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 to twenty-three years of professional experience in multiple industries. 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. My favorite compliment that I've gotten lately is: "you're a polite gunfighter with a silver tongue." Yeah, that's accurate. I am married to Mrs. Right, with whom I welcomed our daughter Jennifer in 2022.

News

March 26, 2023: I have outdone myself this time with a concept for a mobile attorney service. Click-to-book a lawyer to drive to you and give you a consultation. I like this so much that I'm going to try this out on my law firm page to see whether anyone likes the idea.

March 25, 2023: In 2019, I had an idea for a primarily Made in USA hardware store called Andy's Hardware. I did the market research to prove that a consumer will buy American and that survey respondents love the concept of a Made in USA store. The results indicate that most people will pay 35% more for a higher quality American tool than a Made in China equivalent. Over the last three and a half years, unfortunately I have gotten nowhere with the hardware store. The lease is not the problem-- there are plenty of retail spaces available on favorable terms. The problem is the inventory, which would cost at least $500,000 to start the store. In other words, doing this "on spec" will require me to put in the startup capital and funding for the initial inventory. So I had an idea: let's make this a virtual storefront with affiliate links to purchase all of the items in the store directly from the manufacturers. In the version I'm thinking of, that will require some custom integration with each manufacturer's existing systems and is a major project. But it is the only way to bring all the brands into one store, which would be impossible without an outlay of the aforementioned half million dollars. I think I will get started on this right away, because it would be great. I did a concept for this a while back called Build Here, so that is probably the direction it will go in.

March 25, 2023: I continue to volunteer teaching English to Ukrainians as part of the ENGin program, which has been interesting. I will do a full write-up at some point.

March 19, 2023: I haven't done logo design in Illustrator in a long freaking time. Today was my first venture into Illustrator in about four years, but it worked out well. Check out the new logo for Tinandium on our English tutoring site:

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:

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.

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.

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.

Links

YouTube Yelp IMDB Instagram

Future of Humanity Institute - I spend a lot of time thinking about the future.

Closer to Truth on PBS - seriously, a collection of astounding interviews with great scientists.

Robin Hanson - this guy is a prolific author and thinker.

John Carmack - definitely the best programmer in the world.

Stephen Wolfram - an all-around world-conquering genius, with an ego to match.

Harrison Barnes - the legal recruiting industry's version of Stephen Wolfram, only no ego. His blog is solid gold, no joke!

Liz Fosslien - a fusion of the above great thinkers with a whimsical online presence.

Suzy J. - an Australian supergenius with an eclectic, entertaining blog.

Hall of Fame: these are products and services, as well as service providers or experiences, that I use and strongly recommend:

RED Dragon-X 6K digital cinema camera with Zeiss CP.3 lenses - the ultimate run and gun digital cinema setup. Proof (actual sample footage).

Adobe Creative Cloud - my personal trademark is pleadings and letters typeset in the best desktop publishing tool of all-time: Adobe InDesign. Check out my review as a 20-year+ user of Adobe.

IBM Model M Keyboard - the best ever keyboard, especially for those who want 1980s-style typing functionality. For service, Clicky Keyboards is great.

King Star Computer, Inc. - custom workstations and servers built to order. Check them out on Yelp, where my review figures prominently.

Intel Xeon - professional grade processors that permit the use of ECC RAM.

Seagate Exos - true enterprise-grade hard drives. In 2021, I was approved to purchase the Exos 2X14 dual-actuator version of the X14, which packs twice the performance into the same drive. Critical for my use cases of an extreme performance workstation with eight drives in a RAID 0 (>3 GB/sec), as well as high performance 1U rack servers in a RAID 5 configuration with three drives.

Nvidia RTX 3090 - Because you've always wanted a 8K 60 Hz display, just like me.

Samsung QN900A 8K television - the best general purpose computer monitor that money can buy. I have the 65" version on a VESA cart so I can wheel it around, and it's perfect.

IBM Selectric II typewriter - great for typing envelopes and personal notes. Prestige Pica typing element matches Triplicate T4. For sales and service in the Bay Area, Los Altos Business Machines unfortunately went out of business when the owner retired in 2022, so I am still looking for a new vendor as of 2023.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux - a powerful server operating system that works great as a workstation.

General Dynamics PitBull - a trusted operating system built on top of RHEL 7.

CodeWeavers - the official vendor for PitBull and makers of the excellent CrossOver/Wine system.

Mathematica - advanced technical computation platform.

The Curating - website development and art.

Nissan GT-R - the ultimate all-around chariot. You absolutely must get the extended warranty, however, due to the possibility of transmission system failure.

Boardwalk Nissan/GT-R Specialists - five star service.

Alternative BMW Service - five star service.

American Express - the Business Platinum charge card is well worth the annual fee. You can get up to five employee cards with customizable limits and other controls also.

Vim - the best text editor of all time.

Phoenix Guardian R HEPA system - a wonderful Made in USA industrial air scrubber/purifier with 10x the performance of any consumer product. I use this at my office when they are doing construction in the building, which produces dust and odors, and at home when using the fireplace.

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.