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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a collection of climate essays
which started with 1816: The Year without a Summer,
my summary of a weather event that helped change New England history.
While the explosion of Mt Tambora was the proximal cause, it happened
during a cool period in the Earth's climate, one that we might soon be
revisiting. Science, Method, Climatology,
and Forgetting the Basics is both an introduction to two sides of
the climate debate (which makes it twice as good as Al Gore's An
Inconvenient Truth. My essay also chides the scientists who seem to
have forgotten what scientific discourse is all about.
If we do have cooling, then 2016: The [Next]
Year without a Summer, a collection of links about a possible
major climate shift in our lifetime, may become moot. I wrote it in
response to the movie The Day after Tomorrow to present a more
scientific view of what was in the movie.
Penacook weather
I have a competent weather station
on the computer and upload data every 20 minutes.
It doesn't measure snow, but neither do the NWS automated systems.
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
A few years ago my employer had me
fill out a INS I-9 form (Employment Eligibility
Verification). The form asks
everyone for their Social Security Number. Normally people
do this on the first day of the job and are not too inclined to squawk
about Social Security Number misuse. However, after 11 years on the
job, I was happy to stick my neck out. I concluded that the form
violates federal law, so I wrote simply "On file".
DCYF behaviour is summarized in Tricks of the
Trade. This is one of my favorite pages and several sites around
the web link to it too because other CPS agencies do the same things.
The State Budget
can be browsed in comfort. (The alternative is to look at a 518 page Word
document.) It's fairly remarkable what a few days hacking can do with modern
tools. This is the FY2005 budget. They changed the report format for
the current budget and I've never had the day or two to switch to it.
While it's not part of DCYF, the NH Court System is a fascinating beast
and has garnered national attention for some embarrassing moments. I
never had time to polish it, but I started several pages on the
state's multiple judicial conduct
entities. The most recent action is that the Supreme Court ruled
in favor of the Judicial Conduct Committee deciding that the law that
established the Judicial Conduct Commission is unconstitutional. If
you think the plaintiffs were just ruled out of existance, reread the
last sentence or follow the link.
Everything else
This deserves to be higher up, but it needs some photos. This
deserves to have a couple hundred Kodachrome slides scanned, but that's
a big job to do it well. "This" is my first longer
than one day bike ride, 2,700 miles from Palo Alto, California to
Billings, Montana (via Canada). It's kinda like the 2003 ride, kinda
unlike it, but just as interesting.
I'm started a series of pages that will be a guide to
Finances for Young Adults. I'm very happy
with the outline and the first "chapters" but I went back to work before
I could write what I really wanted. However, what's there is useful.
I have one of the better and most current
Pamela Smart pages on
the web. Yeah, it surprises me that I have it myself and why I do is
a long story. Had I known I would
have paid better attention to the trial.
Tasteless stuff that is really more
entertaining than tasteless. It's surprising how many people find
this by doing WWW search for tasteless stuff!
Future: I hate glitzy web pages that take forever to load and say little.
I'll put together a page of awful things you can do.
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:
No Microsoft
programs are necessary to appreciate this site.
No Microsoft
programs are necessary to appreciate this site.
