The Old Man in better days (he fell May 3, 2003). Rest in pieces (sorry!)

I've been too busy for ages to update this as well as it should be. I've saved the old page as index-old.html while I reorganize this mess.

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, well, trips with one or more family members

• 2014 was Paula's and my 25th wedding anniversary. For our honeymoon, we had gone to Prince Edward Island, for this anniversary we went to Nova Scotia, with some dawdling along the way, like along the Bay of Fundy where we spent more time than before watching the tide.
• In 2013 Paula started hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia. She tracked the preparation and trip on a blog, Paula's Long Walk. Like most people who attempt it, she didn't finish, but it was a quite an interesting experience anyway.
• Summer of 2003 was Mom's Fiftieth Birthday I-don't-want-to-grow-up Bicycle Ride Across America. This included Ric and Hannah, and multiple web pages. Mom brought Hannah and Dad, but those two had to return home in August from Montana, Mom made it to Michigan in October.
• Predating the family, World Wide Web, and even the Internet, my first longer than one day bike ride was in 1974 and was a 2700 mile long break from Pittsburgh. It went from Palo Alto, California to Billings, Montana. One of these ages I intend to scan some of the Kodachrome slides from that trip and get them on the web. For now, all I have are the daily letters I wrote home to keep my family updated.

Here is more of Paula's activities.

Ric's links

I'm a retired software engineer with roots that go way back to the days of blinkenlights, 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 early 2000s, but there is still much to be done. Most of my recent web work has been weather related, not just here but also in support of the blog Watts Up With That?.

The (early?) 2020s has been dominated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease Covid-19. The frightening exponential growth that northern Italy and New York City endured convinced me that it was not a matter of if I would be infected, but when. Fortunately, those early outbreaks did settle down, but at the cost of dragging out the pandemic months longer than had it burned through the world, much like the 1918 influenza pandemic did. On the plus side, we had time to develop marvelous new vaccines made from Messenger RNA.

I wrote and automatically update a series of web pages on The Exponential Rise (and Fall) of Covid-19. I had hoped they would have some predicitive power to see when the pandemic was heading, but the exponent generally changes too quickly. The rise of the Delta variant is quite visible, as it hit as were getting close to squashing the damn virus. Many states were reporting a steep decline in new Covid-19 cases, but as Delta made inroads, the decline flattened and began to rise to distressingly high levels again. Then came Omicron, then Omicron collapsed and nothing appears to be waiting in the wings, so the pandemic may be over. Well, maybe after a "sub variant" is done. Nevertheless, I added a section in March 2022 about myocarditis and its link to the mRNA vaccines. The latter third of page discusses how most cases may be linked how the vaccines are administered and that restoring a once standard step (aspiration) is likely why Denmark has a much lower incidence of myocarditis.

On 2022 Mar 15 the US Senate unanimously passed a bill to put all states that observe Daylight Saving Time be on DST permanently. They passed the bill with no discussion, but as it was two days after the US returned to DST they were groggy and in no mood to debate. There is a lot to discuss and history to recall and I collected most of the issues I can think of in that web page.

My favorite pages

• Total solar eclipses are totally awesome. Here are two, from 2017 and 2024.
• The Blizzard of '78 in Marlboro, MA
• The Exponential Rise (and Fall) of Covid-19.
• The Year without a Summer
• Snow Depth Days
• Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics. It's more than a bit dated.
• Deimos events of the Martian Festival
• Nepal Nose Not mine, but still a favorite.

Weather and climate

• My climate collection started with the essay Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics which is both an introduction to two sides of the climate debate and chides the scientists who seem to have forgotten what the scientific method and scientific discourse are all about. Other items there include references to preserving old web sites, other essays on topics I find interesting, and various letters and testimony presented at various hearings.

  1816: The Year without a Summer is the home of two main essays about this pivotal year in New Hampshire history. The two main essays there are an old one looking at the weather events and results, and a later one that goes into quantitative detail about the actual weather and what drove it to historic levels. I also have a link to a scan of microfilm of William Plumer's weather journal from Epping NH from 1796 to 1823.

• Sutton Mills 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.

• Snow Depth Days: definition and multi-season New England summary and Snow Depth Days of 2023-24.
• Photos from Penacook of the historic winter of 2007/2008. The photos make up for the dreadful presentation.

• The Blizzard of '78 in Marlboro, MA My account, written 20 years later. And The Blizzard of '78 Addendum, a collection of related storm stuff that needs a home.

Engineering, electronic toys, err, tools, etc.

	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 Sutton Mills, NH for the year.
	This is very much not an electronic toy. I have a Raspberry Shake and Boom seismograph and infrasound recorder that I bought to record wind turbine infrasound. I quckly realized it is an astonishing instrument that can record earthquakes nearly as well as research grade instruments. And vehicles, ice chipping, helicopters, quarry blasting, and even a meteor explosion..
	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.
	I got involved in a field test of a new rain gauge because I like to measure precipitation by weighing it. I over did it a bit, as the section on weighing cold air clearly proves.
	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.
	Besides Roses, I've been around long enough to see and create a fair amount of folklore. There's some stuff there that will confuse Millennials worse than a rotary phone! Like computers that execute off a drum. Huh?
	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, a program called GPSBabel, 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

• DCYF: New Hampshires's Child Protective Services agency This provides an overview of DCYF and links to news reports and other accounts of DCYF "assistance".

• 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.

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.

Really ancient stuff

Here lies some stuff that is so old that few people would miss it if it didn't exist. OTOH, there are always people looking for old stuff on the web or from pre-WWW days. While I'm not really a horder (at least not an excesive horder), it's so easy to keep computer files around, here's some of them.

• [From Weather and Climate] For a while, I was active in the effort to get New Hampshire out of RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. By extension, we want to see RGGI shutdown altogether. I've created a web page to document and track the RGGI retreat.

  However, that opportunity wasn't seized NH is still in RGGI, and the last two governors have or would veto any attempt to get out. My web page for it is pretty much moribund. I really need to get to it, if only to update CO2 auction results.

• [From Everything else] When we were in the process of fixing up a number of things around the house, one was to fix a ceiling crack that we thought was from water damage, and Paula contracted with NHCRS Services, LLC to deal with all that. Around the same time the firm was getting known for shoddy work and difficulties in getting their attention.

  We shared the pain! Don't employ them for, umm, anything. See our explanations at Joshua Garfinkle and NHCRS. They may have since moved to Tennessee.

• [From Political/Government pages] 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.
• [From Political/Government pages] 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.
• [From 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".

No Microsoft programs are necessary to appreciate this site.

Contact Ric Werme or return to his home page.

Last updated 2024 Apr 20.