dave.ofmassdestruction.com

Yesterday I received in the mail (the old fashioned mail) a notice that my child support payments were in arrears.

OK, let me go on record with the utmost honesty to say, I have never, ever had children with anyone. Add to that, I can’t even remember the last time I was in Cumberland County where my alleged child is living. As you might imagine, this sent a wave of worry through me that lasted… well… until just a few minutes ago. Lots of bad things can happen to you if you are a “deadbeat dad”. But again, I should mention that I am not a deadbeat dad… or any other kind of dad.

So, what happened? Well, according to the nice woman from the N.C. Child Support Customer Service Center in Raleigh, when someone is in arrears (this guy hasn’t paid in 18 months) the state does a search for that person in a number of statewide databases. The first hit is the lucky person despite date-of-birth and social security numbers matching. Freakin’ brilliant. She suggested that this happens all the time and is easily resolved by her sending a note to the case worker to let them know they’ve got the wrong guy. Of course, I could actually receive another notification and if I do, my lawyer will come-a-calling to NC D.S.S., Cumberland D.S.S., and the NC Child Support Customer Service Center.

The whole thing is kinda sad. I now know how little some kid in Cumberland County is supposed to be receiving – and is not. Its not a lot of money. Its also sad that the folks who spend all their days dealing with deadbeat dads simply can’t find these losers even with the aid of modern tools. Finally, the design of said tools to assist these fine folks is very obviously lacking if it cannot determine something so basic as my date of birth and this deadbeat’s date of birth not matching. I could make a mysql query that would determine that in very short order.

This is obviously a case of resources all the way around. Missing resources at that. Such a shame that the richest country on the planet can’t get something so basic right.

This could have been sooooo much worse

OK – its official. I am now on Facebook. I have had no desire to be there before today. Thanks to mah I had a reason – that was simply to see a photo of one of our friends hanging out between the Obama Girl and the Giuliani Girl. So now what do I do? Fred can probably tell me.

Last night I had dinner with Fred, Luis, and my old friend Matt. It was a good time with some excellent food. Mostly though, it was a chance for Fred and Luis to talk about about the things they have been thinking about in their academic endeavors. Luis has been thinking about how to define (and license) an open web service (like gmail but with the protections of open source) and Fred has been thinking about, among other things, identity and social networks (e.g., web services).

Two smart guys thinking very smart things. I honestly haven’t wrapped my head around everything that is involved here but I have to say that I learned quite a bit last night. Of particular note was Fred’s description of the newly announced Wikimedia distributed search engine. More reading is definitely required.