Month: February 2012

Tech Love

/ Bruce Cameron
Binary Heart

Be Mine, A Tech Valentine

Sometimes when you look back on a situation, you realize it wasn’t all you thought it was. A beautiful girl walked into your life. You fell in love. Or did you? Maybe it was only a childish infatuation, or maybe just a brief moment of vanity. — Henry Bromel

I must admit to being a recovering techaholic. I have yet to meet a small bit of shiny new tech that I haven’t lusted after to some degree or another. Fortunately age and experience have tempered my passion (oh for those days of youth when even a mere passing glance at an IMSAI 8080 could cause my knees to go weak) for no matter how much we are devoted to these sirens of silicon, they are ephemeral mistresses, lasting for but a brief moment before the allure of a younger model draws our attention away.

Despite the indiscretions of my youth (that fleeting experimentation with a Timex Sinclair was but a passing fancy – I may have used, but I never coded), my law practice has given me a stable, healthier relationship with tech. Gone are the carefree days of tech for tech’s sake; now tech must  shoulder the burden of bourgeois profit; dirtying her electrons with the mundane tasks of business – being used as simple leverage, a mere augmentation of a frail biologic. Tech has fallen from the pedestal by the entrepreneur’s implacable rule that investment must show a return. Continue reading →

Some Beach, Somewhere – The Romance of Freelance

/ Bruce Cameron / 3 Comments
Some Beach

Now, this is a desk chair

If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed. — Hugh Macleod

I have this recurring midwinter fantasy of buying a snowmobile, putting it on a trailer and heading off in a southerly direction until someone asks me “what in tarnation is wrong with that jet-ski?” The short days, cold nights, monochromatic landscapes, and mountainous piles of snow of the prairie winter are no doubt to blame for these visions of salt water, warm beaches, and a law practice run from beneath the shade of palm tree. Generally, reality (that pesky need to earn an income) quickly steps in to bring me back to the normal world and awaiting Persephone’s return, but this winter, fortune has allowed me to indulge in the dream just a bit longer (seems Demeter has gotten some help with those anger issues) by providing me with a copy of Kimberly Alderman’s new book: The Freelance Lawyering Manual.

The Freelance Lawyering Manual is the fruit of Kimberly’s career as a nomadic lawyer working from the wilds of Alaska to the beaches of the Caribbean and is the first manual to cover this revolutionary type of law practice. Freelance lawyering is not contract lawyering – Freelancers are seldom found in the dark, dank cellars of big law scouring over documents printed in that ubiquitous legal font “tiny, illegible”. These are not the hourly wage earning worker bees of the big law hive. Freelancers work from their own offices on a variety of matters billing their attorney-clients directly. They are independent lawyers running a solo practice complete with all the perks, benefits, overhead, and worries that come with running a business. Continue reading →