An Interview with Monty Trent, District Judge

Reprinted with Permission

_______

askSam: Tell us about your organization and your role within it.

MONTY TRENT: I am an English district judge employed by the Lord Chancellor's Department. I handle civil and family litigation in the county court.

askSam:   Which of our product(s) do you use and what kind of information do you have in your askSam database(s)?

MONTY TRENT: I have used askSam for many years, starting with the DOS version and lately migrating to the Windows versions. I use it as an aide memoire and store case notes, articles, law reports, scribbles, digests, jokes for speeches, ideas for articles, shopping lists for the Boss, recommended Gramophone recordings and all sorts of other memorabilia in various files using hypertext to link them all together. I retrieve information by using askSam's search functions. I have not a clue how to use some of the more sophisticated reports nor do I make any effort to structure the data I input, mainly due to the impenetrable awfulness of the original DOS manual.

askSam: Why did you select askSam over other products?

MONTY TRENT: I couldn't afford ISYS and found it was impossible to use a structured database like Dbase or Access to cope with my untidy brain.

askSam:  In what ways has askSam helped you in your daily routine?These are the wishes that they have added included.

MONTY TRENT: askSam is my "commonplace book" where in, like a magpie, I store all the bits and pieces I am likely to want to recall later. I use it every day to find material I would otherwise have forgotten or lost in the black hole I call my filing system.

askSam:  How has askSam saved you time or money?

MONTY TRENT: It has saved me the frustration of looking for material that I would otherwise have carefully stored in a forgotten file or directory so I suppose it has saved me time. It has saved me money as I don't have to buy the Boss a bunch of flowers every time I forget to collect her fish order or the smoked salmon.

askSam: What applications do you plan for askSam in the future?

MONTY TRENT: Much the same. I have taken the plunge and am using it to archive material for a book I am writing instead of a card system, though I am a little nervous about doing so.

askSam:  By the way, what uses have you found for SurfSaver?

MONTY TRENT: I use SurfSaver to archive WWW pages and have created a searchable database of case reports, articles and other legal material swiped from the Internet.

____________

M. F. Trent

LCD

Email: mtrent@lix.compulink.co.uk

URL: http://www.open.gov.uk/lcd/lcdhome.htm