I like to start off each month by posting “Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit” on all my web properties. It’s supposed to be good luck and as I’m one of the luckiest people I know, it seems to be working.

Automate Your Life

This post is the first where there should be an automatic post to my public twitter account letting people know it exists. I’m kinda surprised substack doesn’t have that feature built in - maybe they do but I just didn’t see it. But anyway, if it works that means I won’t have to log into Twitter and see all of the notifications and DMs I’m ignoring until April 12.

I’m using IFTTT or “If This Then That” which is a free and easy web automation tool. It works like it sounds: “if X action happens, then Y action will happen.” In my case, as soon as this post gets published, IFTTT picks up the RSS feed, writes a tweet and sends it. (Almost everything on the web that gets frequently updated has an RSS feed, except, you know, things that you would really want like court dockets.) Zapier is another option, but I get the sense that Zapier is more productivity oriented and IFTTT is more for getting public web tools working together. You may be aware of Zapier because it works with Clio.

You don’t really need to know how to code to use these services, just be aware that things like RSS feeds and APIs exist. This took me about 5 minutes to set up and while it only took me a minute to tweet (plus complicated emotions of logging into twitter and seeing stuff I can’t reply to), over time I’ll be ahead of the game.

There are ways to calculate whether or not you should automate a process. Because it’s not always a five minute job - building an app on Community Lawyer or an interview on A2J Author can take days to get it right. But when you think about how many hours of 1:1 lawyer-client time it can save, it seems like a no brainer that one of the answers to the justice gap is automation.

More Covid-19 Stuff

It’s here and the next few days are going to be kinda scary because it will become more clear just how many people in the United States have it. The Pope might have it? And he’s really old and only has 1.5 lungs and the last thing this news cycle needs is the pope dying of plague.

(This might be a good time to mention one of my FAVORITE conspiracy theories, which is the Prophecy of the Popes. tl;dr It’s the end times. Don’t act surprised.)

Anyway, your phone is absolutely filthy. Clean it.

I went to the dollar store this afternoon and got a bunch of Clorox wipes and hand sanitizer. You’re going to be able to perform surgery on my desk tomorrow it will be so clean. QVC sells a UV light phone cleaner for about half the price of amazon, FYI.

Not for nothing, I’ve been thinking about the HBO movie “And the Band Played On” which is about tracking the early AIDS crisis and the government response (or lack thereof.) Seems relevant. It’s available on Amazon video, free with Prime.

I Mean, They Show Her Name…

You know that pretty older lady on the CoverGirl commercials?

Yeah, this lady:

THAT’S ELON MUSK’S MOM! I just learned that and my mind was blown. Apparently she’s been a model since the 1960s.

Check Out My Dad

My dad and sister were up in the U.P. this past week and on their way back to Cincinnati, they swung through Northern Indiana to visit me. It’s a beautiful day so we stopped up at Indiana Dunes State Park to check out the lake before they headed home. Like I said, I’m really really lucky and one way that expresses itself is that I get to live close to such a beautiful place.

Let’s have a great month!

If you want to get this via email…

I meant to write about Substack and why I’m using it, but I didn’t want to drone on too long today. But one reason is that it’s a newsletter service instead of a blog, although you can always just read this anonymously on the web and people can get blogs via email so maybe it’s a meaningless distinction.