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Sorry it’s been so long - after the Site5 screwup, I’ve been procrastinating having to manually import a bunch of my older posts, plus I lost a number of them, so I’ve just been putting it off for a while.

But now most of them are back, many without the original images, sadly.  Hopefully now I’ll get back to posting more regularly.

So, I finally got a new phone last weekend. I had my Treo for almost exactly 2 years now (actually, it had been Jessica’s and I stole it when the campaign stuff had started up). Well, the Treo finally died. It was either when I accidentally threw it across the asphalt from a height of about 5 feet when getting out of my car, or it was later when the cat dumped water all over it and it sat in the water all night. Hard to say what caused it really. It was on it’s last little digital legs anyhow, as the ‘p’ and ‘m’ buttons no longer worked, which made for some pretty difficult typing from time to time. It’s amazing how often you actually need the letter ‘p’ in a sentance.
So, we went down to the verizon shop to see if I had any insurance on the little guy. Turns out I did not, plus I still had two months left on my contract so I’d have to buy a phone at full retail. So, I reasoned out loud that it perhaps made more economical sense to just ride out my contract for a couple months and cancel and meanwhile go sign up at the Cingular booth 20 feet away and get a big ol’ discount. The verizon guy thought maybe we could work something out. Hmm.
So, I ended up getting a new phone there. It’s a Moto w315, which looks something like the PEBL, but with a little antenna. I think it’s my favorite phone ever. The thing about this phone that I love is that it’s simple. No camera, no video, no games, no bluetooth, no fancy ringtones (i think), etc. It makes calls, txt msg, contact list - that’s it. After the monstrosity that was the Treo, it’s fantastic change of pace. It’s cute and light, the battery lasts forever, and it does exactly what I need it to do and absolutely nothing else. A good first step to simplfying your life, huh?

The other thing I learned from this experience is that I hate buying phones. I made a mental connection that I’m sure most people made long ago, which is that it fits within the class of experiences that buying a car does. The salespeople are on commission, there is a set of things that they know that you don’t and there is a great amount of latitude in what can be taken and given in a transaction. I hate this kind of sale. While buying this phone, halfway through the transaction the salesperson told me that “my manager just told me” that there would have to be a $20 “early upgrade” fee - which I’m 50% sure was made up on the spot, but I didn’t have the strength or mental stamina to stay in that store a minute longer to argue about it. I asked my wife if she thought we should get the undercoating or not. The bottom line is that I fundamentally cannot stand being lied to or decieved and that is what buying a phone or a car is all about. “We can’t do this”, “Oh, you want text messages? That’s another $20/month”, “Yeah, it CAN get video, but you have to get the unlimited data plan”, etc, etc.
Since I’ve never been a sales rep there, I don’t know what the bottom line really is and I hate fighting for it. For the same usage, any phone can essentially cost between $30 and $90 per month, depending on how exactly it is that they screw you. Right after I got the phone, my friend pointed me at this at the Consumerist:
8 Confessions of a former Verizon sales rep
If you have to buy or re-up your cell phone, please give this a read - maybe if everyone knows their stupid lies and tricks, they’ll move to a fair sales model and my blood pressure won’t have to rise every year or two for no good reason.

Hey everybody – long time, no blog. A couple of things happening I thought I should let everyone know about.

For one, Mark Warners Forward Together PAC has an online contest poll for your bestest candidate and our very own Jerry McNerney – the congressional candidate here in the 11th. In fact, I don’t think I’ve blogged about that yet – Jerry won the democratic primary here, so congratulations to him.

For those of you who don’t know, I volunteered for him briefly in 2004, ran against him for a while here and then backed out in favor of Margee Ensign who also had to back out shortly thereafter. Anywho, Jerry won and has some great people on his staff this time around who I really respect and I’m following his campaign closely. He is competing in a few online contests – he recently won the DFA one and is now in the running for Mark Warners MapChangers. So, since I like McNerney and would like him to win, and I like Warners group – please do take a moment to vote for him in this contest.

Forward Together also just posted a blog entry about the Sunlight Foundation, which is a great sign. The Sunlight Foundation is where Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry went after the Advocates for Rasiej campaign that I wrote about several times here, so it’s great that Warner and his team are thinking that way.

Lastly for today, I wanted to share that Margee has invited Jessica and I to join her on her Africa trip this year. So, next week we will be traveling to Rwanda and Kenya for about 3 weeks. I’ll be bringing along the camcorder and camera, so hopefully we’ll have a lot to share when we get back.

Here we are, back into the Tri For Fun series of Pleasanton Sprint Triathlons. I did it last weekend, and this time Jessica did it too!

I actually made it all the way through this time without a bike dying on me, but unfortunately, Jessica did not. Her bike tire went flat a few miles into the ride and she had to turn back and do the run.

For those of you interested, here are my results (there are no rankings – I don’t think they post them for this event) :

I’m not sure what the next Tri will be, as I think Jessica and I will both be gone for the next Tri for Fun.

Wow, you ignore your blog for a while and what do you get? 100 spam comments on one post. Man.

Well, it has been a while now since I’ve been posting here, but I’ll try to get it up to speed again – there is a lot going on. I was trying to get another site launched – a fun project I’ve been working on with Margee Ensign, interviewing people around Stockton about issues and social solutions there. However, my video editing skills aren’t what I had hoped and it’s just taking forever to get them turned out. The more I put off posting here about it, the more I didn’t want to post anything else and alas, the site got ignored.

The new project will be called DemocracyStoryProject.com, but there is just a holding page there right now. Soon though – I have enough raw footage to get a couple stories up. Maybe I’ll start putting some of them here as I’m doing them.

As for other things, I have been busy. I have been working with the Grassroots Champion Coalition on their California Precinct Captains program. I’m trying to help out with some programming, but the Advokit codebase is… well, let’s just say special for right now. The program is great and the people involved are the best, it’s just the software that needs a little work. Or, you know, complete rewrite. However, I am a Captain now, so if you live in my precinct and you’re a Dem, watch out because I’m coming to meet you.

I’m also trying to stay involved in the Congressional race, and being a Captain I am also trying to stay basically neutral until the mid-terms. I’ve spoken with both major campaigns (Thomas didn’t respond to my request) and it’s certainly interesting. I am not endorsing either candidate, though the McNerney team has been kind enough to ask my advice on a number of things, so I am doing some volunteer work for them. Maybe I’ll post more on that later.

I have also been contacted by Mark Warner’s ForwardTogether PAC web team about what they are trying to do with technology, and I am very impressed. I would recommend checking out their site and I’m sure I will write much more about them and my involvement with them in the coming months.

Lastly, I have recently been invited to a Communications Symposium on the UOP Campus on April 20th, where I’ll be on the Professional Panel, which should be fun and/or interesting. I’ll try to get some pictures or video or something to post here.

On a non-political front, I just competed in my first Triathalon of the season a few weeks ago in Oxnard (near where I grew up) in the Strawberry Fields Tri. It was great, nice and short, and fun to be back in my home town for it. For those keeping score, it was a 400yd swim (which was cancelled due to the waters being too dangerous, so we high-kneed it through 200yds of water – ouch), then an 11mi bike and 5k run. Much fun.

Well, that’s all for now – I’ll try to be a bit more regular with these from now on.

On Monday, I was able to attend a speech by Paul Rusesabagina, whose life was dramatized in the recent movie Hotel Rwanda.

Mr. Rusesabagina was a lively speaker with a very strong message and an incredible life story. For those of you who have not seen the movie, which I would recommend, he was a hotel manager living in Rwanda at the outbreak of genocide in April 1994. He managed to keep his family and 1200 other Rwandans alive in his hotel for several months while the international community abandoned them. His story is inspiring and rare.

It is the kind of story that causes you to wonder how you would act in that situation. Would you let people into your home to save them from murderers, even though it put your own family at risk? Would you stay behind to face incredible danger when given an opportunity to leave, because if you left, you knew that over 1000 men, women and children would certainly be slaughtered? How would you react to someone asking you to please tell them when the soldiers were close, so that they could have time to bring their families to the roof and jump off for an easier death? If a man handed you a machete and pointed a gun at you – would you kill another?

These are questions that Paul faced and he acted with incredible heroism and courage. These are situations that others face in the Sudan and elsewhere in the world now, and if history is any indication, will continue to happen long into the future. This burden is ours to confront as a society, to face as a world community. Pauls example is heart breaking in that it is so very rare. Most would not resist and risk themselves, but would give in, participate, and give excuses after.

Paul has started the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to help women and children affected by the genocides of several African nations, including the Sudan. He will be coming out with a book called “An Ordinary Man” next year, I will try to link to it when it goes on sale.

If you would like to learn more about the Rwandan genocide, some books I would recommend would be We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Shake Hands with the Devil by Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, or one that I’m currently reading, A Probl