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for big picture -- it's about 98K, so ask yourself how badly you need to
see my picture.
I'm a graduate of Sonoma State University (M.A., History, 1998), software engineer, and author. The titles of my books and publications appear below.
A sample of some of my published books (along with ordering information). You can read the first few chapters of my newest book here.
Full text of my scholarly journal articles.
A full list of all my published popular magazine and newspaper articles, with the full text of most of them.
"How to Become Wealthy"--an ongoing series from my weblog, conveniently packaged.
Since most of the local demand for software engineers was C#/.NET, I learned them right now. If you want to see what I have been up to do since August 25, when I found that my job was going away, this page shows a cute little graphing application that I built which is similar in intent to the Java applet below--but written completely from scratch.
And here's a C# program that actually does something useful: it checks for broken links on web pages, and gives you a report of where they are.
A new section that I will be expanding over time includes some real world examples of useful or fun Java applets. To see an example of a Java applet that provides a variety of interesting crime statistics for California that you can use to plot crime rates for selected counties, click here . (Sorry the data only goes through 1993 -- I am still updating the data files.)
You can use the plotting applet to plot any CSV data that meets certain criteria. Go here for an example.
I have recently started to learn to use the Eclipse IDE for Java, and so I have updated the JAR files to use the Java 1.6 compiler's somewhat more demanding type checking--and I fixed a couple of relatively minor bugs at the same time.
Here's a multithreaded Java applet with source that's kind of fun. I call it Pong On Speed.
Java Sample Code for those of you just learning Java.
Here's a link to a group that I think very highly of who specialize in helping very troubled teen girls: New Haven Residential Treatment Center. They are expensive, but your insurance is likely to at least partly cover it. If not, because it is a medical facility, and they are providing more than just counseling services, you should have no problem deducting the costs under medical care on Schedule A--and you will have no problem exceeding the 7.5% AGI limits on Schedule A if you have a daughter that needs the level of help that New Haven provides. I am convinced that they saved my daughter's life. You may also find Struggling Teens a useful site to visit as well for information and emotional support from other parents going through the same struggles.
Back in 2002, I had the only serious surgery that I have ever experienced: a
deviated septum repair and turbinate reduction. If these exciting forms of sinus surgery
are on your list of ways to spend time and money, you might want to read my
account of what I have experienced.
Astrophotography
The Beauty of Where I Live
Are those expensive refractors worth the extra money over the cheap ones?
I'm in the telescope accessory manufacturing business! If you have an equatorial telescope mount, you might want to see the gadgets that I am now making.
Okay, maybe you aren't home schooling your kids. Maybe you are just trying to remember how do all that stuff that you learned 25 years ago, when the teachers used a different, and often more effective way of teaching this stuff. Here is where I will be throwing stuff that I put together to help my kids. Maybe you can use it as well. You are welcome to print it out for personal use. (Feel free to throw money into the tip jar at the top of the page.)
If you want to use it in a classroom, or reproduce it for commercial purposes, let's talk first. I'm not unreasonable about this, but I would like to make a tiny bit of money to justify the effort.
Signed Arithmetic -- Basic Four Operations: Forget the fancy number line theory. That's fine for some kids; most others will just suffer eye glazeover. They want simple rules that they can use without thinking too hard.
Click
for big picture -- it's about 98K, so ask yourself how badly you need to
see my picture.
I've wanted one for fifteen years, and since I moved to Idaho, where car insurance is cheap, and Corvettes are even cheaper, I decided to splurge. It's a 2000--with active handling, the G92 performance axle ratio, glass top, heads-up display, and really impressive gas mileage: 20-21 mpg around town, and 33-34 mpg on the highway (if I set the cruise control at 55 mph).
Questions? Ideas? I hate to make sending me mail so difficult, but I get way too much spam. Those nasty spambots pick my email address out of a mail to, so just mail to clayton, the at sign, and my domain name, which is claytoncramer.com.