My Bio

Hi, my name is Andrew G. Watters. I am a radically honest, category-defying polymath based in Redwood City, California, USA. I am primarily a lawyer, with a law degree from U.C. Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, a bachelor's degree from UCLA, and seventeen years of professional experience. Currently, I have my own law firm and R&D laboratory. I offer legal services since 2005, including complex private investigations; custom computer vision systems since 2022, and custom web application programming/I.T. consulting since 2000. I am married to Mrs. Right, with whom I welcomed our daughter Jennifer in 2022.

News

June 3, 2023: new Hall of Shame entry: UCLA I.T. Department. Sad!

June 3, 2023: A big update is forthcoming on my Run your own email server tutorial. A constant problem is the sometimes moronic opposing lawyer who insists that several members of their staff are cc'ed on every email. No one in my law firm can possibly be expected to remember to cc someone on emails who is other than the lead counsel on a case. A companion problem is when the opposing counsel sends us email and doesn't cc someone working on the case intentionally, or otherwise. The solution is email aliases in Postfix, which are trivial to set up using virtual aliasing to create simple distribution lists. I intend to do something like this, with the name of the case followed by an underscore, and the group it is going to:

clientname_opc@andrewwatters.com
clientname_staff@andrewwatters.com

The alias to opposing counsel will deliver to everyone on the other side who asked to be cc'ed; the alias to staff will deliver to everyone here who is assigned to a particular case. The OPC alias will only be allowed from within the firm, that way the OPC can't use my email server, which they might do out of their own laziness. They can still set rules on their own mail server to process these messages into particular folders or take other actions, because it's easy to create a rule based on the To: address. The staff alias will be allowed from anywhere because we want to encourage the other side and the client to use it. I did a test run on two cases where there are four or five opposing counsel who asked to be cc'ed, and it works beautifully with a header check to prepend a reply-to header. That way, when they get an email to the _opc address, the reply auto-populates to _staff so they can reply right back to my team. This also obviates the need to sync my mailboxes to my separate file server; all I have to do is include a file server email address in _staff and it will auto-file the email into the correct client file using a simple sieve script. Damn I'm good. Too bad marketing I.T. services is so difficult, because this would be useful to a lot of law firms.

May 28, 2023: I wish I had gotten the chance to attend the Pat Mac Coaching Squad Spring meetup, which is this weekend. Unfortunately, work always gets in the way. This is a great group that I've been a member of since its inception in 2020. It's a really interesting selection of people with a variety of interests and a lot of subject matter expertise. Hoping to attend the next one.

Ventures

These are my current business ventures:

Attorney - general civil litigation and complex family law, with seventeen years of experience and twenty-six trials (plus three JAMS arbitrations). Also available for complex private investigations, including missing persons/homicide and cyber/corporate espionage.

Computer vision developer - behavioral science computer vision systems at the intersection of technology and psychology, plus general research and development.

Web application programmer - law practice management system and specialized task management/productivity software written from scratch by yours truly. If you're wondering how I have time to practice law while doing all these different things...this is how.

Music hobbyist - rock, progressive rock, instrumental rock, and metal.

Tutorials and Articles

Here are my popular tutorials/articles/videos:

Linux tips and tricks - random tips learned the hard way. 🔥

Run your own email server Howto - have you ever wanted to take full control of your email? Not for the faint of heart.

Andy's Connections - my effort at behavioral science-based matchmaking.

Rællic™ - ongoing blog tracking the development of my advanced product at the intersection of computer vision and psychology.

FirePower+™ - a database acceleration technique for database-intensive web applications with a 2,000% improvement in speed (20x faster), and also an alternative to memcached. Coming soon.

Reverse VPN sharding - method for reconstructing access patterns on websites where VPN users intentionally obfuscate their requests.

Privoxy on macOS Howto - have you ever wanted to block ads on the web on your Mac without having to install MacPorts? This is for you.

Lattice™ - next-gen user interface for slash.law, featuring a novel technique for focus detection and raising.

An informal proof of Plato's Theory of Forms - reasons I continue to believe that idealism is the truest form of world view.

Dynamic entoptic matrices - a thought-based theory of dynamic entoptic phenomena found in highly productive computer programmers.

Spectrum Warrior - a suite of electronic surveillance tools and techniques to find the truth and also seriously embarrass liars.

A casual network investigation of the Russian Ministry of Defense - random security research leads to things I wish I could un-learn.

Andy's Dashboard - a free charting solution for server administrators.

Introduction to microexpressions - my guest lecture at Stanford.

Unboxing a new IBM Model M keyboard - travel back in time to 1988.

Andy's Hardware - market research on the concept of a Made in USA hardware store.

100G office network Howto - the fastest, most reliable office LAN that money can buy.

10 gigabit networking - a howto on my 10 gig office setup, which rocks.

The Forever War - my superfan-level tribute to the greatest science fiction novel of all time.

A fractal crystal lattice of Gaussian primes - research on the fractality of prime numbers in Mathematica.

Analysis of WMAP data with Mathematica - a side project that is going a little too far, but it's interesting.

The Vision - A proposed 100G packet capture system.

Hall of Shame: if someone gets me to the point of posting a whole web page about them on here, you know they went way too far in whatever they were doing wrong.