Law on Rice

I’m sold on the idea that being a truly valuable professional means that I need to do everything I can to make my client successful. The interesting corollary to such an obvious statement is doing so means I need to focus on my client’s success, and that I need to stop worrying about my own.

This is exceptionally easy to say, but exceptionally hard to do in practice. And especially hard on the first day when I’m obsessed with making a good impression but bombarded with new people and tons of information. Hopefully tomorrow will be easier as I settle in a little, if only a little.

By the way, I’m very appreciative of the people who have promised to help be my backup. Thank you!

So, here I am on my second first day of the summer. Unfortunately, I haven’t restored my old Wordpress database, so you can’t look back to my first days as a legal intern. So I’ll give you the quick summary: they weren’t good.

This is far superior. I’m a consultant on a cool project at Microsoft. I’m using all the same exact skills as the internship. The only difference? This is more challenging and will do far more to further my practice of being a professional.

A bill recently introduced by Rep. Mark Kirk would have the effect of banning social networking sites—such as Facebook and Myspace—from libraries. This is clearly not what I have in mind when I say I’m trying to connect the dots.

For a simple explanation of the bill, read the USA Today article here.

I couldn’t find this year’s bill on GovTrack.us yet, but I did find a few recent incarnations of it. The most recent is H.R. 1120 “Deleting Online Predators Act of 2007.” According to the Congressional Research Service, the bill

[a]mends the Communications Act of 1934 to require schools and libraries that receive universal service support to enforce a policy that: (1) prohibits access to a commercial social networking website or chat room unless used for an educational purpose with adult supervision; and (2) protects against access to visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors. . . .

Directs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to: (1) issue a consumer alert regarding use of the Internet by child predators and the potential dangers to children because of such use, including the potential dangers of commercial social networking websites and chat rooms; and (2) establish a website resource of information for parents, teachers, school administrators, and others regarding potential dangers posed by the use of the Internet by children.

So in the last bill, anyway, not only would libraries (and schools) have to ban the services, but the FTC would also have to get involved in “alerting” us about the dangers of social networking for children.

Mayor Nickel’s $0.20 plastic bag tax will soon go into effect for Seattle grocery shoppers. To me, the tax has the right intentions, but gets it wrong for three reasons.

First, the 20 cent bag tax is plainly a tax on the poor. Carrying around those clunky totes is no problem for those among us with Volvo station wagons. However, when I was riding the very packed buses to work through Seattle’s International District, Central District, and parts of Mount Baker, I saw a lot of big poor families that were having enough trouble hanging on to their kids, let alone having to remember that they might be going shopping that night. If they forget there’s no food in the refrigerator, they’ll probably forget to bring the tote. This isn’t really a problem when you have no kids and you make $100,000 a year. It is a problem when you make $32,000 and have three kids.

Second, the 20 cent bag tax fails to put the cost of the behavioral change on the cheapest cost avoider. That is, the tax should not be placed on consumers. Attempting to get consumers to change behavior is expensive and inefficient compared to what we could do if we taxed the grocery stores for the use of the bags (or if the state charged a tax on their importation). If we did something like that, then the stores or producers would attempt to innovate something better. The best innovation consumers come up with is a dirty old tote.

Third, the 20 cent tax may actually undermine environmental efforts. I say this based on a conversation I just heard in Starbucks this morning. A woman was saying, “they want to charge us for air in our tires, water to drink, and now plastic bags.” The barista, for whatever reason, explained to her how bad the bags are for the environment. The woman was nonplussed. I think the general majority of people lump grocery stores and government into a larger “they,” and so most people won’t really get it. They’ll just see it as yet another burden from “they,” and that may turn the same people off of environmentalism. I think it’s an annoying and unfortunate mistake.

“McMullen’s large-scale and absurd kinetic machineries cite an era of American industrial boom, when ever-new, problem solving mechanisms became available to the average consumer.”

Grey Gallery
1512 11th Ave
Seattle, Washington 98122

I’m hanging out in Madison Park waiting for the Number 11 to take me to Pike and Pine. Near Bert’s Red Apple is a crosswalk across a very slow moving part of Madison. And at this crosswalk, I observed the following sign. I thought I would share.

A lot of people are kind of surprised to find out that I have somewhat of an accounting background. I learned the hard way how to keep books for, oh I don’t know, three years all throughout high school. Then I was in the accounting program at Arizona State University for two years. At the time, it was the top accounting school in the country—bought and paid for by Andersen Consulting—and it was competitive entry.

Between that and law school, abstract concerns like “what is the exact financial state of the company at this moment” concern me. And this concern brings my to my current problem.

I’m forming a corporation so that I can subcontract for future consulting work. The corporation is just about formed, but I don’t have the corporation capitalized yet. Nevertheless, I want to recognize the fact that the company owes me money for some expenses, including incorporation fees, some books, and more. Unfortunately, Microsoft Accounting 2008 (the freebie version) is not cooperating.

Yesterday, I thought I found a slick solution to the problem. I added a new account to my chart of accounts called unpaid reimbursements as a place to neatly record such liabilities. I did it from the “Add a New Financial Account” link on the Employee Payments screen and I numbered it 2050. I recorded the liability through the employee payment form and it posted to account 2050 just fine.

The problem is that now I can’t add another employee payment to that account using the same drop down. The drop down ignores the fact that I added a new account for just this purpose yesterday. (I tried every option to make it work.)

So now I’m left with a small mess—for the accountant mind in me, anyway. I have a little money sitting in an account that I can’t use. Thus, I either have to start making direct journal entries (which I’d rather avoid if possible), or I have to (1) merge out the new account into the one account that Microsoft Accounting seems to endorse for this purpose, 2600 Long-term Notes Payable and then (2) start charging new liabilities to this account. This is not ideal either because they aren’t “Long Term” liabilities.

Do you have any suggestions?

In my never ending quest to confuse Google and my two readers, I’ve yet again changed domain names. Having been endlessly scooped on my name as a domain name, I vowed to not let it happen again this time with the release of the .me domain name.

My apologies to whoever Michael Rice in Micronesia is, but I beat you to it, fair and square.

Just as a fun little experiment in connecting the dots, I’m thinking about writing an Excel-driven application based on Maister’s trust model.

According to David Maister, there are four progressive levels for professional services: needs-based, problem-based, relation-based, and trust-based. Under each are some more details that will lend themselves to an Excel spreadsheet.

Specifically, I want to use the dials from Google and somehow link it to Excel through my own Excel services-like wrapper.

I’m studying the much heralded Excel Services. It occurred to me that the web services component, Excel Web Services, makes it truly possible to share development across the business and the enterprise developers. That is, a lot of analysts in the enterprise are very good at developing fabulous spreadsheet, but until now there hasn’t been a scalable way to get that knowledge into production.

Studying this also makes clear to me the rather stark difference betwen legal and technical writing!