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. Still trying to be a moderate Democrat.

News

October 14, 2025: I just finished watching the posthumous presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie Kirk. I don't agree with him on a number of important issues, however, one cannot deny that he deeply cared about freedom and our country, and that he was a hero to his side of the aisle. I made a modest donation to Turning Point USA in his honor because their mission deserves support, even from the other side of the political spectrum. On that note, I have an announcement coming up in the political arena in the area of PACs. The Democratic Party is in high need of a reset toward moderate candidates, and I intend to further that goal.

October 5, 2025: Today represents nearly a month without Facebook, which I rage-quit due to all the disgusting displays of joy in my network following Charlie Kirk's assassination. I wanted to take some time to reflect on that, and the fact that I cut off several people who were dancing on his grave. Honestly, I feel better without all the toxic negativity and political posts, especially from those people. I do miss having easy access to the Facebook Groups feature, which is how most non-technical people in my network stay connected with interesting topics. I currently have X, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and that has been plenty for me. LinkedIn has been especially horrible lately, but I have no solution when I really have to be on there for other lawyers and sometimes clients who want to find me. X has been great because it is a raw and uncut window into how many people really feel, plus I have been connecting with interesting people. Instagram is just my occasional outlet for posting photos. That's my long way of saying that I feel better having limited my social media use to the essentials. At some point, I might get off LinkedIn because it is useless to me and is also a never-ending source of spam messages and spam notifications. And Instagram isn't really useful for me except as a way to message people in my network whose phone numbers I don't have. I might just get their numbers and delete Instagram, not sure yet.

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.

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.