The high price of oil has spawned a lot of legal work since the first of the year, especially in the area of title examinations. Operators actually have enough money these days to budget for legal expenses that had been scrimped on after the last price crash. I’ve been doing a lot of “stand up” title examinations, meaning that I have to go to the various courthouses and search through the records myself. In the “old days”, landowners had “abstracts” that we borrowed and updated, and I examined the abstracts in order to render title opinions. It seems nobody has abstracts any more. The thumbnails below should link to larger images at Flickr. You may need to select a larger size when you get there. Even though I’ve been in oil and gas all these years, I still find it amazing that some of the currently producing leases are documents that are nearly a century old.

In the Chappells Blog I recently wrote about Knoppix on a stick, and mentioned winPenPack where you can get a whole collection of portable apps installable on a USB stick, a/k/a flash drive.  Last night, back on Bill’s Demon Child called Windoze, I was perusing one of my favorite hangouts — the Sourceforge site. Sourceforge is essentially the home of the Open Source Community. It’s a place infused with the energy and mindset that made the internet what it should be. A person could write a lot more about that, but I’ll save it for another time.

While perusing Sourceforge I came across the Portable Apps Project, also to be found at its own Portable Apps Website. I think Portable Apps might even be better than winPenPack. I downloaded the standard suite and installed it all on one USB stick, and then downloaded a bunch more portable apps to add to it. Having already done a couple of installations of winPenPack and, therefore, being already familiar with how much can packed onto one little USB stick, I was nevertheless again amazed at all the stuff I put on it, and how much space is still left. I was hard pressed to think of more that I might conceivably want to have on it. Yet, a visit to the PortableApps website just now revealed several new additions to the list of available apps, particularly, several new games. Sudoku, BTW, is included right in the Standard Portable Apps installation.

Like winPenPack and Knoppix, PortableApps is all free stuff. BTW, I’m back on Knoppix/Linux this evening, while also watching a little March Madness, though I’ll likely be paying more attention to the TV and less attention to the monitor tomorrow, when KU will be playing. Rock Chalk!

Next time I’m at the law library using one of the PC’s or laptops to do research on Lexis, I’ll just plug in either my winPenPack or my PortableApps stick. I can save all the research right to it, and also write the brief and whatever else I might want to do, even taking breaks for a little game playing. And I won’t have to worry about leaving tracks on the library computer where adverse counsel can check on what I did during my session.