Picture this: It's Friday night, 8PM, and you're about to have a bunch of the coolest law students over for a little pre-game at your apartment. Suddenly you realize that you haven't visited the iTunes Music Store to make sure you have all the latest "cool kid" music, and quickly sign on to check out the scene. Uh oh, new Britney song, better have that on hand (obviously). "Buy Song" gets clicked, but then you notice...

I hate Microsoft Office. There, I said it. The newest version of the software (Office 2007 for PCs, 2008 for Macs) unnecessarily hides the simplest tasks behind a shiny globe and a huge, oddly organized menubar Microsoft calls "the Ribbon." Every time I have made the bad decision of sitting (on the horribly uncomfortable stools no less, but that's a rant for a different day) at one of the crappy Dell workstations that populate the Law School's computing centers, I dread having to open the world's most ubiquitous failure in software.

In my last column, I talked a bit about using the "Getting Things Done" system to keep on top of your overflowing inbox. Believe it or not, some people actually found the article useful (I am flattered and shocked) and are holding me to my promise of further GTD goodness, so that's the plan.

If you're anything like the average email account holder, your inbox is packed with unread messages and their potentially daunting collection of tasks, requests, assignments, and yes, spam. No matter how hard you try, these seemingly uncomplicated tasks become a blurry mass of subject lines every time you access your account. This is not an uncommon problem and popular authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point) have made a career out of demonstrating how our society is suffering from an information overload that slows us down more than helps us succeed.

It struck me as I went to write the column this week that the idea of a technology column was neither well-thought out, nor is it incredibly compelling without some sort of reader input, at least on an occasional basis. Our first installation about backups was largely written in light of the sad realization that a good number of my fellow classmates do not bother to backup their computers, and some are not even familiar with the concept. While this would seem to be to my advantage (my crappy notes at least will always be intact, while your notes will be gone, causing you incredible anxiety at exam time), for some reason I try to be a good member of the stimulating community that is the law school.

If it seems like every few weeks one of your friends' laptops craps out and results in a frantic, headlong trip down into the library to look for somebody wearing goofy glasses and a pocket protector, the RG has come to put your mind at ease. Our technology columnist, Greg Lavigne, explains in this first installment of his new column, how you can avoid being that person who needs to solicit outlines and notes and replacement porn on LawOpen because you didn't adequately backup your computer's hard drive.