At any rate, the Featured Content Carousel deactivated the slide-box on my main page, making me think it was broken.  I decided that this had happened because of the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 and decided I needed a new 3.0-compatible theme.  So I looked and looked — the theme I originally tweaked (Revolution Office) apparently no longer exists — and found something called Work Place from Press75.com looked the closest to my theme.

Bought it; installed it; realized it was never going to work without major tweaking.  Complete waste of $75!

A little more poking around on the web and I discovered that the Revolution Office theme on which I based my theme stops working correctly if the Featured Content Carousel is installed and activated.

Deactivated the plug-in.  Problem solved.

I’m still out $75.

You’re probably tired of hearing me say this (you who might have found this blog via some Google search and then started reading several of the articles, even though the site appears to be almost dead), but I haven’t blogged here in awhile.

The big problem boils down to this: I’m a lawyer. I don’t know why, but I’ve been concerned about maintaining a “personal” blog, like this one.  I worry that people — potential clients and clients, to be exact — will react to things I say on my personal blog, even though the main page (as the site is currently constructed; this may change) says, under the heading “Letting My Hair Down”:

This site is where I let my hair down. Everyone is different in private life versus professional life; everyone is entitled to both. Don’t judge my professionalism or ability as an attorney by what you might see on this site.  This site is meant to allow me some self- expression and enjoyment that isn’t necessarily related to what I do as a criminal defense lawyer.

I do, however, have other interests (particularly “writing”) and I do want a place where I can “play” and “experiment” and write about things that have nothing to do with the law.  To do what I want to do, I think I need to pay more attention to this site.  (And, now that I broke it, I might have to actually re-design it.)

So I’m just going to have to ask people — potential clients and clients, to be exact — to remember that, as I said above (and on the current main page), people’s private lives and professional lives are different.  What I write here may, or may not, tell you much about me.  What it probably won’t do is give you a very good idea of what kind of lawyer I am; it probably won’t tell you if I’m the attorney who could best handle your case.

On the other hand, I guess I have no control over how people make their decisions.

I can only be myself.  And hope for the best.

At first, I thought it would be a great idea to have a personal blog. After all, I’ve kept journals off and on for years. My journals don’t really record all that much in the way of deeply personal things; someone finding them would probably just be bored with the reading. Much of it pertains to ideas and thoughts that are best labeled “philosophical.”

No surprise there, as I majored in philosophy.

The point is that my journals, while personal, aren’t deeply revealing (except insofar as they reveal the “philosophical” things I consider). Sometimes, too, I share what I’ve written with friends and this often leads to fun discussions where I get to learn what they think on the same topics.

And so I thought that maintaining a personal blog could be even more enjoyable and would not be a big deal.

What I’ve found, however, is that because of my work as a criminal defense attorney, I’m not as willing to keep up a personal blog. It’s enough to provide fodder for prosecutors, judges and potential jurors through my specific thoughts on criminal justice — or the lack thereof — and the criminal legal system — or the lack thereof — on my law blogs. I don’t need to add into the mix that someone may not appreciate some of my more generalized thoughts on life.

Still, I live in an area — Fresno County, California — where I find it difficult to meet people whose company I enjoy. All of us like to occasionally hang out with people with whom we don’t perpetually need to defend our world-view, or justify our most basic thoughts about “the good life.” Blogging is something that I discovered, years ago, opened up the possibility of having discussions with a range of people, some of whom disagree with me, to be sure, but many of whom don’t.

At Unspun#&8482;, for example, I wrote about social and political issues. I largely stopped after becoming an attorney. I miss the community of commenters I encountered there, both the good (people who are still friends to this day) and the not-so-good (people like “Nat” who could not conduct a discussion without personal attacks). I’ve even thought frequently about resurrecting Unspun#&8482;. After all — and even though I voted for him — our current President provides much to debate and criticize (and even perhaps a few things to praise).

Another thing that has held me back from building my personal blog on this website is the thought that I may, one day, simply take this site down. The things I write — the good, the bad, the poorly-written — have some weird hold over me once written. I hate to see them go away. That’s why Unspun#&8482; remains online to this day, even though I haven’t written anything there since early 2009. So I don’t like the idea of writing here when I know I may very well just erase it all someday. (One reason I might erase it is that if I decide to practice a different kind of law, other than criminal defense, my other websites aren’t easily adaptable to that; I may need a “generic” web URL to use for a non-criminal-defense-oriented website.)

Finally, there’s the whole idea that there’s already a Rick Horowitz — and not a very pleasant one, if you ask me — who is somewhat famous, at least in some circles. I have people mistaking me for him often enough as it is. If I try to redeem the name, to connect it with less idiotic and thoughtless ideas, it could just confuse people. After all, that other Rick Horowitz has been around so long that it would be hard for people to understand if suddenly someone named “Rick Horowitz’ started to sound intelligent and sane.

So I’m not sure what’s going to happen here with this blog. At the moment, when I want to write on a more personal note, I journal offline. But the more I think about things, the more I wonder if it wouldn’t be fun to start writing about non-law things again, on occasion, and see if I can’t reconnect with some of my non-law online friends of the past.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I bought a Gateway LT2030u. It’s red and weighs about 2.5 or so pounds. It’s tiny! But the keyboard is managable, even with my hands.

I bought this one because it came with a 250 GB hard drive, 1 MB RAM and said the battery life was 7+ hours, whereas all the other comparable laptops said the battery life was about 3.75 hours.

With this configuration, this laptop is actually more powerful than the laptop I use for work!

At any rate, I should be able to do more work when away from the office, since this is so much easier to carry than even my ordinary laptop. And with the Internet access, I can do legal research, blog, and will be able to advance my book project, as well.

Can you imagine if Jack Kerouac had had one of these puppies?

You might say, I’m a happy camper. You might hear me say, “Woo-hoo!”

I went out last night and bought my first-ever copy of Writer’s Market. Other than the fact that someone told me to do it, I’m still not sure why.

I think it’s because I’d like to try to become a writer.

In one sense, I’ve always been a writer.  As a young child, I wrote stories about Snoopy and the Red Baron.  The Red Baron’s appearances in my stories were primarily limited to his being shot down in flames.  But Snoopy!  That dog could drink!  (As a child, I don’t know what I thought he drank, but he was forever partying when not shooting down the Red Baron.)  Sadly, the last time I saw my bundle of stories I had stuck them under the seat of our Rambler station wagon on one of our cross-country moves.  I don’t know what ever happened to them after that.

The first “publication” that I know of came when I was in the eighth grade.  I wrote a poem titled “My Imaginary Tree by Me.”  I still remember some of the lines (heck, this might be the entire poem for all I remember):

Here the tree stands all alone,
     All the kids have gone home.
See his limbs all torn and tattered,
     All his leaves have far been scattered.
How he wishes he could play,
     Each and every single day.
But he knows this cannot be
     For he is just…

…my imaginary tree.

In addition to writing the poem, I had drawn a picture of a particularly pathetic-appearing leaveless tree.  The poem was printed, superimposed over the tree, in a newsletter put out at Woodrow Wilson Jr. High School in Hanford, back in the days when education still mattered in California and schools had money for such things.

As the years went by, I wrote more poetry.  A couple of specimens can be found here and here.

Despite appearances, the first of the linked poems there was not inspired by any female or any broken relationship.  At the time it was written, I was yet to kiss my first girl!  What happened was that I was reading a thesaurus (yes, I know) and found the phrase “a debt which cancels all others” as an alternative for “suicide.”  Something about the phrase struck me and, before I knew it, I’d written this poem.  Of course, I used to read a lot of Edgar Cayce back then, so I may merely have been channeling some dead poet.  The second link is to a weird “poetic fragment” that popped into my head one day and I wrote it down.  Yes, therapy would probably be a good idea.

I wrote a large number of other poems over the years, but I’m not sure I’ve saved many of them.  Not a few were written for the first love of my life, Elizabeth Yvonne Adams, whom I married when we were both too young to know better and who left before either of us could grow up.  (Primarily my fault, btw.)  In fact, after she and I went our separate ways, other than whiny journal entries, I didn’t write again for a very long time.  (And I don’t believe I ever wrote any more poetry.)

Yet writing, in one form or another, has stayed a big part of my life through the years.  I’m loathe to state the cliché that “it’s in my blood,” but I suspect this is true: in spite of the fact that I love “having written,” the act of writing itself is usually quite difficult, painful and when I’m done I feel as if I’ve actually lost a lot of blood. Is it so strange to believe it was “in my blood” and I then bled all over the page?

For years, beginning around the time Yvonne and I separated, I kept journals.  (It’s occasionally amazing to me to go back and read them.  It’s like someone else’s life!)  And, at least with the way I wrote them, journals can be quite painful to maintain.  For one thing — this is no doubt very OCD of me — I had a “rule” that I was to avoid crossing things out or making corrections at all costs.  And since I also have ADD and usually did my writing at Carl’s Jr. restaurants, this could create some of the most amazing difficulties.  When I was distracted and “lost my place,” I’d come back to a partial word or sentence and think, “Now what?”  But rules are rules: I had to figure a way to complete the sentence, even if I couldn’t remember what I was trying to say, in a way that did not disrupt the flow of writing.

In some ways, although I no longer adhere to it, I actually think that rule made me a better writer.

When the Internet came along, I more or less abandoned journaling.  Instead, I constantly revised a personal website (winkola.com; no longer in existence, though I’ve kept the URL) that I maintained.  This was before “blogging” existed — or, at least, before it was called “blogging.”  But I do recall for awhile maintaining a page where I manually input entries (without titles) in chronological order.  Like a journal.  And when blogging software was created, I started to experiment with it, eventually starting up Unspun™.

Although my blogging is different and less personal than my journals, it is difficult for me.  When I maintained Unspun™, I began a habit of adding incredible numbers of links to my articles, which added to the difficulty of writing.  On the legal blogs I own today — Fresno Criminal Defense and Probable Cause: The Legal Blog with the Really Low Standard of Review — I probably don’t link as much as I did with Unspun™, but I still usually do quite a bit of research (and citation).

In addition, I do quite a bit of legal writing, not only for my own clients, but for other attorneys.

In spite of all this writing, I have only a few publication credits.  One (long lost) is for a marketing article I wrote for medical transcriptionists that appeared in MT Monthly.  Another — of which I’m fairly proud because of the analogy I employed and because I tuckerized numerous family and friends (although until being introduced to Susan Krinard I didn’t know it was called “tuckerization”) — was a chapter for a book on Migrating from NT 4 to Windows 2000. Then there are a few op-ed pieces in the local newspaper and one blog article which Fresno’s Community Alliance kindly asked permission to reprint in their paper. (I can’t remember if it was this one, or this one, or some other one.)

As I’ve come to understand myself more, I realize that I have a number of weaknesses that make a “regular job” no fun at all.  Not even where I’m “self-employed.”  On the other hand, most of those very same weaknesses would probably work well for writing.  And I do have more than a few story ideas I’d like to explore.  So after talking with an actual writer, I think it’s time for me to stop pretending, dabbling, or whatever we should call it, and try to approach writing more seriously.

But note that I said “most of” my weaknesses might benefit me as a writer.  One has kept me from actually attempting this before: I’m not the most self-disciplined person in the world.  (And there’s that danged ADD issue.)  I can do pretty well focusing on something for “awhile,” but then I tend to not do as well with following through.  And, apparently, “real writers” write daily.

My problem is that I tend to write only when I feel like I have something worth saying.  Which isn’t daily.  Sometimes not even weekly.  Not a few people will probably say I never have anything worth saying!  But I’m going to ignore those people.

In fact, for at least a little while, I’m going to ignore myself when I say such things.  From what I’m told, the trick is to sit down and write.  If you don’t feel like you have anything to say, you write anyway.  (I’ve even been told, “Just write that you don’t feel like you have anything to say and go from there.”)

You can blame this blog entry on my first attempt to adopt that attitude.  Starting now, starting here, I’m going to force myself to write something every day, even if it’s only to write that I have nothing to write.

If you don’t like it, blame Susan Krinard.  Or, better yet, just move along.  There’s nothing here to see anyway.

In one sense — at least so it seems to me — all blogging is personal.  To the extent that it’s written by individuals who are expressing their opinions, how can it really be otherwise?  But the blogs I maintain for my Fresno-based criminal defense practice and my more generalized criminal-law-oriented blog, can be considered “less” personal in that they primarily deal with legal issues relating to the practice of criminal law.

In “the old days,” I maintained a blog called Unspun™, which was more personal, but mostly contained political and social writing.  I started that blog in the dark ages of the slide to hell that was introduced to television news by Fox.  Bill O’Reilly liked to fantasize that his post-modern attempt at dismantling the United States was actually a “no spin zone.”  Of course, O’Reilly is nothing but spin.  So, in reaction against that, I decided to create a website where, I hoped, things would be unspun.  And I researched most of the articles I wrote for that site fairly thoroughly.

I always felt odd about posting more personal articles on Unspun™, or articles relating to non-political/non-social issues, such as my musings on anthropology, cognitive science, or other topics that did not fit my “vision” for Unspun™.

My name is common enough that several other well-known people carry it themselves.  At least one can probably be considered “fairly famous.”  And this, I felt, created a problem for me in writing a blog under my own name.  I didn’t want to be equated with the more famous dude, primarily because he seems to me to be something of an idiot.  And a hypocritical sell-out.

Network Solutions, like the great dope domain pusher that it is, recognized long ago that I had a penchant for registering domain names, even if I didn’t yet know what I’d use them for — or that I would use them at all!  Consequently, I was always getting these tempting offers: “Register RICKHOROWITZ.COM now!  This is your last chance before your nose falls off! Get it before someone else does, maybe even that idiot who shares your name is and is more famous!”  Okay, so they didn’t actually say he was more famous.

(Here’s a spot of irony for you:  I own several domain names I haven’t fully decided what to do with, including some I’ve used extensively in the past, such as techstop.com, and some I’ve more recently acquired such as MrConstitution.com, which has never really been put to use yet.  But in “the old days” of the commercial Internet Service Providers, circa 1993, two of which I worked for, I remember sitting around with fellow geekazoids and laughing at someone who had just bought some “stupid” domain name like “furniture.com” or something like that.  Boy!  Did I miss that boat!  Back then, you could buy domains, if I’m recalling correctly, for a one-time fee of $50.  I remember hearing once that the guy who bought lawyers.com for $50 later sold it for a couple of million.  (I don’t know if that’s true; it’s what I’d heard.  Lawyers.com is today owned by the same people who torture attorneys with Lexis-Nexis products.))

Anyway, as regards the tempting offers from Network Solutions regarding a domain with my own name, eventually, I caved in.  You can only wave junk in front of a junkie for so long before you get him, after all.  Everyone knows when it comes to the Internet, resistance is futile.  And the sooner you give in, the sooner your blog content will be disseminated.

But I am an attorney by trade (primarily, and so far it is a trap from which there seems to be no escape).  This creates a problem in maintaining a “personal” blog.  It’s not just a legal matter, what with freedom of speech being actually dead for attorneys as far as some courts are concerned.  It’s also a political matter: if you blog “the wrong stuff” you can scare off potential clients, alienate jurors who ignore the judge’s instructions and hunt for and read your blogs during trial and perhaps even cause your colleagues to question your sanity.  Though I’m not sure I really give much of a hoot about what my colleagues might think.

I can’t say that I’ve actually made a decision about the best way to handle this dilemma.  Blogging is easier than journaling.  And I do enjoy the occasional conversation it generates: one of the drawbacks of being a private attorney — a “solo” — is, well, having to be solo so often.

So while I’m trying to figure this one out, I guess I’m just going to have to try to exercise a little care in what I say here on my “personal” (but very public) blog.  And hope that people visiting the site will recognize that there is a difference between whatever personal views I may express on this site and the way I conduct myself as a private attorney and business person.

I’m not usually one to pay much attention to birthdays.  But this one seems special for at least this reason: I’m exactly 30 years older than I — and probably most of the people who knew me — expected I’d ever be.

This has caused me to spend a good deal of today thinking about my life: where I’ve been (to the extent my Swineheimer’s permits remembering), where I am, and where I might go from here.  When I think about the great achievements of my life, from my first “published” poem in the eighth grade to the publication of a book by a Microsoft employee for which I wrote one chapter in 2000; from the time my brother and I won an award in a city-wide talent show for singing “Candy Man” to my cover of “Brandi” (originally by Looking Glass, more recently the Red Hot Chili Peppers) done just a couple hours ago; from fingerpainting “pictures” in kindergarten to seeing my first publication of pictures in the Fresno Bee (Friday, July 31, 2009, an insert called “Talk” in the South Valley Edition); from being possibly the only person in America to have to repeat pre-school (it really wasn’t my fault) to graduating third out of 56 in my law school class — which, incidentally, kicked off the official recognition of my move from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) to Career Deficit Disorder (CDD) in 2006 — I’m underwhelmed.

I really thought I’d have done something with my life by now.

Where I am right now is not a place I’m exactly tickled pink to be.  I’m a lawyer.  A criminal defense lawyer.  And I’m not sure exactly why I ever chose to do that, except that maybe it’s because everyone in my family always hated lawyers.  That seems kind of like a silly reason to become a lawyer.  And, since I’m going to be honest about things here, I don’t particularly like being a lawyer.  Fortunately for me, everyone in my family also hates psychotherapists, so I’ve got at least one more career ahead of me.

My family claims not to dislike writers.  This is a real bummer.  Because the one thing I’ve been told that I’m really good at is writing.  Maybe as I embark on the second half-century of my life, I’ll take a crack at writing something a little more significant than a blog, or two, or three, or — yes, I believe I have — four (not counting the photoblog).  As some of my closer friends know, I have at least that many story ideas in my head; none of which could possibly be less than a novel.  I do have an imagination!

I don’t actually know how to write a novel, mind you.  But, as noted, I’ve done a few blogs.  And I once read about a guy who had written so many blog articles he was able to put them together into a book.  Now there’s a novel idea for you!  I’ve also done some short stories, although none have yet been published.

Since I never had any kids — Challah Bobalah, Avi Bobalah, Tuvia Matai Bobalah, Rivka the Rapscallion and Lilith the Demon Kitty don’t count; they’re “just” dogs and cats — maybe I should figure out how to birth a novel or two.

Well, who knows?  Maybe I’ve still got a few years left in me.

So…happy birthday to me.  Happy 51st birthday to me.

Broke, But Not Flat Busted

A lot of people have expressed puzzlement over Palin’s recent decision to quit the governorship of Alaska.  Rumors swirl about the reason behind her sudden departure.  An article at The Daily Beast proffers 11 reasons, but does not touch on the obvious.  (I would refer you to the actual Daily Beast article, but after noticing it tried to lay about 30 cookies on me, I give you this summary of the article instead.  I don’t know about you, but I’m on a diet and that allotment of cookies would last me a week.)

I think the real explanation is actually much simpler: She’s Alaska’s Ramblin’ Rose. The woman who attended five or six colleges to graduate in six years — some were community colleges, so you’re only supposed to attend them for a short time, right? — has done well to hold out in the governorship for two-and-a-half years. I doubt she’d have lasted that long if it weren’t for the interlude with John McCain in the national limelight.

As Palin herself might put it, her spirit may have been broken, but she’s not flat-busted.

Seriously, though, I’ve been busy reading.  And writing.

Some of the reading I’ve been doing lately is about writing.  The reputation that I hear I have is for being a good writer.  Truth is, though, writers are made; not born.   There’s definitely truth to what Nancy Lamb says in The Art And Craft Of Storytelling: A Comprehensive Guide To Classic Writing Techniques:

Some people are born with the gift of storytelling.  You know them: friends who can talk about the most mundane encounter and captivate an audience.  They know just when to pause, when to draw out the details, and when to deliver the punch line.  They’ve got the instinct for narrative.

But she goes on to point out some equally true facts about the writing life:

Even if we’re not among those fortunate few blessed with this inherent skill, we can learn how to master it.

Storytelling is an art, but it is also a craft….

Craft involves technique.  Craft has rules.  If a potter doesn’t center the clay on the potter’s wheel, he can’t throw a pot.  If a cabinetmaker doesn’t measure the wood carefully, cut corners at the proper angle or join those corners correctly, she can’t build a level table. What the potter and the cabinetmaker produce may be art.  But they could not produce that art without craft.

What Lamb doesn’t say is that even those with an instinct, or an affinity, or — if you prefer to think of it this way — a natural ability for a thing must work to hone it.  Michael Jordan may have been “something” from the minute he picked up a basketball, but don’t doubt for a minute that he became the legend he is through constant and repetitive practice.  Michael Jackson was a hit from the minute he stepped onto a stage; it took several decades of daily repetitive practice to build him into the King of Pop.

I’ve never had the privilege of meeting either of the Michaels mentioned above.  But from what I’ve read, Michael Jackson was familiar with those who came before him; he admired and studied them.  From them, at least indirectly, he learned about craft.

My life has (obviously) not been as glamorous or as well-followed as these icons in their fields.  This provides all the more reason for taking my cue from them.  Thus I’ve spent a great deal of time lately reading books about writing.

Actually, I’ve always done this.  But I’m stepping it up because I’ve finally decided that if writing is where my strength really lies, then it’s time to stop relying upon any “natural gifts” I may have in this area; it’s time to do some work on craft.

They say that practice makes perfect.  But I suspect that practice does not make perfect, if one practices imperfectly.  So far, most of my writing — check out my various websites accessible from the main page of this website — has been based on whatever “natural” abilities with which I was born.

It’s time to take the next step.  If I can.  Time to embrace that which (because of the pain involved), I’ve resisted.  So, for now, I’m digging into a study of the craft of writing.

Tomorrow, I may begin to write again.

I usually only do that when looking the mirror.