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.

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.

Recently, I’ve been much concerned about issues of personal freedom, the right to move freely through society, including government buildings, without being treated like a common criminal.  I find the whole thing fairly depressing, but mostly because I realize I’m impotent.  I’m not going to change this.  We’re part of a permanent police state.  (And it’s not just us.)

Anyway, check out the following articles for the details.  And get involved in the discussion by using comment forms at the bottom of each article!

Relevant Articles

• Submitizens (Fresno Criminal Defense)
• Submitizens II (Fresno Criminal Defense)
• A Nation of Suspects (Probable Cause: The Legal Blog with the Really Low Standard of Review)

Don’t forget to comment!

Here you’ll find information about and links to other places where I’m active on the Internet, including websites I’ve built for my law practice and photographic activities, as well as my profiles on websites such as Facebook, JDSupra, Twitter and more.

Because RickHorowitz.com functions as the site for All Things Rick™, it focuses primarily on my non-lawyering activities, both personal and those non-law-related things for which I’m sometimes paid (like photography).

My understanding of PHP was somewhat limited when I first downloaded the Revolution Office theme.  I’d occasionally done some really minor tinkering, but nothing on the scale that I’ve had to do here.  In addition, it took me a couple of days to realize that I had to create “.php” files with particular text in the first few lines to create a “Template” and then to figure out how to connect that to a “Page.”  Frankly, I’m fairly proud of myself for figuring it out.

I think the design of RickHorowitz.com is pretty much where I want it to be right now (except for one thing).  The content needs to be modified, but the design is 99.9% complete.

The one thing that’s missing — and I will be amazingly and super-hyper-incredibly grateful if someone out there can supply me with information on this — is that I can’t seem to get the Blog page to be the way I want.

I’m fairly certain from what I’ve been able to read so far that the problem is caused by the fact that my primary page — the page you see when you type just RickHorowitz.com and nothing else — utilizes the Revolution Office main page, stripped of the bottom box. I wanted a cleaner design and I wanted the primary Blog to be a secondary page.

Well, I managed to get it to a secondary page, but I can either print full-posts-only, using the_content(), or I can get shorter versions with the_excerpt(). Using the_excerpt() means that people will have to click on the title of the post to read the entire post. This is because the_excerpt() doesn’t recognize and utilize the WordPress tag.

It’s about 1:30 a.m. here now and I’ve been at this since around 5 p.m. today, trying to finalize the design, so I think it’s time to “throw in the towel” for the night.

Hopefully, either some good soul will leave me the answer before I can get back to it, or I’ll find it myself in the next few days. I’d hate to think I can’t have a properly functioning Blog page without a site redesign!

All That's Left of Some Poor Soul's Past

In approximately 1993 or 1994 — digital archeologists will just have to take my word for it — I created the first of many websites. I don’t remember the exact URL for the site: it might have been something like http://www.cybergate.com/~rickh since the now-defunct Cybergate ISP was how I gained (SLIP!) access to the commercial Internet. Eventually, I moved to ValleyNet Communications (later to become Protosource Network after I became the Vice-President there) and bought the domain name “Winkola.com.” (This is derived from a nickname (“Winky”) given to me by Sarah Serafimidis. That’s a story for a whole ‘nuther post.)

Back then, if we wanted to build blogs, we had to code our way uphill, through the snow,both ways!  And that’s just what I did for quite a long time.  Winkola.com constantly morphed as I posted information about things that interested me, images from local plays — not part of any failed Hollywood career as one Holocaust denier has mistakenly claimed all these years (do these guys ever get anything right?) — and I slogged my way through several versions of HTML code to eventually add an “events calendar” complete with links to the “events pages.”  Ah…for the days when the <table> tag was brand-new and we were all trying to figure out how to make it do things it wasn’t (then) designed to do!

Though by then I was part of a small group creating applications with perl, it never occurred to me to create blogging software.  This was not the first — or last! — time that I missed my opportunity to be involved in something significant.  I still ruefully remember sitting around with friends, laughing at the guy who bought chairs.com, or some other generically-named domain, which seemed to us quite silly at the time.  (I even laughed about the idea of buying rick.com.  I did not.  Today, that domain is worth a lot of money, too.) Consequently, as with my dinosaur-friend above, all the fleshy-parts of my proto-blogging pages are lost.

But I digress.  Repeatedly.  And this was supposed to be a “blurb.”

Eventually someone with more business sense than me created blogging software.  I won’t bore you (even more) with all the packages I tried before settling for several years on MovableType™.

With the birth of my first MovableType™ blog, Unspun™ took the place of Winkola.com.  (Winkola.com still exists, but is merely a referrer — or “referer” as the “correct” (mis)spelling of that word has evolved in HTMLspeak — to Unspun™.)  From at least 2003 through 2008, it powered blogs I wrote at Unspun™ and TechStop™.

In either late 2007, or early 2008, I started learning about WordPress™.

The one language I had not dealt with a great deal, PHP, powers WordPress™ and that delayed my getting to know it. In a word — okay, three words — I love WordPress™. Tinkering with WordPress™ lead me back to something I’ve always loved: building websites. In mid-December 2008, I decided to create a “mother-of-all-Rick’s-websites” here at RickHorowitz.com, using WordPress™. The theme I selected and am busily modifying is Revolution Office from Brian Gardner Media, LLC & Circa75 Media, LLC.

Since the development of RickHorowitz.com, Unspun™ will now focus more on political and social commentary, while a new blog will be built — sledding downhill with WordPress™ the entire way! — at RickHorowitz.com for more general, and/or more personal, posts.

You now know more about Unspun™, and a few other things, than anyone either needs or cares to know. To get some firsthand experience with Unspun™, click one of the many instances of its name in this post.