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. College of Law San Francisco (formerly known as U.C. Hastings College of Law), a bachelor's degree from UCLA, and nineteen years of professional experience. I have had my own practice since 2012, and my own law firm since 2016. I offer legal services, including complex private investigations; and a custom software platform for attorneys called Slash. I am married to Mrs. Right, with whom I welcomed our daughter Jennifer in 2022. My personal trademark is my carbon fiber briefcase from Tecknomonster, a combined aerospace/luggage company. For entertainment purposes, I recently resurrected a popular anonymous discussion board for lawyers called JD Underground, which has been a great diversion from the law firm for me. I also sometimes build computer systems and custom guitars, which I find to be self-actualizing. I am originally from San Francisco, which I always enjoy telling people because Dirty Harry shares my hometown. Finally, like Thanos and Tony Stark, I am cursed with knowledge-- and I try to use this substantial gift for positive things.

News

September 8, 2025: Applying the first two coats of Minwax Hybrid Polyurethane on the Blackstar gold bass, unit no. 002. The artist was right to ask for gloss instead of satin-- there is a sheen/shimmering effect that did not appear in the satin prototype, and you also really see the texture of the gold. The photos were with my professional camera, but they still do not do it justice because I cannot get the whole instrument in focus from these angles. It is going to be a very special instrument. This is spoken for by the world's number one Bowie fan, who really deserves it.

September 6, 2025: My daughter's first computer drawing. She requested a rainbow brush, which I was able to do, and we drew a gradient plus an abstract shape. I chose GIMP for this, since I no longer use Photoshop.

Ventures

Attorney - general civil litigation and complex family law, with nineteen years of experience and 40+ trials. Also available for complex private investigations, including missing persons/homicide and cyber/corporate espionage. Software platform Slash for licensing to fellow attorneys who want a non-Clio solution. Video-on-demand masterclasses in family law as a joint venture with a L.A. law firm. I also offer a suite of family law tools that people might find helpful.

Rællic® - Advanced Information Systems and heavy duty computers, with custom LAMP web application programming by yours truly, plus C and Python programming by our in-house software engineer. This is also where my special, invitation-only custom guitars live.

The Polite Gunfighter® - legal program for CCW holders in California.

Tutorials and Articles

Here are my popular tutorials/articles/videos:

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

Creative writing - I seem to have an unusual connection to the ether that gives me a limitless supply of material.

Animal House - the most realistic fraternity movie of all time, and should be required viewing for everyone considering joining a Greek Letter Organization. I was going through some old boxes and realized that I have a trove of great material from the 2000-2002 era of my life that will be nice to revisit, and I intend a write-up of this film in that context. Literally every principal character in this movie had an analog in UCLA Theta Chi, which I joined in 2000. We even did a tribute/parody video internally where we tried to mimic one important scene from the movie as part of a recruiting video.

Jack Reacher - "He doesn't care about the law. He doesn't care about proof. He only cares about what's right." That's why Jack Reacher is my hero. This is a write-up of the 2012 film, which is my favorite version of Jack Reacher because Tom Cruise fits the role so well-- and the film doesn't shy away from controversial topics, such as mass murder and sexual homicide. Coming soon.

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

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.

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.

My trademark concept art - I commissioned this piece from a vision in my head, and I decided to start using it as my background. It really fits me, I think.

Hall of Fame: services, products, and service providers that I use and strongly recommend.

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.