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In about 30 minutes, I’ll be at the Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup, where I’m scheduled to give a presentation on the newly released Rails 2.0.

Here are the slides I’ll be using (basically - I’ve made a few changes…) :

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Sorry about the complete loss of all my posts for the previous year or so, but Site5 just went down and lost everything I had.  I have the last 10 cached, so I’ll re-add those, but everything from Jan - April is pretty much gone.  Second time, second host in a year.  Fantastic.  And I still haven’t learned to back anything up.

My hosting provider, Planet Argon, had a major, major screwup this past week. Their server that was running this blog got hosed and they apparently had no backups or anything, so it not only took days to get back up and running, but I’m missing the last few months worth of blog posts. I have backups, but it’s going to take me a while to get them all imported again. I apologize – I’m thinking of moving the blog to Vox or possibly just another hosting provider, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.

I have been becoming more and more interested in the opportunities and promise of municipal wireless access lately, and I found out that Ripon has begun deploying a wireless network across the entire city.

From the article, the network would provide :

- real-time monitoring of city wells and pump station data can be collected and sent to public works supervisors and mobile field units;
- government vehicles fitted with the high-speed mesh will benefit from the systems’ built-in position and location capability enabling the deployment of an Automatic Vehicle Location system without the city having to purchase GPS equipment. This will allow dispatchers to task the closest mobile police units to incidents and allow them to keep track of the units during critical incidents and .emergencies;
- allowing remote access to information generated by Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping of hazardous material storage areas, utility infrastructure locations and the development of tactical plans for commercial building responses.

The project is being spearheaded by Chief of Police Richard Bull, and will cost about $550k, with possibly $75k awarded from Homeland Security funding. Lockheed Martin will be deploying the Motorola MESH network hardware.

I think this is something we need to see across the whole district. We are starting to chip the tip of an iceberg of opportunity here in letting our government function better and more efficiently. It also provides individuals more information and control in their government and businesses with new models and opportunities.

They see the citywide wireless network as a way to improve efficiency, to allow city workers and police officers to do their work more effectively from the field.

In the future, it is also envisioned to provide VoIP for city departments, hand held PDA access in the field, Fire Department uses, and possibly civic access.

I will write more extensively about the promise of municipal wireless for our district in the near future, but for now Micah at the Rasiej campaign does a pretty good job of providing an overview of that vision.

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 h