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Ever since Kris at Alexander the Average recommended to me the MilBlogs ring, I have been following a few dozen military blogs on a daily basis.

Iraq soldiers blogging about their experiences has fascinated me. So many soldiers in the front lines are keeping regular blogs for thier friends and family to read, it is as if we can listen in on all of these soldiers. My wife being a history student, we own books that consist almost entirely of letters home from previous wars, such as War Letters by Andrew Carroll, and others. Today we can get these letters home as they happen, not 20 years later – it can help us get an entirely new perspective on military life and war from the soldiers point of view, in real time – faster than it would even take a letter to be shipped home.

Anyhow, I bring this up since one of the blogging soldiers I had read was wounded this week. Army Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss of TC Override was injured by shrapnel in the arm and leg by an IED a few days ago. His wife has been posting to his website with updates on his condition.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his wife, his children and himself. I wish him a speedy recovery, and I thank him for his service.

We got a mention in the Tracy Press today, in an article titled “Pombo won’t face Machado or Matthews”. For the last few months, people have been speculating that either Mike Machado, a State Senator from Linden, or Assemblywoman Barbara Matthews would run in the Democratic primary for Congress here (against me). It now looks as though neither will. Apparently, I’m too intimidating. It’s understandable.

From the article :

Another announced Democratic candidate is Dublin computer engineer Scott Chacon. Chacon is similar to many of newer district residents, because he commutes two hours a day.

Chacon said he plans to limit contributions to $100 and overcome his lack of name recognition by developing an Internet-based campaign.

“I believe that Pombo’s abuse of power and ethics problems are becoming far more widely known in our district,� Chacon said. “Pombo’s actions have given us an opportunity.�

In other news, Jessica and I are going river rafting on the American River this weekend, so we won’t be walking or otherwise much working on the campaign, but we will be back next week, and I’ll try to get some good pictures – I hear it’s very pretty up there.

As far as the campaign itself goes, I’m working on reworking and otherwise finishing up our full “Plan to Win” document, and fleshing out an idea for helping out with the horrible traffic problems so many of us face out here. I’ll get both of them up on the site as soon as they’re ready.

Much more on the way – we’re just really getting started now.

Scott

Almost every day this week has been spent with my wife Jessica in her classroom, finishing up the last days of school – grading, entering scores, cleaning out the classroom. So, the posts have been sparse. Now that school is out and our schedules have opened up a little, we’ll be ramping up our activity again.

Speaking of Jessica, she just finished a 0.75 mile swim at Lake Del Valle in Livermore. It was her first competitive swim in quite a while and she did a great job. I had the honor of marking everyone for the race, so I wrote everyone’s number on them. We met a lot of great people there and had a good time, so we’ll hopefully go to more events in the future.

In fact, we’re going to start training for Pleasanton’s Tri For Fun triathalon, which is in four weeks, so if you are a local athlete, I hope to see you there. I’ll let everyone know how our “training” progresses.

On the campaign front, we’re getting our research volunteers organized with their topics, so the Issues section of this site should be more filled out by the end of summer.

I hope all the teachers out there are starting to wind down, and all of the fathers have a happy Father’s Day.

Scott

I’ve had to deal with a couple of issues this weekend – for one, the mail system has been broken on our servers for a few days. We got hit by a spammer which for some reason was not being properly blocked by our mail system, and they queued hundreds of thousands of mails in our system. I was forced to flush the queue, which lost all of the mail in it.

I have since blocked the spammer and fixed the mail system, but if you tried to send mail to us or used the contact forms on the site in the last few days – I probably did not get it. I apologize, and I hope that you will resend it. We will be moving to a new, better server in a few weeks, which should help in the future.

Thanks again,
Scott

Update – it appears that I fixed it, and I believe everything finally got through. So, disregard.

Here is Fridays podcast. I hope you all have a good weekend, I may see some of you at your doorsteps, and I may see some of you at the Livermore Rodeo.

Don’t forget to call in with comments at 206-20-CHACON

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Tags:
chacon, conversation, podcast, campaign, politics, political podcast, politician podcast, politician

If you tried to visit the site this afternoon, I apologize for the short outage. Our hosting company, ServerBeach, had a power loss for about 4 hours and all of the servers there were down. At some point I’ll have to get a backup server that is somewhere else, but for now I just feel bad for the guys working there – I bet it’s been a heck of a bad day.

The big news is the recent arrest of five Lodi men suspected of terrorism. Lodi is, of course, one of the cities in our district and this is just shocking to the small community. For a great overview, please go to the Lodi News-Sentinel website as they are doing a series of reports on different aspects of the story. For a really scary read, see the FBI affidavit (United States v. Hamid Hayat).

I’ll keep everyone up to date on this as things unfold and especially as we eventually get out to Lodi to go door to door.

Good morning, everyone. I wanted to take a few minutes to let you know that Jessica and I went door to door this last weekend. We didn’t finish the precinct, and we only went out on Sunday, but it is a definite start and I learned a lot.

We passed out bundles of the flyer I posted earlier and the business card I posted even earlier than that, along with little black and white half sheets of ways to volunteer. We had a number of good conversations and people were incredibly nice. I was actually a little surprised – from my previous walking experiences, it makes a big difference when the actual candidate is at someone’s house, rather than someone who is volunteering for them.

I was also surprised at how many people gave us mean looks until we proved that we were not trying to sell them anything and were not from a church. The first line was met mostly with scowls and then when I said “and I am running for Congress”, smiles emerged. It was actually very encouraging. I am also hoping I got at least one podcast interview out of it, but I’ll let you know how that shapes up.

In total, it was a great experience, and encouraging in that I had a good time, which lets me know that the next year of doing this is going to be an incredible adventure. We did forget to bring the camera this weekend, so I’ll try to get some snapshots next weekend, when we finish up that precinct.

Thanks!
Scott

Here’s my Thursday recorded podcast, and some quick updates on the campaign.

Printing was done today, so Jessie went to pick it up. On the whole, it came out pretty well, and we are hoping that we will get through it all by the end of the month. 1000 houses by the time Jessica goes to Europe for her study program.

FEC has my statement of candidacy on file, which was pretty neat to see. You can find it on fec.gov, along with everyone elses. The committee papers haven’t been processed yet, but they were sent in a bit later.

Alameda county faxed me an application for voter registration information, but I have to go into the office in person to pick it up. I’m thinking of mailing in the payment, and just going to pick up the CD, otherwise it’s a good half day of travel for the two trips.

AFL-CIO robo-called me with an anti-Pombo spot basically calling him a tool of the oil and gas companies a day after the DCCC aired anti-Pombo radio spots on Memorial day. Apparently, people are starting to pay a lot more attention to him this year, which will make this a lot more fun.

Working on new website functionality, which will be all open sourced, so look for that.

Lastly, we’re walking this Saturday, so I’ll post some pictures on Monday, hopefully. I think I’m going to start a little counter here pretty soon too – number of houses visited meter, or something.

Don’t forget to call in with comments at 206-20-CHACON

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Tags:
chacon, conversation, podcast, campaign, politics, political podcast, politician podcast, politician

This past weekend was Memorial day weekend, and I spent much of it working on campaign things. I wanted to walk precincts this weekend, but the printing was not done until today, so that was not really an option.

I do hope that many of you that were given a day off had the opportunity to take a few moments and think about the men and women who have served and died for our country. Whether we agreed with the wars or the administrations prosecuting them, we have to be awed by the selflessness and sacrifice of the soldiers that serve, to this day.

I thought specifically of the liberators. As I’ve mentioned before, Jessica will be traveling to Europe in July for a Summer Seminar Program on Holocaust and Jewish Resistance, and has been studying the subject even more than usual lately. We have talked recently of the American soldiers who liberated many of the camps – in some instances being so horrified of what they found that they forced the people in nearby towns to walk through the camps to see what they had allowed to happen.

My Grandfather was