The scene: the eye clinic at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. The time: 9.00am. The plan: a quick inspection following a referral from my optician, then back to my desk. The outcome: “Nothing to worry about, but we’ll just put you into the theatre list for today. The list is full, so you may have to wait all day”.

So: what would you make of that? It’s not a problem, and our operating list is already full, but we think we ought to deal with it today. Suddenly, a 30 minute appointment – say an hour out of the office in all – turned into a full day sitting in a waiting room followed by…..to be honest, it makes me slightly queasy to think about it, so I will spare you the details, save to say that it involved the equivalent of spot welding by freezing round the back of the eyeball.

I am squeamish. I don’t have a tooth filled without being sedated first. What I do have, however, is a mother who treats her all-too-many hospital inspections as if they were an extension of the Blitz (“We can take it”), and a mother-in-law who has regular injections into the eye. If they can cope, then so can I.

I’ll make a recommendation though: if you suddenly find “floaters” across your eye, as many do after a certain age, go and get them looked at. For most, they settle down – they are not illusions but physical bits floating around in the eye. Mine, as it happened, involved a small tear, and the hospital’s concern was that small tear might become a bigger one – thus the urgency, followed by a day of feeling distinctly off-colour, to say nothing of blurry-eyed.

With that fixed, sort of, I could get back to the queue of interesting things which had been piling up.

Most of my posts, and most of my page views, are not on this blog but on the parallel one at chrisdaleoxford.co.uk. Its function is to pass on news about developments in the eDiscovery marketplace – webinars, appointments, new releases and short pointers to other things which may interest a legal audience – anything really which deserves a longer life than Twitter gives it.

It is also the home of my videos, the most recent of which is features Alex Dunstan-Lee of Navigant Consulting talking about the use of technology assisted review in the UK. You will find it here. In it, Alex Dunstan-Lee eloquently sets up a number of “really bad reasons” for not using technology assisted review / predictive coding which he then demolishes one by one.

I really like this way of getting people to talk about their subject. Words are good – I write thousands of them most weeks – but video gives people opportunities to make a case or to describe something in a way which words cannot. In the same place, you will find my recent video tribute to Browning Marean. I point to it to show that this medium can involve more than merely talking at a camera with a microphone clipped to your lapel. You can mix speaking to camera with slides, images, voiceover or other audio, and use it to reach wider audiences than you can get to visit in person.

The other articles published in the last day or two are representative of the things which you might expect to find on the chrisdaleoxford.co.uk blog – a Recommind integration, a recruitment opportunity from APT Search, news about a Japanese patent for UBIC, a link to an article about the Singapore International Commercial Court, a webinar from Nuix and one from Recommind, and an appointment by NightOwl.

These were pulled more or less at random from a stockpile of interesting things. I could keep going for a month on the store I have already, even if nothing new came in. The central column on that site picks out those things which have a date, mainly webinars. The site chrisdale.wordpress.com (the one you are on) contains longer and more thoughtful posts, those presenting an argument, reporting on an event or analysing a judgment or a trend. The distinction is a useful one, but it is important to make sure that those who usually come to one site know what is going on on the other.

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