Clara University, recently published a paper in the California Western Law Review called “The Blogosphere: Past, Present, and Future”. The article is a nice look through the history of blogs, their role in journalism, and some of the legal issues they bring up, along with a small discussion of how blogs are treated elsewhere around the world.

It’s a quick read and refers in the footnotes to some articles that look very interesting.

The article is not up at the CWLR site, but is available from SSRN. . . . [more]

Seems a pair of photographers taking photos of streets and people in a pedestrian zone in Middlesborough, England, were grabbed and detained by citizens and by security guards who were under the impression that it was illegal to take photos of buildings and people. If the photographers are to be believed, even the police officer who was called was mistaken about the right to take pictures.

Some of the confrontation was videoed by one of the photographers and the movie can be seen on Flickr.

I’ve been questioned by police myself for taking pictures in suburban London, but when . . . [more]

Dalhousie law prof, Philip Gerard, has an enjoyable piece on The Court today in which he shades his eyes and does a tour d’horizon in search of a replacement for Justice Bastarache.

Herewith an excerpt to whet your appetite:

That leaves Nova Scotia, but it has to be said in all honesty that the province is not bursting with Supreme Court-calibre talent at the moment. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of highly competent and professional judges sitting on the Nova Scotia bench. But the bar for the Supreme Court is higher than that. If you are looking