Werme Family Home Page

Our new yurt
Yurt Sweet Yurt
You've found our home page. This has links to our personal pages, shortcuts to some of the more important subpages and links to other sites in the Web to support some of our pages. Sorry about the lack of a flash animation with cacophonous music.

Family stuff

Summer of 2003 was Mom's Fiftieth Birthday I-don't-want-to-grow-up Bicycle Ride Across America. I'm getting some pictures up and have plans for additional pages. Mom brought Hannah and Dad, but those two had to return home in August.

Paula's links

I'm a lawyer who defends people falsely accused of child abuse and neglect.

My legal site is http://nhdcyf.info/index.html and has much more on Defending Constitutions and Your Freedoms. Together Ric and I have far more information about DCYF than the NH government's WWW site!

One of my cases involves a stunning and sad injustice. Dad was sent to jail, charged with civil contempt of court for non-payment of child support. However, Dad has spent more time with his daughter than has Mom, and the daughter wants to live with Dad and have Mom only come to visit. The courts seem to be more concerned about protecting their own than the welfare of the family, case law, the state constitution, or even common sense. All the details of the case are at http://WermeNH.com/Fathers_Rights/David_Johnson/Case_Synopsis_07_03_23.pdf . See the nhdcyf.info page for a little more guidance until I write a real home page for the case. Warning - you will leave outraged. I've been outraged for months, and it shows on the YouTube videos of the bail hearing.

While I don't have much on the family court system, there is a Wikipedia page on the New Hampshire Judicial Branch Family Division.

One of my main hobbies is quilting. I've even mixed work with pleasure in a quilt about my H8DCYF license plate which the DMV illegally removed from my vehicle. Really!

Another important hobby is colonial reenactment I've made clothing for the entire family and have gotten interested in natural dying. One of these days I'll write up some WWW pages about that.

My newest hobby is carving spoons and other wood things.

Ric's links

I'm a software engineer with roots that go way back, i.e. my daughter calls me a geek. I heard a NH Family Division judge say "Engineers are unreasonable people" so maybe I'm that too. I call myself a hacker - in the best sense of the word.

When I get time I'll write up my accounts of implementing FTP and Telnet back in my Arpanet days at Carnegie Mellon for their PDP-10 computers.

While I can spend all day and all night working on code that ranges from Unix internals to WWW hacks in Python, hearing about NH's Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) turned me into a political activist. It takes a severely broken system to do that to an old hacker! DCYF has improved significantly in the last decade, but there is still much to be done. Most of my recent web work has been weather related, not just here but in support of the Yahoo! ToddGross, NEweather, and HometownWeatherObservers groups.

My favorite pages

Several of these are mentioned in later sections with related pages. That's okay, I think these deserve an extra mention.

Weather and climate

Engineering, electronic toys, err, tools, etc.

Oh all right, geek stuff! Check out the last page of the Saturn collision page for my physics analysis.

The Equation of Time is the difference between sundial time and clock time. Why don't these tell the same time, anyway?

While I'm at it, here's Sun data for Penacook NH for the year.

Did you hear about the sundial to be sent to Mars? Here's a report on the Deimos events of the Martian Festival.
I've long been fond of the "qualitative display of quantitative data," i.e. graphs, plots etc. The master of the field, Edward Tufte, wrote the definitive books on the subject starting with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I brought a couple of things I did to one of his one day classes. He liked my baseball runnings enough so I converted it to experiment with his "sparklines" concept. I'm also experimenting with similar data for the 2006 Tour de France, the most complex sporting event worth sinking one's teeth into.
Of course, one can also discover "attractive display of quantitative data." Sometimes that happens with bugs in graphics code. A mistake by someone at Stanford nearly 40 years ago still has me playing with a graphics hack I call Roses.
How well does an Earth-bound Saturn automobile handle a head on collision with a pickup truck? Pretty well, all things considered. At least I'm still around to write about it!
My GPS pages on geocaching, Garmin's GPS protocol, and various other comments and observations.
From a USENET post, err, flame with an irascible engineer who disagrees with this engineer and most of the rest of the newsgroup, I put together a, well, let's call it a freeze frame of a frozen flame. It's useful more for some family photos than anything else. It certainly doesn't count as intelligent engineering discourse!

Political/Government pages

Everything else


Search our sites! Or not... I used to keep these up-to-date, but they've languished of late. Search engine spiders seem to wander by fairly frequently these days, I may shut this down altogether.

Search the family's site:
Search Paula's site:



Tame the gov't
monster, click me


Lynx inspected! No Microsoft programs are necessary to appreciate this site.


Contact Ric Werme or return to his home page.

Last updated 2008 Oct 1.