Law on Rice

One of the most important things a bankruptcy court offers is the so-called automatic stay.  One of my bankruptcy professors called it the most powerful tool any lawyer has in any field of law.

It stops almost everything, stops it immediately.  That collection company has to stop garnishing your wages. The county judge has to stop that lawsuit. The foreclosure sale on your house stops.  Visa cannot so much as dial the phone to call you.  Yet, if you owe a bank (or other creditor) for a payment on a car or house, the bank is likely going to be able to convince the bankruptcy court to lift the stay if they can convince the judge that they are not “adequately protected.”  Why?

At first, I thought “adequate protection” was Congress’s way of trying to throw creditors a bone.  That is, Congress gave a bankruptcy filers a lot of power, but Congress also wanted a way to protect a secured creditor’s collateral.

But when I looked at the legislative commentary, Congress didn’t mention that particular concern in 1978. Instead, it seems like Congress was more concerned about Fifth Amendment Takings issues.

In a few weeks, when we get to open source licenses, I’m going to petulantly raise my hand and say, “how can a piece of software be ‘dual licensed’?” I’m playing around with GlassFish, the open source application server from Sun. I’m trying to decide what I think of it as compared to JBoss. Accordingly, I pulled the Wikipedia entry, and lo… I found this oblique statement:

“GlassFish is free software, dual-licensed under two free software licences: the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and the GNU General Public License (GPL) with the classpath exception.”

Whaaaaaat? What does this mean? My law school issue spotting radar lit up like a Christmas tree in Guadalupe.

I just got an email that Patents.com finally launched.

I have a vague memory of the publicity around the service a long time ago. But what’s more interesting to me is that it must have taken close to a year to launch. I say this because I probably would have registered for an email update with the service when I was hot and heavy with Coderights: and that was in the early part of this year.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. When I finish rebooting Coderights, I’ll probably cover it!

I’m seriously thinking about resurrecting Coderights (my old blog about software legal issues), but there are quite a few things I want to do a differently with it this time around. Foremost among them is that I need more technology behind it than just Wordpress or Movabletype.

For example, I probably will talk more about software licensing. In the past, I was frustrated when I was trying to highlight multiple pieces of text from a contract (or one court case, for that matter).

So this afternoon I’m working on a tool to help me do just that: highlight text and render rich information related to that highlight. It will use AJAX, and I will post it soon on labs.michaelrice.me.

For a little while there, I was thinking about doing it with Cappuccino, the new Objective-J based framework, but I think that will be overkill for what I’m trying to accomplish—for now, anyway.

I’m under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), so I can’t tell you as much as I want to you about the new native Brightkite iPhone application. Nevertheless, I think it’s not a breach to tell you the guys did a great job, and you’re going to like it when it’s ready for general use.

It had to be done. I downloaded Chrome.

The only thing can say in addition to the 37,633 other posts in the last 24 hours is I like it a lot better than IE 8. There. Obligatory geek post duly entered in my stream.

I was playing around with Eclipse tonight, when the application suddenly decided to tell me that it wanted to tell the Eclipse developers about how I use the application.

Of course I said yes, but I thought I’d share their terms of use because I was kind of surprised–and kind of pleased–by (a) the technology for giving me control over what feedback it submitted and (b) the forthrightness of the terms of use. Whether the terms are really going to make the privacy folks happy, I don’t know… but at least it’s direct.

I really really really really wanted MobileMe to work out. It doesn’t. Not for me anyway. I watched the little video on apple.com (you know, the one with the soothing guy who says he works at the Apple Store). The little video man said everything would sync. He said I would be in sync nirvana (not to be confused with my neighbor’s wifi name nirvana).

Unfortunately, it appears nirvana will have to wait for nirvana 2.0. No matter what I do, I cannot get my contacts to sync with Outlook; syncing contact was kinda the core value proposition for moi. Of course, that statement makes it seem like there’s something I could do. In typical Apple fashion, there are very few buttons, switches, or logs to help me out. It’s supposed to “just work,” but when it doesn’t, it just don’t. 

I searched the Apple support site and the only recommendtation was to reinstal Leopard. I find it unnerving that Apple users feel the need to reinstall their OS to make a little thing like MobileMe work. I know Microsoft bashing is alive and well, but at least when Microsoft software fails, I only need to reboot!

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 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?