Scott Chacon

This Year

2009-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

So I basically stopped blogging this year, more or less since I started working for GitHub. I’ve been busy, what can I say? I wrote a technical book through APress publishing called Pro Git, I’ve traveled all over the world speaking at dozens of conferences on Git and GitHub, and my wife had our first child, Josephine.

I think writing the book is what really killed the blogging. I was writing for hours every day or two, then spending hours each day the next week reading over comments telling me how I was both technically wrong and generally bad at writing in English. Sitting down and writing a blog post wasn’t really what I wanted to do after that.

Travel-wise it’s been a pretty amazing year. According to Tripit, I’ve traveled 74,360 mi to 31 cities in 11 countries over the course of 80 days this year. That’s almost a quarter of the year on the road. This year alone I’ve been to Shanghai, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Berlin (twice), Poznan, Stockholm, Oslo, London (twice), Barcelona, Madrid, plus San Diego, Boston, Vegas, Chicago, New York, Virginia and Honolulu.

Physically I’ve changed kind of a lot, too. I got more or less in shape again this year, mostly due to a simple routine of running and the hundred pushups program. Though I haven’t quite yet made it all the way to 100 pushups in a row, I can now do about 70 or 80, which is pretty cool. I also lost about 30 pounds this year, from a high of about 195 when my baby was born to about 165 now.

Finally, there is Josephine. When the year started, Jessica was a couple months pregnant and now we have a little 5 month old baby girl. I was never really a fan of all the “it changes your whole life” comments, but it really does. It is by far the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. She even has a little passport already and has traveled to Hawaii and Spain with us.

Overall, this has been one of the most amazing years of my life, and I’m really quite sad that I didn’t write more during it. I will definitely try to reverse that trend over the coming year as I have more amazing trips coming up (for example, Australia, New Zealand, Paris, Ireland just in the next few months), and there will be no shortage of baby stories and GitHub amazingness.

Looking forward to this year, everybody. Skál!

Moved my blog to GitHub Pages

2009-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

It’s been a while since I made a big blogging change - I’ve been on Wordpress for a pretty long time now and have generally liked it, but the theme wasn’t so hot and the general zeitgiest of my postings have veered much more into programming than politics over the last year or so. So, I thought it might be time for a change.

As of this post, my blogging software of choice is Jekyll and my new hosting provider is GitHub Pages. Which is pretty cool for me, since I am part of the small team here at GitHub.

In the past, I have had two catastrophic data losses from my hosting providers losing a good number of my posts. Each time I thought I would finally remember to setup something that would back them up, but I never did. Now I finally have a secure backup for my blog data, since everything is done via a Git repository. How it works is I keep the source for my blog in a specially named GitHub repository and every time I push to it, GitHub pixies automagically generate my static blog pages for me.

So, now my blog and content are all available via a public Git repository, if you’re interested in using it for anything. I copied the theme and javascript from Michael Bleigh, and you’re welcome to copy it from me, in turn (do remember to credit Michael, though).

I do love GitHub.

London Git Training

2009-02-02T00:00:00-08:00

At the end of March, I’m going to be traveling to Europe for Scotland on Rails to do a Git talk (also likely a talk at the University of Edinburgh, if you’re there).

While there, I thought I would do a more in-depth training session in London for all our friends toiling in SVN heck or otherwise wanting to sharpen their Git-Fu. My friends at Codebase have helped me rent a space, catering and all that so we can have a nice long session learning the ins and outs of Git.

If you are interested in signing up for the training, which is happening on April 3rd (a Friday), you can check out our website at gitlondon.com. If you know anyone in the UK who might be interested in doing it, please do let them know. If you’re in the UK and don’t want to do the training, but do want to go out for beers after, send me a note.

On Mercurial

2008-11-24T00:00:00-08:00

It seems that a rather popular theme when reading about distributed SCMs on a blog post is that someone says that they hate or love Git, where the hate is generally that it's hard to learn, unintuitive, etc. Then, generally without exception, a mercurial user jumps in on the comments and says something like "I tried Git, but it was impossible to learn, so I'm using Mercurial and it's easy-peasy". That person is wrong.
Git is not hard to learn. At least, not any more difficult than Mercurial is. There, I said it. If you think that Git is like learning Linux - powerful but steep in the curve of learning, while Mercurial is like Mac - more constrained, but far easier to learn, you have either tried the systems a long time ago or have never really tried them and are just repeating the Merc FUD.
Don't get me wrong, it certainly used to be this way. My point here is that if you take a fresh look at the two systems, the majority of beginner to intermediate tasks that you have to do with a DSCM are very similar in both systems and being sufficiently familiar with one takes very little effort to use the other.
I state this because of the incredibly scientific research I concluded tonight, wherein I used hg. I have been a Git guy for several years now and have never previously touched mercurial, and I dove right in a few hours ago and took some notes so I could share what is _not_ intuitive in hg, even from an advanced DSCM user, and to give it a fair shake. Here is what I have concluded:

Git and Mercurial have nearly the same learning curve
Some things are easier / more intuitive in Git, and some in Hg
Both systems have a similar number of overall common commands, of which 90% are identically named
You can pretty easily move from one to the other for basic tasks

Let me get into a bit of detail about what I found. As my first piece of evidence, I will look at the help menu. If you simply type 'git' or 'hg' on the command line, hg will give you the following 17 commands :

 add        add the specified files on the next commit
 annotate   show changeset information per file line
 clone      make a copy of an existing repository
 commit     commit the specified files or all outstanding changes
 diff       diff repository (or selected files)
 export     dump the header and diffs for one or more changesets
 init       create a new repository in the given directory
 log        show revision history of entire repository or files
 merge      merge working directory with another revision
 parents    show the parents of the working dir or revision
 pull       pull changes from the specified source
 push       push changes to the specified destination
 remove     remove the specified files on the next commit
 serve      export the repository via HTTP
 status     show changed files in the working directory
 update     update working directory

and Git will give you the following 21 commands:

   add        Add file contents to the index
   bisect     Find the change that introduced a bug by binary search
   branch     List, create, or delete branches
   checkout   Checkout a branch or paths to the working tree
   clone      Clone a repository into a new directory
   commit     Record changes to the repository
   diff       Show changes between commits, commit and working tree
   fetch      Download objects and refs from another repository
   grep       Print lines matching a pattern
   init       Create an empty git repository 
   log        Show commit logs
   merge      Join two or more development histories together
   mv         Move or rename a file, a directory, or a symlink
   pull       Fetch from and merge with another repository 
   push       Update remote refs along with associated objects
   rebase     Forward-port local commits to the updated 
   reset      Reset current HEAD to the specified state
   rm         Remove files from the working tree and from index
   show       Show various types of objects
   status     Show the working tree status
   tag        Create, list, delete or verify a tag object

Take a good look at that, because there is not a lot of frickin' difference. If you know one, you basically know the other. I can attest to that because I didn't need to look up a lot to figure out how to use hg - not because it's so super simple, but because it's nearly identical (for the basic things).
One of the things I hear a lot is that Git has a billion esoteric commands that are cryptic, magical and impossible to remember. That... is true. However, it doesn't matter. What matters are the porcelain commands that are meant to be used by the end user, and there are about 30 of them - the 21 above plus some special stuff like 'stash' and 'submodule'. On the other hand, if you type 'hg help', you get a list of 41 commands.
Now, there are another 100 commands that git will respond to, but they are plumbing commands and are just there in case you want to build something novel - using them is the equivalent of opening up Mercurial and modifying the source. I happen to use a bunch of them to do some really weird stuff that is just not possible in Hg, but there is no reason users even need to know they're there. They are not in the path (as of 1.6) - out of sight, out of mind. As far as a new user is concerned, Git is simpler in it's command set then Hg.
Now, let's look at a simple use of hg - creating a new hg repo and commiting and import:

mkdir test1; cd test1
hg init
cp [files] .
hg add .
hg commit -m 'my message'
hg log

Now, let's look at the same thing in Git:

s/hg/git/g

It's exactly the same thing. clone, add, annotate*, commit, diff, init, log, merge*, pull*, push, rm, status - these are all basically identical in the two systems. (annotate is generally called 'blame' in git, but 'git annotate' will also work, and merge/pull work slightly differently but do largely the same type of thing) This is the core of both systems, these commands are what you spend nearly all of your time doing, and they are almost exactly the same.
Now for the fun part.

Things that are Confusing in Mercurial

I get to listen to Mercs take the high ground all the time about how git is hard to learn and the UI is confusing - now it's my turn. Here are the things I had to go look up because I didn't get it and even the 'hg help' wasn't helping.
You have to set your username via 'vim ~/.hgrc'
In Git, one of the first things you do is :

$ git config --global user.name 'Scott Chacon'
$ git config --global user.email 'schacon@gmail.com'

In Mercurial, far as I can figure, you gotta do that by hand. There is an 'hg showconfig', but no setter (again, far as I can tell). That means you have to look up a snippet of what the actual config format is and paste that into your ~/.hgrc file manually before your commits will stop complaining that no user is set. PITA.
There is no staging area
This is really just a Gitter wondering how Mercs do it, but the lack of a staging area is something I didn't know I would miss. The lack of control over what versions of what files you're committing seems like a huge, huge missing feature to me (again, only because I'm used to Git). People argue that it keeps it simpler, but you can get the equivalent functionality by adding a '-a' to the 'git commit' command every time, which a lot of people do. In my initial foray, that was the only place where Git was actually more complicated than Hg - ignoring the staging functionality takes an extra '-a'.
How do I setup a remote repository?
OK, I have this Hg repository, and I want to create a remote one and push to it. I know I am being an idiot here, but I literally could not figure out how to do this short of doing an 'hg clone ' and looking at the .hg/hgrc file to see what was added to allow 'hg push' to know where to go. I figured out that you could specify it on the command line, but the thought of typing a url every time I want to push made me throw up a little in my mouth. I could not find the equivalent of a 'git remote' where I could add and manipulate my remote repositories without editing the '.hg/hgrc' file. I couldn't find it in the hg book, either. Perhaps in the comments someone could enlighten me.
I setup a repo on BitBucket and the instructions on how to push into it were simply 'clone this', and then I assume you're supposed to pull your files in and then push, but what if you already have a repo? This drove me nuts, and I still don't know how to do it.
Then, for Act II of this little play, I wanted to know how to have another remote - say I want to be able to push my repo to my staging server for deployment and my central server for collaboration. Again, could not figure out how to add it - I ventured a guess and just copied the line in the config file and gave it a different name and that seems to have worked, but do you really have to edit the file to add a remote repository?
It also appears that something that happens incredibly frequently in your typical day is much more complex in Hg than Git - pulling. In Mercurial, you have to do three commands each time you want to pull (and merge) changes from your remote repository:

1  hg pull
2  hg merge
3  hg commit -m 'Merged remote changes'

In Git, that is effectively done with 'git pull'. Now, you can do that with Git:

1  git fetch
2  git merge --no-commit
3  git commit -m 'Merged remote changes'

But WHY? (as an amusing side-note, there is a Merc plugin that adds an 'hg fetch' command that does what 'git pull' does, so in hg: fetch == pull + merge and in git: pull == fetch + merge...)
Branching... poor, poor branching...
I passed out for a quarter second when I read this in the Hg Book:

The easiest way to isolate a “big picture” branch in Mercurial is in a dedicated repository. ... You can then clone a new shared myproject-1.0.1 repository as of that tag.

I was naive enough to think that branches living in entirely different directories was a thing of the past. How SVN of them. I cannot imagine living my life making local clones to effectively deal with long running branches. The book literally says:

"In most instances, isolating branches in repositories is the right approach."

Um, no thank you.
It turns out that the more I get into branching stuff, the more I understand why they advocate that you clone to branch. Everything is on one track - you can't commit something and then easily leave it there for work later and ignore it for the time being, which is what I use branches mainly for. It's like Mercurial is a one-track mixer with some post-it notes to remember where you were and Git is a multi-track board that starts with one and then allows you to snap on new tracks at any time. Not sure if that metaphor worked, but the constraint of not having cheap, real local branches would drive me batty.
When I tried to have two topic branches going at the same time (say a master branch and an experiment branch), it was rather painful. It worked OK until I went back and forth and then when I tried to push it gave me a:

$ hg push
pushing to http://bitbucket.org/Scotty/objective-git/
searching for changes
abort: push creates new remote heads!
(did you forget to merge? use push -f to force)

No! I didn't forget to merge, I want to have two branches! So, I forced it. Then, when I want to switch back to my other branch, it gives me this:

$ hg branch newbranch
abort: a branch of the same name already exists (use --force to override)

Yes, I know it does, I'm switching back to it, you bastard! So, you _can_ have several local branches being developed at the same time, but hg hates it and you cannot push one of them without pushing all of them. It looks like it stores them as sequential changesets but then stores the parents so you can technically recreate the history. However, it seems that you _cannot_ push your A branch without also pushing your B branch.
That. Is. Annoying.
Conclusion
Perhaps some of these things are simpler at first in Hg, but I don't really think they are that much easier (if at all), and the amount of flexibility you lose is so immense that I can't understand how anyone can think of Mercurial as anything other than 'Git Lite'. Same great usability, much less functionality. And if your answer to that is 'get X plugin', then why do you think you're winning the usability battle again?
That's it - I'll keep playing with Hg and sharing my thoughts (being as how they are sooo unbiased). In the meantime, I'll leave you with some more metaphors:
* If DSCMs were bikes, Hg would be the Git bike with the training wheels soldered on.
* If DSCMs were TVs, Git and Hg would turn on to the same channel, but then Git would also have cable.
* If DSCMs were GPS units, both would have places of interest, but Git would also come with the street maps and be able to do driving directions.
* If DSCMs were shoes, you could play basketball in either, but Git would have the pump (for when you needed extra jumping and whatnot)
* If DSCMs were alarm clocks, they would both wake you up, but Git would also make you coffee.
(if you have others, please share - again, the theme is that they're the same out of the box, but then the one is ultimately a lot more useful)

Why? Why why why why why?

2008-11-02T00:00:00-07:00

Warning: the following post is a rant - I wrote it so that I could get this frustration off of my chest and out of my mind.
I live in California and I cannot for the bloody life of me understand why there are so many Prop 8 supporters. For those of you that don't know, Proposition 8 is a ballot initiative on the California statewide ballot that will eliminate the rights of gay couples to marry.
How can this be taken as anything other than pure bigotry? It literally makes me sick to my stomach. I have not been so angry at the actions of other people in a long time. I can see a small, zealous minority agitating over this, but there are tons of normal people donating and picketing and arguing for the opportunity to strip rights from those who are not like them. Their self-righteousness, intolerance and in some cases, hatred, are so transparent that I have a hard time understanding how aren't completely mortified at their own blatant vindictiveness.
There is simply no good reason to oppose it. There is no way in which this effects their own lives in any tangible way. It is simply that they don't want people that they don't like in the abstract to be in any way accepted in society. They may as well be wearing t-shirts that say "Gay people are icky, Yes on 8!"
It's that there is actually no argument - the entire 'Yes' campaign is "wink, nod - you know you think it's gross too..."
The sad part is that I actually do understand these people - I know tons of people that will vote 'Yes' on this. It's people who are so ensconced in their own little self-righteous, self-affirming communities that they can justify it internally it as a referendum on gayness without feeling personally guilty. It's naked xenophobia that is still so widely accepted that people don't feel like they're bad people like they would if they were equally blatently racist. Every "argument" for 'Yes' works completely unmodified if you replace 'gay' or 'same-sex' with 'mixed-marriage'.
There are no financial, legal or health implications for anyone who would vote 'Yes'. They just don't want gay people to be able to avoid the social awkwardness that comes with having to refer to your husband as a 'life-partner' instead. They don't want their children to even be exposed to the notion that being gay might be OK - secure in the notion that THEIR children could never be gay. It is that simple. It is not even fundamentally religious - there are churches and synagogues that will marry gay couples, there are tolerant congregations all over the place.
I don't blame the people personally, they're by and large good and loving people, it's the environment - the churches and right-wing agitators that think this crap will energize their base, and people trust them and are moved to action and animosity by them unfairly.
The thing that really bothers me is the support and role of the churches in this. The fact is that this entire thing is fanned and supported by churches across the country. I read that nearly half the funding for the 'Yes' campaign has come from the Mormon church alone, and that this Sunday thousands of pulpits will be used for political purposes to encourage people to vote the "right" way on this - the way Christ would want you to vote.
For some reason, I still naively believe that faith is supposed to be a source of strength - teaching love, understanding and tolerance, not to be a support center for bigotry and judgment. What makes it worse is that I probably know the sections and context of the Bible that most of them draw from as the source of their intolerance and self-righteousness much better than they do, but that wouldn't slow them down one bit. No, they are justified in their judgment - God Himself supports them. I found myself thinking of this quote from Obama's "Audacity of Hope":

"We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious and cultural tensions roil the landscape."

Sure, in a decade this will all be for naught. The slow movement of tolerance will eventually force peoples view on gay marriage go the route of mixed-marriage bans and segregation - but that we aren't there yet is frustrating to me. That people naturally take such pleasure and zeal in excluding minorities and ostracizing those who are not like them, and furthermore that they are allowed to hide behind religion as a justification for their animosity, makes me truly, truly sad.
Please vote 'No' on 8.

A GitHubber Now

2008-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

My big news of the day is that next week I officially start my new job at Logical Awesome, working on GitHub. This is a really exciting move for me, I've been interested in GitHub since long before it was released, nearly a year ago, when Chris first told me about it and I was first writing my Git/Ruby library.
Since then, I have loved it as a tool, evangelized it in my talks and whatnot, and done some part time consulting work for the site - I helped write Gist, Inline File Editing, and added some pure ruby goodness to the Grit library we're using on the site. I have greatly enjoyed drinking, podcasting and working with Chris, PJ and Tom and I'm looking forward to doing that full time going forward.
Most importantly, I'm incredibly excited about working on Git stuff full time now. For the last few years, it has taken up more and more of my free time and now I get to do what I am truly passionate about for a living. Everyone should be so lucky. What's more, all my talks and events I go to are now somewhat justified - I have to spread the Git love! The only downside is that where before I could plug GitHub as being truly awesome from a somewhat neutral viewpoint, now people will likely think I'm biased. :)
On a somewhat related note, we announced this at the Git Down event last night in San Francisco that GitHub put on, hosted by Serious Business, where we got to learn a little about git-sh, codeswarm and magit. Tom showed us some of the new stuff he's working on for GitHub and I got to show off my GitHub iPhone app preview and talk a bit about ObjectiveGit, my Objective-C implementation of Git. A good time and a fair amount of beer was had by all.
Anyhow, it's likely that future posts will be even more Git related, and I hope this means I can be even more effective in getting people to use and understand this tool that I enjoy so much.

Git Community Book

2008-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

For the past several weeks, I've been working on a free, open source, online book on Git called the Git Community Book that I'm hoping to turn into a great one-stop resource for learning Git.
The idea is that we have a super solid Git resource linked right off the Git homepage that people can get most of the answers they need in a single, easy to browse place, from super-beginner to super-advanced. I've taken some content from the existing User Guide and tutorials that can be found scattered around online, and re-written a lot of it and added a ton of my own content, screencasts and images. There is a PDF version of the book that is generated and linked automatically everytime I do a build, so for those of you who like a paper or local copy, I've got your back. Probably 80% of the book is done now, and now I'm looking for some other contributors and some feedback.
I have a bunch of ideas for git-scm.com and the Git Community Book - I'd like to do searchable documentation, a cookbook, a quick-start guide and a few more things - but first I want to get this online book at least initially complete. If you are interested in helping contribute content for a section or chapter, I would hugely appreciate it. Even if it's just notes that you've tested, I would be happy to humanize it for you. Or, if you've written a blog post that I can re-use the contents of that cover one of the topics, that would also be great.
The topics I'm currently looking for are Advanced History Modification, Corruption Recovery, Branch Tracking, Subversion Integration, Git with Perl/Python/PHP, and Git with Editors (especially NetBeans/Eclipse). I can write them, but since I have limited personal experience with these topics, I'm not very confident that they would turn out particularly well.
Again, the book itself is open sourced and you can download the raw markdown and build scripts from it's GitHub repo, and read the "how to contribute" guide on it's wiki.
Write me if you can help contribute or proof-read the existing content at schacon at gmail.com.
Thanks, and I hope you like the book!

The Launch of git-scm.com

2008-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

I love Git. However, a lot of people have the idea that Git is hard to learn, which I really disagree with. I have been working with Git for a few years now, but I understand it vastly better than I ever understood SVN or CVS, which I worked with for many, many years. Why? Because it's cheap and easy to try things out, the model is ultimately very simple and understandable, and it's really pretty hard to really screw things up - Git almost never removes information. So, I found it easier to play with features and find what is really helpful to me, rather than being scared of costing myself more time than it's worth.
I assume that the main reason people think Git is difficult is because they've heard other people say Git is difficult and they didn't have a good teacher or learning resource, so when they fall back to their instinct - what SVN would have done or something - nothing works as expected and they get confused. Then they auto-complete for 'git-' and get 150 commands. How are they supposed to know that only about 20 of those are really going to be useful to them most of the time?
So, I'm trying to build some resources that will help newcomers love Git from day one. Really try to focus on the usability of the main site, make it easy to find reference or tutorial documentation, and eventually I'd like to build a really nice online book that answers learners questions when they need to know them and guides them through the learning process as naturally and easily as possible. I honestly don't think that Git needs to be made easier somehow, I think the learning process does. The current docs are wonderful for many of us that are more technical, but often it's easier to learn with screencasts and diagrams.
However, first I wanted to fix git.or.cz. I have always pointed to it as the git homepage, and Petr is awesome - he's always kept it up to date and is a core contributor himself. However, as a landing page for a project, it is very overwhelming. There are nearly 1200 words on that page - almost all of them at the same font size. It is very difficult to skim, and pretty difficult to figure out what Git really does in a second or two.

So, I've forked the source of that site (because awesome Petr made it open source) and created a new site, which is now being hosted at git-scm.com. I've broken the page up into 5 topic pages and drastically simplified everything I could. Hopefully it is easier to navigate and find what you're looking for. The version number should be updated automatically, and I've setup a mirror of the Git source code at GitHub that I will eventually be doing some fun automated statistics with. The source code for the website is at GitHub, if you have an idea or contribution to make, feel free to fork the site and send me a patch.
Now that is done, I'll work on the spiffy new documentation project, which will likely be another branch in that same repo. I'll do another post when there is enough to share, at which point I would be happy to have all the contributor help I can get.
By the way, in case you're wondering, the logo at the top is a Git. He's a BLOB that is COMMITed to storing TREEs. Little Git humor, there...

Fuzed and EC2

2008-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

First of all, this post is about 2 things that rock. One is Fuzed, the new Erlang web glue that runs Rails on the Erlang-based Yaws web server, put together by Tom Preston Warner and Dave Fayram of Powerset. The other is Amazon EC2, which is a big, sneakily expensive nerd playland. I became interested in Fuzed at the talk I heard on it at RailsConf by Tom and Dave.
I downloaded the Fuzed software and compiled it and got it running on my local machine, which was a bit more complex than was neccesary, since I needed 3 nodes (a faceplate, a master and a backend) to get it running. So, I thought I would see what it could really do in a real, multi-node environment. That's where EC2 comes in.
I setup two (now public) EC2 AMIs, one 32-bit (ami-1da54174) and the other 64-bit (ami-64a6420d), (in EC2, you need a 64 bit version to run the bigger instances) each with Erlang and Fuzed and Rails and an example Rails app and HAProxy all installed on it. Then I started playing with different configurations.
For all of these examples, I'm using the Kronos rails app (a simple frontend to Chronic running on Rails v1.2) in development mode (just to make it slower) with no database. So, it is not a totally normal setup, but I wanted to see how to scale a slowish, difficult to cache app with Fuzed.

Control Group : our trusty mongrels

The first thing I did, in order to get a sort of benchmark of the Rails app itself was to run a normal setup on a small EC2 slice. I started up an m1.small slice (if you aren't familiar with the various EC2 slice sizes, see here) and ran the app in 3 mongrels proxied behind nginx.

single server running a small mongrel cluster

This setup did pretty well under smallish loads - I was able to serve 9.0 requests per second with 5 simultaneous users[#/sec] with 95% of the requests taking less than a second, which means that I could pretty readily serve 30k requests in an hour, or somewhere around 500k a day, as long as it's steady traffic.
cost: $72/month performance: max 15M page views/month, 500/min max
(obviously, these numbers are highly dependent on the app and spikes in traffic and such, but they should help us compare to the other setups)

Configuration 2 : 3 servers

So that gives us a baseline. Now, my first pass at a Fuzed setup was with 3 servers - one faceplate, one master node and one rails node with 3 handlers running in it - all 'm1.small' sized. This is sort of a weird setup, since we're still only dealing with 3 rails handlers, but now have added the overhead of the Fuzed master node and frontend listener.

one faceplate
one master
one small rails node (3 handlers)

And it turns out, that we get roughly the same overall performance here - about 10 requests/second sustained, though I mistakenly tested it with 10 simultaneous users instead, so the page loads were a bit slower on avg, but still not bad.
cost: 3 small = $215 / month performance: max 15M page views/month, 500/min max
(though I'm fairly certain I could have run the master, faceplate and rails node all on the same slice and gotten much the same performance, so it's not really 3 times more expensive than the mongrels...)

Configuration 3 : 4 servers

So now I come to the fun part of Fuzed, the auto-configuration. I simply spun a High-CPU Medium Instance ($0.20/hr, 5 CU), started Fuzed on it with 15 Rails handlers (my formula was consistently 3 Rails handlers per EC2 Compute Unit), bringing my total number of Rails handlers to 18.
Now I brought my concurrency up to 100 and got 56 req/sec from the stack, though the average response time was a bit higher, at about 1.5 - 2 seconds per request. That's unacceptably high, so for the performance calculations, I'll assume limits of closer to 40 req/sec.

one faceplate
one master
one small rails node (3 handlers)
one high-cpu medium rails node (15 handlers)

cost: $360/month + $20 bandwidth = $380/mo performance: 85M page views/month, 2500/min max

Configuration 4 : 5 servers

Now I decided to bring in the big boys. Amazon has brand new High-CPU Extra Large Instances ($0.80/hr) with 7 GB of memory and 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), which means I should be able to run 60 Rails handlers on each one. So, I fired up one of these and attached it as a Rails node, then brought up two more small instances, one as a second faceplate and one as a frontend server running haproxy round-robining back to the two faceplates. This entire reconfiguration took me about 5 minutes to do, most of it spent waiting for the instances to come up.

one master
one haproxy
two faceplates
one small rails node (3 handlers)
one high-cpu medium rails node (15 handlers)
one high-cpu extra large rails node (60 handlers)

However, now my stack was able to fairly easily handle 140 req/sec with 90% of them coming in under a second. This means that I can take sustained loads of close to 500k hits per hour on an uncached Rails app in development mode, 20 minutes after I was running it on a single slice.
cost: 935/month + $85 bw = $1020/month performance: max 300M page views/month, 8500/min max

Configuration 5 : 13 servers

Just to see how far I could take this before I wasn't willing to pay the hourly rate for this test, I spun up another faceplate and 5 more high cpu extra large servers for a grand total of:

one small master
one small haproxy
three small faceplates
one small rails node (3 handlers)
one high-cpu medium rails node (15 handlers)
six high-cpu extra large rails node (6*60 = 360 handlers)

At this point, adding new nodes is pretty trivial - it took about 10 minutes to get here from the previous setup, most of the time spent reconfiguring haproxy for the third faceplate.
Now I'm hitting other breakdown points in my testing setup - I can pretty easily get about 475 req/second from the stack, but it appears that the bottleneck is now in the faceplate layer and possibly elsewhere, but 475 req/second is pretty dang fast, especially for a site with no caching and no static requests at all - all 475 of those invoke the full Rails stack in development mode, no less. Plus, it's still really responsive to me even as I'm slamming it with ab in the background.
475 hits per second translates into roughly 1.5M hits per hour, 35M a day, etc. Obviously these estimations are getting pretty ridiculous - so many other things come up before you hit this point that the comparison is only interesting from a relative view to the other configurations, but I did have fun setting it up and beating the crap out of this with ab.
cost: 3816/month + $342 bw = $4158.00/month performance: max 1000M page views/month, ~28,500/min max

Conclusion

Now that I've taken this to it's illogical conclusion, it's fun to look back at what we've done. The point of the post is not to say "Fuzed will solve all Rails scaling problems", because a) I don't know enough about running any actual huge scale websites to have my opinion be worth a lick and b) this is a stupid-simple Rails app - any complexity you add to your app will give you new and interesting problems at scale.
However, what is fun to note is how easily Fuzed made it for me to take a simple Rails app running in development mode and make it serve 5000 dynamic pages in 10 seconds flat with no failed requests, and that it took me more time to write this blog post than it did to get it there.
All of this was automated with a little tool I wrote called FuzEc2, pronounced un-pronou-ncab-le, which basically just uses EC2::Base and Net::SSH to automate all the Fuzed and HAProxy setup steps. The first time I ran through this stuff I did it all manually and it still only took a couple hours, with FuzEc2, it took about 30 minutes. The AMIs are public, so if you want to try this for yourself, just download my FuzEc2 script, replace the example variables with your own AWS keys and such, and start spinning them up!
You can watch a video of me doing another, more limited run of this after the jump, which has an example of using the script.

RailsConf Git Talk

2008-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

I just got back from RailsConf 2008, which was held in Portland again this year, and I have to say I had a really excellent time. I met tons of really cool people, had a hundred conversations about Git and Ruby and consumed a fair amount of Drop Top.

In addition to that, my talk went as well as I could have hoped. The place was packed, I talked on the second day after they had extended the rooms and the room was still almost totally full. The presentation went off without a hitch and dozens of people came up to me through the rest of the weekend to say they enjoyed it, so that made me feel really great.

One of the awesome guys that I met there, Daniel Wanja of OnRails.org, was kind enough to take some video of my talk, if you're curious how I present or how many people there were:

RailsConf 2008 Git Talk by Scot Chacon Video from daniel wanja on Vimeo.

You can also download my slides here:

There were about 520 slides that I went through in 55 minutes (went a tad bit over the time limit) and some of them had moving pieces, meaning I probably clicked that clicker at least 600 times during that talk.

Update: I've recorded my basic talk over the presentation of the full slide deck and posted it as an episode at GitCasts, if you want to see the whole thing.

So, now I go back to work, but I enjoyed myself and met a bunch of great people and learned a lot about DataMapper, Erlang (Fuzed and Vertebra), and even a little Ruby... I also got to whine at Chad Fowler about the sessions not being videotaped, which he commiserated with me on. Lastly, I wanted to point out that for those of you who missed Nick Kallen's talk on ActiveRecord at the very end of the conference, you missed out on a really well done live coding session - probably the most informative and well presented Ruby learning I've had in months.

GitCasts - Git Screencasts

2008-05-20T00:00:00-07:00

Continuing on my git-ish roll, I've just launched a new site called GitCasts. I've noticed that a lot of people have been watching my other screencast, nearly 5,500 views so far - so I thought I would do something along the lines of the excellent RailsCasts website and do a bunch of short, topical screencasts on Git usage and internals.
I've put the site live with the first 4 screencasts:

Those of you who have my Peepcode Git Book may notice that these are the same screencasts that are distributed with the book. Next up will be "Browsing Git Objects", "Branching and Merging", "Rebasing" and "Distributed Workflow". After that, I will continue to produce short screencasts, mainly from the list I'm keeping here, so if there is something you want to see, give me a shout.
Hope you find it helpful.

Peepcode Git Book

2008-04-29T00:00:00-07:00

I've been wanting to write a book on Git for a while now - at least since the beginning of the year. I really wanted to take the time to write out a book that taught Git the way I wish I had been taught - describe the internals first, what Git is really doing, rather than comparing it to SVN or just showing random commands without context.
I laid it all out and started writing, but it's really hard to justify the untold hours it takes to finish it if you're not sure anyone will even read it. So, about a month and a half ago, after a few false starts, I asked Geoffrey Grosenbach if Peepcode would be interested in publishing a mini-book on Git - it seemed to be getting more popular (remember, this was before GitHub or Rails moving to Git) and he was enthusiastic. So, off I went, and just a few minutes ago the Peepcode Git PDF product page went live:

This is actually only half of the book that I laid out - about halfway in it became clear that this is way too much for one mini-book, so I will be coming out with a follow-up book on "Advanced Git" hopefully sometime in the next few months.
In addition to the PDF, I also produced 8 short (5-15 min) screencasts that are associated with several of the chapters - you can download them all when you buy the book and there are sidebars in the text that point you to which episode demonstrates the contents of that section. Also, I am working on an audio-book version in case you want to review the content on your commute - that should be available this weekend.
I originally intended this content to be free, but not having something on the line would never have gotten me to actually do it, nor would the final product have been nearly so polished. I'm really glad I went with Peepcode - I think the $9 is worth the quality that the Peepcode production added to it. I hope you agree. Let me know what you think!

Ruby Reporting with Munger

2008-04-18T00:00:00-07:00

I started in on a story at work where I needed to add some reports on one of our internal applications. In the past, I have just done some query and then iterated over it in the view, creating a report manually, but it seemed that I was always doing the same sorts of operations and that there should be some tool that makes that all easier. So, I started searching for reporting tools in ruby, googling and asking friends and the only thing I found was Ruport.
It seemed pretty cool and I was really impressed with the demos and my first few passes, but after a half day of struggling, I just could not force out of it the reports I was looking for. It did grouping weirdly, I didn't seem to have easy control over the rendering of the html, I couldn't highlight cells, the pivoting functionality was destructive to other row data and you couldn't change more than one column in a single pass.
My biggest problem was that the data manipulation and the report formatting was so tightly coupled. It was an interesting api, so I considered hacking on it, but it didn't seem too complex and I wanted the architecture to have a cleaner separation of what I feel are the three major steps of reporting - data manipulation, report formatting and output rendering. So, I decided to start my own project and a day and a half later, I had Munger, the alternative ruby reporting library.
The library is about two days old, but it's pretty usable already. If you'd like to help out, fork and hack!
Simple Example

Here is a simple example.

result = AdAirings.find(:all)
report = Munger::Report.from_data(result).process
puts Munger::Render.to_text(report)

will result in :

|airtime | airdate    | clicks | advert | 
------------------------------------------
|15      | 2008-01-01 | 301    | spot 1 | 
|30      | 2008-01-02 | 199    | spot 1 | 
|30      | 2008-01-03 | 234    | spot 1 | 
|15      | 2008-01-04 | 342    | spot 1 | 
|30      | 2008-01-01 | 172    | spot 2 | 
|15      | 2008-01-02 | 217    | spot 2 | 
|90      | 2008-01-03 | 1023   | spot 2 | 
|30      | 2008-01-04 | 321    | spot 2 | 
|60      | 2008-01-01 | 512    | spot 3 | 
|30      | 2008-01-02 | 813    | spot 3 | 
|15      | 2008-01-03 | 333    | spot 3 |

A Simple Pivot

result = AdAirings.find(:all)
data = Munger::Data.load_data(result)

new_columns = data.pivot('airdate', 'advert', 'clicks')

report = Munger::Report.from_data(data).columns([:advert] + new_columns.sort).process
puts Munger::Render.to_text(report)

becomes:

|advert | 2008-01-01 | 2008-01-02 | 2008-01-03 | 2008-01-04 | 
--------------------------------------------------------------
|Spot 1 | 301        | 199        | 234        | 342        | 
|Spot 2 | 172        | 217        | 1023       | 321        | 
|Spot 3 | 512        | 813        | 333        |            |

A More Complex Example

result = AdAirings.find(:all)

data = Munger::Data.load_data(result)
data.add_columns([:advert, :rate]) do |row| 
  rate = (row.clicks / row.airtime)
  [row.advert.capitalize, rate]
end

report = Munger::Report.from_data(data)
report.sort('airtime').subgroup('airtime')
report.aggregate(Proc.new {|arr| arr.inject(0) {|total, i| i * i + (total - 30) }} => :airtime, 
                        :sum => :rate)

puts Munger::Render.to_text(report)

gives us :

|Spot   | Rate | Air Date   | Airtime | 
----------------------------------------
|Spot 2 | 14   | 2008-01-02 | 15      | 
|Spot 1 | 20   | 2008-01-01 | 15      | 
|Spot 3 | 22   | 2008-01-03 | 15      | 
|Spot 1 | 22   | 2008-01-04 | 15      | 
|       | 78   |            | 780     | 
|Spot 2 | 5    | 2008-01-01 | 30      | 
|Spot 1 | 6    | 2008-01-02 | 30      | 
|Spot 1 | 7    | 2008-01-03 | 30      | 
|Spot 2 | 10   | 2008-01-04 | 30      | 
|Spot 3 | 27   | 2008-01-02 | 30      | 
|       | 55   |            | 4350    | 
|Spot 3 | 8    | 2008-01-01 | 60      | 
|       | 8    |            | 3570    | 
|Spot 2 | 11   | 2008-01-03 | 90      | 
|       | 11   |            | 8070    | 
|       | 152  |            | 16770   |

Wrapping Up
There is also cool cell and row styling, html rendering, etc, so check it out.

PublicMarkup.org

2008-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

A new website was released today by my heroes at the Sunlight Foundation that implements the first step of an open source politics dream I've had for several years, an online legislation app that lets the public comment on and help define public policy. My idea was to put the tax code online and let people humanize, tag and comment on it - open it up via public scrutiny, but this is pretty cool too and will hopefully someday lead to something like the tax code thing.
They call it PublicMarkup.org and they are testing it out by putting a bill that they would like to pass up for public comment, called the "Transparency in Government Act of 2008". They would like this to be a model for all new legislation.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I personally think this should be a model for all of our public law. I think the entire US code should be put online so every American can help look for, translate and point out the loopholes and special privileges built into so much of our law. This website is the first step toward that - asking for public input in an easy to use web app for new laws is fantastic, but the next step is what really excites me - exposing the flaws in our current laws that only get passed because the arcane nature of the process makes our view into such corruptions so opaque that it can be gotten away with. ("gotten away with?" is that a phrase?)
I've been thinking about this for a long time now - I even started writing such an application and sending the screenshots around to see if anyone was interested in the idea some time ago, but it hasn't gone anywhere. Take a look at how similar this app I did in October of 2006 looks compared to the new PublicMarkup.org:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Actually, in an odd coincidence, I sent that screenshot to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry a year and a half ago, who both consult for Sunlight, though I highly doubt it eventually had anything to do with this site.
So, I wasn't involved, but at least it's getting done. I think this is a big step for open source politics and it really shows that good things are coming. It further proves how useful and important the Sunlight Foundation is and I hope to see even more wonderful work from them in the future. Congratulations, everyone at Sunlight!

TicGit and a new Git gem

2008-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

I just put my new gitty project, TicGit up at GitHub for all to enjoy. I'll release a gem to Rubyforge in a few days, but for those of you who are curious, you can build and install your own gem pretty easily.
It is basically a simple command line client that keeps simple ticket information in a new bare branch. It doesn't keep any files in your working directory. All the git operations on the new 'ticgit' branch are wrapped by the 'ti' command line client and should be transparent to you. Tickets can be created and worked on offline and pushed to central repositories. Right now, the ticgit branch will have to be merged manually (ie: git merge ticgit origin/ticgit), but I'll fix that pretty soon. The way the project keeps it's data in git, there should not ever be any merge conflicts, since I never edit files.
So far, I like the way it's turning out and I'm keeping my bugs and features for TicGit in the ticgit repository. You can see them by running 'ti list' from a new checkout.

#>ti list -s open

     # TicId  Title                     State Date  Assgn    Tags                
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     1 9ebd07 add attachment to ticket  open  03/22 schacon  attach,feature      
     2 6ca8be download attached file    open  03/22 schacon  attach,feature      
     3 9b83ea general tag management    open  03/22 schacon  feature,tags        
     4 94f24e show expanded comments    open  03/22 schacon  feature,ticket      
     5 f3dd9b remove a ticket           open  03/22 schacon  feature,ticket      
     6 e1629e improved cli support      open  03/22 schacon  cli,feature         
     7 9c0804 find the git directory pr open  03/22 schacon  bug                 
     8 28c3fa start web ui              open  03/22 schacon  feature,webapp      
     9 9b0e09 link to a git object      open  03/22 schacon  feature,ticket      
*   10 93ef93 change ticket assignment  open  03/22 schacon  feature             
    11 6f9e7c priority for ticket       open  03/23 schacon  feature,ticket

If you're interested, you can see a bunch of examples and more documentation on the TicGit GitHub wiki.
The only requirement is my Git gem, but you'll need version 1.0.5, which I also just released today, so run another 'sudo gem install git' if you already have an older version installed. Among improvements in 1.0.5 : gc, each_conflict, ls_tree, stash support, advanced logging, tree_depth, checkout_file, bare branch support, more testing and some optimization. I'm happy to say that more than half of this release was provided by patches from others - Joshua Peek, Cassie Schmitz, Eric Goodwin, Shu-yu Guo, Bernd Ahlers, Mateusz Jedruch, Skaar and Nick Hengeveld - thanks all!

Git-Ruby Library Benchmarks

2008-03-14T00:00:00-07:00

I just finished a simple benchmark of the various Git ruby libraries out there, my git gem, Err's Grit (as used by GitHub, and my new pure ruby Git lib, Git-Ruby. Turns out that because the other two libraries are running system calls for everything, the pure ruby version is pretty dang fast:

Git Gem:
             user     system      total        real
objects   0.030000   0.130000   0.730000 (  0.759323)
log       0.480000   0.420000   2.210000 (  2.258663)
branch    0.120000   0.920000   5.450000 (  5.434611)

Grit :
             user     system      total        real
objects   0.020000   0.120000   0.590000 (  0.587605)
log       0.280000   0.430000   1.990000 (  1.958004)
branch    0.020000   0.160000   0.850000 (  0.877369)

Git-Ruby (pure ruby) :
             user     system      total        real
objects   0.030000   0.010000   0.040000 (  0.049364)
log       0.950000   0.100000   1.050000 (  1.059527)
branch    0.130000   0.070000   0.200000 (  0.191696)

Sweet. Still a lot of work to do, though.

Git-Ruby Success

2008-03-11T00:00:00-07:00

I just got my new Git-Ruby library to add files and commit a new tree properly in pure ruby. My 'gitr' command line interface is getting pretty close to being usable as a full git replacement in simple circumstances.
The thing I'm not doing right now is using the index file properly. I haven't quite figured out what that format is in - my C is a bit rusty and going through the source has not blessed me with the answers to what the heck is going on there yet, but hopefully I'll get there soon. However, in the meantime, turns out I don't really need to use that to do most of the stuff in git. I can read and write the object database perfectly fine, so I just ended up re-implementing the index functionality from scratch and it works well enough.
If anyone out there is really good at C and wants to help me with re-implementing some of the index features - it will probably be really helpful when I get to the merge / diff stuff. Let me know if you can help out.

Ruby/Git and Git-Ruby

2008-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

I have been putting off releasing a new 'git' gem for a few months now because I had decided to implement some of the base functionality in pure ruby. I have been wavering on whether having some of the commands in pure ruby and others as system calls was a good idea since I merged in the branch quite a while ago. Well, I finally decided that for now I don't want to do that.
I've rolled back out the pure ruby code from the 'git' gem and created a new project that aims to make roughly the same functionality, but with a command line client and gitweb application - with no system calls at all. I feel this will make the APIs for what you can do with the git binary and what you can do without it a bit clearer. Perhaps at some point in the future, when the pure ruby stuff is really solid and complete, I'll incorporate the two into one project again, but I'm going to wait to see what I can accomplish in pure ruby.
To completely confuse everyone (including myself occasionally), I have named the second project 'git-ruby', which is largely confusing since the original project is called 'ruby-git' on GitHub, yet the gems will be called 'git' for the system call one and 'git-ruby' for the ruby only version.
My first project in developing git-ruby will be getting the simple version of the git-wiki project running entirely without the git binary.

GitHub invite

2008-02-20T00:00:00-08:00

I have one GitHub invite left, if anyone out there is interested - it is turning into an awesome application that I think will really change how open source development is done.
Send me an email at schacon [at] gmail.com if you're interested.
Update: I gave out the original one, but I have 5 more, so let me know if you want one again.
Another Update: All out again - sorry everyone!

Voting for Barack Obama

2008-02-05T00:00:00-08:00

This morning, bright and early, I'll be casting my vote for Barack Obama. There are a number of reasons for this, and I wanted to write a short post on why, and to encourage you to as well.

Most importantly, for anyone who was familiar with my foray into politics, I am very concerned and interested in the possibilities in the practical application of technology in improving our governance. I think that there is great potential in connecting us, getting the public involved in a practical and helpful way and making the governments at all levels work more efficiently and fairly with the use of technology.

Barack Obama has embraced this vision more fully than any politician I have ever seen, and seems to fully understand the potential and path to seeing out that vision. In the Technology section of his website, he articulates many of the things I was not expecting politicians to embrace for years. Under the heading "Create a Transparent and Connected Democracy", he lists out goals such as :

Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities.
Establishing pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.
Requiring his appointees who lead Executive Branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can watch a live feed on the Internet as the agencies debate and deliberate the issues that affect American society.
Employing technologies, including blogs, wikis and social networking tools, to modernize internal, cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decision-making.

And so on. Given what I've been advocating and working for, this alone is probably enough to push me into voting for him. The issue that I truly care about, and which I think effects every other issue in that it opens up government to public input more fully, has never been more fully embraced by a candidate and probably won't again for some time.

By way of comparison, Hillary Clinton has no "technology" section on her website, and the closest page, the Innovation page simply lists broadband deployment as a goal. There is no sense of her awareness of technology as a tool to connect government and public, and no call for deeper, ongoing community involvement facilitated by technology at all.

So, that is my personal issue-grounded reason for my vote, but there is another, more subjective reason as well. Barack Obama is an amazing speaker. More than that, he is an amazing writer. He is obviously a smart man - he was the president of the Harvard Law Review, which say volumes in itself, but the contrast with most politicians, especially our current president who seems to go out of his way to seem simple, is refreshing. Obama does not seem to pander - he uses imagery and vocabulary that is unusual and poetic. He has a way of describing things that are often intangible with a beautiful clarity.

For example, in his Call to Renewal keynote speech given over a year and a half ago, which I originally listened to as a podcast, he describes the draw of religion in a way that is clear, meaningful, understanding, and really quite beautiful.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and they're coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.
They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.

Nearly all of his speeches are like this, many of which he has written himself. In one of his speeches in the runup to the war in Iraq, he describes why he is not against all wars, even though he is against the Iraq war.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars.
My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

When do you hear people use phrases like "the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of the multitudes" or "that arsenal of democracy"? He is comfortable with the cadence and oratory style that is predicated by speech of this style, and I feel like my friends who have heard King or Robert Kennedy must have felt when they heard them speak. Moved, inspired, urged to improve.

I saw this passed around the other day, and I kind of like it. I mean, I don't really like the simplification of the candidate to rhetorical passion - just because he speaks like this is not really a great reason to vote for him, though I could probably make an argument that inspirational ability is an important and useful presidential attribute, but I am moved when I listen to it nonetheless.

Though oddly, no more moved than when I hear it without the musical overlay or when it is read. The speech is quite beautifully written:

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.
Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.
Yes we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

SÃ se puede. Off to the ballot box now...

Git and Rails News

2008-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

It looks like yesterday my Git/Rails screencast got on the new ruby reddit page, which I deduced because Peter Cooper (I'm assuming of RubyInside fame) left a comment on the page all of a sudden. So I looked at my Google Analytics page and my hits went from about 30 a day to 500 yesterday, which is a fun little curve. So, welcome all, I hope you enjoy the screencast.
In other news, I have been informed that my presentation proposal for RailsConf 2008 has been accepted, so I will be speaking on "Using Git to Manage and Deploy Your Rails Apps" in Portland in May. I hope to see you all there. I promise the talk will be more energetic than my little screencast.
Also, the ErrFree guys have just opened up beta for GitHub, which I have now moved the repo for Ruby/Git to. I'll update the Ruby/Git page soon.

Rails 2.0 Presentation

2007-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

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...) :

| View | Upload your own

gitr - pure ruby git command line client

2007-11-27T00:00:00-08:00

I've been working on getting as much as possible of my Ruby/Git library to run in pure ruby rather than forking out to the git binary, and luckily the guys that started the gitrb project some time ago let me incorporate their code into mine. Now I have quite a bit of my gitweb camping app running without calling 'git' at all. Only the archive and diff methods are currently invoked - everything else is in pure ruby.
The other cool thing I get from this that I've done a simple command line client that does a number of git functions without needing git compiled on the machine at all:

$ gitr log
$ gitr branches
$ gitr ls-tree (sha)
$ gitr cat-file (sha)
$ gitr rev-parse v1.0.2

All of those are run without forking out to the git binary. Sweet. You can get this code at my Repo.or.cz Ruby/Git repo. I will release it as a new gem soon.

Ruby/Git and gitweb.rb

2007-11-19T00:00:00-08:00

Lately I've been working a lot on Ruby/Git, which is a library for using Git in Ruby. It's now about at the point that I can integrate it into the stuff I'm doing at my work (we were doing some rather advanced read-tree/write-tree stuff), but I wanted another target for it so I can see first hand how the library works on real-world situations.
So, in the last two days I wrote gitweb.rb, which is a Camping app, weighing in at just 365 lines of ruby code for the whole thing. (Though, it's not really a tiny file, since I embedded code from the SHJS project for syntax highlighting, which is cool but not tiny.)
It provides a similar interface onto a Git repo as the perl version of gitweb, which is bundled with git itself. It uses my Ruby/Git bindings to do everything and it was a great test for me. My next Ruby/Git deal will be to reimplement some of the core stuff in either pure ruby or RubyInline or C bindings - my goal will be to get gitweb.rb to be able to run without the git binary present at all - no system calls forked.
Anyhow, here is what it looks like.

You can download it here, and run it like this:

> gem install camping git
> camping rubyweb.rb

Then point it to your repositories, and you're good.

gitweb.rb interface

2007-11-19T00:00:00-08:00

Git and Rails

2007-11-02T00:00:00-07:00

I just finished somewhat in-depth screencast on using Git to manage and deploy Ruby on Rails applications. If you're interested, you can find it here:
http://jointheconversation.org/railsgit
Scott

Using Git to Manage and Deploy your Rails Apps

2007-11-01T00:00:00-07:00

Git with Rails Tutorial from Scott Chacon on Vimeo.

Update: I just published a mini-book on Git called Git Internals through PeepCode Press ($9) that goes into a lot more detail on Git and includes about an hour of associated short screencasts, if you'd like to learn more.

Git and Rails

I produced a rather in-depth (~30 min) screencast about using Git with Rails and Capistrano 2.1, since Cap now includes a Git SCM module and I've been finding that a number of Rails people are getting more interested in using Git.
In this screencast, I talk about how to deploy and develop Rails applications using Git. Specifically, I go over:

Installing Git
Creating a new Rails App and Initializing a Git repo for it
Cloning and publishing an external repository for that app
- git clone --bare
- scp git@gitserver:/opt/repos/notetaker.git
- git remote add gitserver git@gitserver:/opt/repos/notetaker.git
- cat .git/config
Setting up Capistrano 2.1 with Git SCM
Deploying the App
Making a change and re-deploying
Working in a new 'testing' branch
Switching to main branch, applying a patch, redeploying
Switching back to 'testing' branch, continuing to work
Merging 'testing' into the main branch, resolving, re-deploying
Using gitk
Using :deploy_via, :copy and :remote_cache

Setup Files

Here are some setup files I mention in the screencast:

setup.zip

Here are most of the commands I had to run to get everything installed on my Debian etch servers I used in this screencast:

  apt-get update
  apt-get install libcurl3 libcurl3-dev libexpat libexpat-dev
  apt-get install ruby1.8-dev rails ri irb rdoc libmysql-ruby mysql-server nginx
             git-core build-essential sudo
  gem install mongrel -y (twice)
  gem install mongrel_cluster -y (twice)
  gem install capistrano

More Info

For more information, I highly recommend:

Send any feedback to me at schacon@gmail.com

Rails Rumble Screencast

2007-09-26T00:00:00-07:00

The Rails Rumble guys asked those of us who did apps to submit screencasts, which I just finished. I uploaded it to YouTube, if you would like to see it online:

If you would rather download a high-res version, here is the original (12M, mp4):

Rails Rumble Voting

2007-09-14T00:00:00-07:00

Last weekend I participated in the 48 hour programming contest called the Rails Rumble. They give you 48 hours to develop a web application in a framework called Ruby on Rails that I've talked about here several times in the past.
I thought it would be fun, and Jessica has been wanting me to write this app for her for some time now, so I worked for about 15 hours each of the two days and got it out there. It is called "Researchr", which is a name I really don't much like, but I couldn't come up with anything better when I registered, so forgive me. It's a writing app based loosely on a Mac writing app I like a lot called Scrivener.
It is sort of a non-linear text editor. You create a bunch of note cards - one for each idea you want to explore. You give each one a title and a synopsis of the idea. Then you can rearrange them, group them, attach references (books, journals, websites) to them, etc. You can view them (they look like actual little 3x5 notecards) and drag and drop re-arrange them to change their order:

When you want to write, you can go to a "Compose Mode" that lists out each of your notes in sections in order and the text associated with each. You can click on a paragraph and edit the text to change that part of the paper.

The cool thing is that the text stays associated with the note card, so at any time you can rearrange your paper in blocks by rearranging the note cards and the text will move around in the same way. Then at the end, when you're done writing, you can export your paper (right now into HTML or plain text, but I'll get around to Word and PDF later) and it formats it and even formats a bibliography of all the references you used in the paper.
Anyhow, I like the way it turned out, and they've opened up voting on the site, so please vote for me:
http://researcher.vote.railsrumble.com
Thanks!

Such a Long Time

2007-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

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.Â Hopefully now I'll get back to posting more regularly.

Site5 Screw Up

2007-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

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.Â I have the last 10 cached, so I'll re-add those, but everything from Jan - April is pretty much gone.Â Second time, second host in a year.Â Fantastic.Â And I still haven't learned to back anything up.

Kisumu Water Tank Drive

2007-04-25T00:00:00-07:00

As some of you know, I've been involved in a little non-profit called GlobalEyes for a little while now. Today I started a little fundraising initiative based on the Pledgie fundraising platform, which looks pretty cool. I tried ChipIn earlier, but I didn't like the whole Flash thing.Eventually, we're trying to start a sort of â€œopen sourceâ€ non-profit, where we'll put most of the emails that we get from the Kenyan NGO that we work with, Tropical Focus, the emails we send them, the spreadsheets and documents we write up, podcast our board meetings, etc. The exciting thing for me is that we're working on sending them a better camera so we can get regular photos and videos from them of the things they're able to do with the funds we raise and possibly get Tobias or Caren to write a blog post from time to time. More to come on that as I actually get the software to support it done.
The rest of this post is what I put in the Pledgie Fundraising page. I've also added the badge to my site here so you can see how it's doing.
GlobalEyes is looking to raise funds to supply our friends at the Childrens Rescue Mission, Kenya with a new water tank, which will help provide them with a water source through the year. From an email from Tobias:

â€œThe heavy rains have started already - since 15th this month and may continue to about 10th June. The tank we proposed for CRM is 6000 litres costing about Kshs. 35,000 together with the accessories. However if funds shall be limiting we can go for 3000 litres which costs Kshs. 21,700 together with accessories, but the storage will still not last long.â€

35,000 Kshs is about $512 USD.
Here is a picture of the water tank that we funded at that facility a year ago. It's capacity is not large enough to last the whole year, so we'd like to add another one.

If you donate, we'll be happy to send you pictures of the new tank when it is installed.
http://throughglobaleyes.org
â€”
The Pledgie page is here: http://www.pledgie.com/campaign/show/171

Fellow Bylo Chacon

2007-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

Yesterday my wife got a letter from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum that let her know that she was choosen for the USHMM Museum Teacher Fellowship Program.
I'm very proud of her - she's worked hard on a lot of Holocaust and genocide studies programs, many of which have been on her own time and expense, and I think she'll be able to learn a lot from this program.Â Yay Jessie!

Ruby, Python and Closures

2007-03-27T00:00:00-07:00

I was talking to someone the other day about the Django vs. Rails web frameworks. These are two similar web frameworks that are written in Python and Ruby, respectively. I had played with Django for a small project once, just to try it out - I like testing web frameworks that are becoming popular from time to time to see if there is a concept that's really clever or that I could use in what I'm working in. I'm pretty framework agnostic in the grand scheme of things - I use Rails because it's the best one I've seen yet and I'm getting pretty good at it, but I'd switch without hesitation if something better came along.
So, I started looking again at Django and there are some big differences but it seems like there's no killer distinction either way. From the little I yet know, I like the built in admin stuff and no baked in JS in Django, I like the migrations and testing support better in Rails. I'll continue to play with Django a bit and see if I can find some more interesting comparisons a bit later. However, one thing I've found right off the bat that seems really huge that I would really miss if I switched over is the lack of closures (blocks). This is a language thing, I haven't used Python in several years and I have been using Ruby for several years now and I've really gotten used to and become quite fond the concept of closures in Ruby. It seems they are basically completely missing in Python. There is a way to sort of hack out comparable functionality, via the lambda function, just like in PHP, but it's really quite ugly.
// RUBY emps.select {|e| e.isManager} // PYTHON filter(lambda e: e.isManager, emps)
It's not that it's that much longer, it's just that it doesn't read as well. I see these fantastic, clean and simple DSLs being written in Ruby all the time that just makes everything written in it look like pseudocode, where I don't see that at all in Python. I'm also somewhat surprised that there doesn't seem to be iterative classes in Python.
// RUBY array.each do |i| puts i end // PYTHON for i in array: print i Why don't collections have generic methods that iterate and aggregate the data? It just seems like it's more procedural in a lot of ways where Ruby takes a much more object oriented approach that looks cleaner and more elegant to me. You can do stuff like this in Python, but it's just not really the same, is it?
Of course, this guy seems to be arguing the opposite, but only uses Zope, which I'm not a huge fan of, to make his point (which even he qualifies).
However, I have read so much about it that is positive and glowing, I feel that I am obviously missing something. I'll continue to play with Django and see if I can't expound.

Pirates Cove

2007-03-26T00:00:00-07:00

This past weekend I ran a 30k (18mi) at Pirates Cove, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, with Pacific Coast Trail Runs. Here's the Google Earth image of the running route (taken from my handy dandy Forerunner 305):
Unfortunately, it was really foggy out, so I didn't get to enjoy what I'm sure were normally really spectacular views. However, I did have a good time and had a really good run (probably due to the chilly weather). I finished it in just under 3 hours, which gives me an average pace of 9:47 min/mile over the 18 miles. As you can see from the Google Earth image, it was fairly hilly.
Jessica was signed up to run the 8k, but accidentally took a wrong turn and ended up doing the 20k instead. â€œAccidental Half Marathonâ€ is a new phrase around the Chacon household.
Here is an idea of the length of the run in relation to the Bay Area:

FizzBuzz

2007-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

So, this is pretty geeky, but I found it amusing.Â My friend read this article which states that most computer programming candidates cannot actually program.Â So, as is obviously neccesary when a blog article slaps you with a virtual glove, we each worked out our own little solution to the problem that was presented as an example of what candidates could typically not do:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print â€œFizzâ€ instead of the number and for the multiples of five print â€œBuzzâ€. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print â€œFizzBuzzâ€.

Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

So, this went back and forth a few times between us, escalating.Â This morning, I emailed him this:
http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3720
Turns out it actually runs faster than a one-liner in several situations because it only prints to STDOUT once rather than for every number.
Ahh, what are pointless fixations if not fun?

Gorillas Redux

2007-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

So I was reading this article on how to create high quality YouTube videos and I wanted to try it out. I also had wanted to upload a more compact video about our visiting with the Gorillas in Rwanda, so I re-edited the video to make it less than half as long and tried to follow all those steps to get really nice quality video uploaded.
I ended up with a slightly better quality video, I think, though I'm not sure it's as good as you can possibly get with YouTube. Here are the screencaps as close to the same frame as I could get them (the top is the new video, the bottom is the older one):

So, I can see a little more detail in the top one, so I think it improved a bit, but it's not that much more impressive (especially for the amount of work that it took). Let me know if any of you have any good tips for this, I'm interested in how to get really sharp videos onto YouTube.At any rate, here is the new video - only about 2:40 now.

Garmin Forerunner TCX file processing code

2007-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

I just posted the code that I used to process TCX files from a Garmin forerunner at the Snippets website, if you're interested in processing those Garmin TCX files.

Weekend Run

2007-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

So, as I promised, I did an 18 mile run on Sunday with my new toy. Some cool things I learned about myself and my new toy. One is that when you upload the data, MotionBased gives you a Google Earth file so you can do a flyover of your whole route, which is pretty cool. Here's what my run looked like: I think that's pretty spiffy. If you click on that image, it should take you to the data page for my run, which has all sorts of cool info, including the Google Earth file. I also learned some interesting things about me. It turns out that my heartrate tends to go down during a long run. It started out at about 160 and trended down towards the low 140's by the end. My speed decreased a bit too, but not by too much - my first couple miles were in the 8:30/mi range and then for most of the rest of the run I kept around a 9:30/mi pace: I also discovered that I burned about 2200 calories in the almost 3 hours it took to run (2:51). Here are my overall stats:

Total Moving Time: 2:51:33
Total Distance: 18.11 miles
Avg Speed: 6.3 mph
Avg Pace: 9:28 min/mile
Avg Heart Rate: 149bpm
Elevation Gain: 960ft

At any rate, it's a fun running toy and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes to run.

Rwanda using Google Apps

2007-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

I just read on Google's blog that they have recently announced a partnership with Rwanda for the government ministries and universities there to use Google Apps.

As a result of two separate partnerships that we've signed today with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network, nearly 20,000 students from the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology, plus 50,000 more from Kenya's University of Nairobi, are joining their colleagues at Northwestern, ASU and around the world with access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets under their university's domain for free.

This is interesting to me because Jessica and I happened to visit a number of those places when we went to Rwanda. Here is the vice rector of KIST showing us some of the projects the students there were working on. We were lucky enough to get a personal tour of the entire facility and got to talk to many of the students there.
Later we also visited the University of Rwanda at Butare, where we were also shown around, then we got to see a dancing competition they were holding on campus and then went to have a beer with the vice rector there. I'm glad that Rwanda and Kenya are adopting this - I think it is a great sign of things to come and the progress that is being made there. I hope that someday soon Rwanda will be able to compete effectively in the global technology market - providing computer skills to bring in money and jobs and to be able to enhance their own technology infrastructure. I think they are focused and determined to do just that and I'm glad to see them making strategic partnerships to get their students and ministers using cutting edge web apps.
While we were at Butare, I got to chat for a few minutes with a couple of the Linux system admins on campus - there is no doubt that there are some really smart people there that could easily match many of the people that I've worked with in Silicon Valley. They are only now starting to graduate people with advanced degrees in computer science from the Univ. of Butare - the genocide having been about 12 years ago, when their educated class was nearly wiped out. I think and hope that in a few more years we'll see some major outsourcing shops open up there in web development, graphic design, CG work, possibly call center work - and we'll be able to see their economies benefit on the global market from the educational and infrastructure investments they've made in the past few years.

Orange Peel

2007-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

Orange Peel Sleeping
Originally uploaded by schacon.
This is mostly just to test this â€˜Blog your Photo' dealio in Flickr, but the picture also makes me happy. This is our cat when we first got him. He's a little more sophisticated now.

A Day at Work

2007-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

Friday I was sitting in the office and I can hear this little dog going nuts down the hall, so eventually I got up and walked over there and this is what I saw:

The projected display is what the company I work for produces. Someone brought in their dog to play on it and one of the artists, Tip, recorded this and put it up. You can probably hear me laughing in the background. Funny thing is he put it up on YouTube and over the weekend it got like 40,000 views - wow.

My New Toy

2007-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Friday I got a new toy from Amazon, the Garmin Forerunner 305. It's one of the cooler toys I've been able to play with lately. I got it because I've been training for a marathon at the end of April and I realized I have almost no idea how I pace or what my heartrate is when I train or really how far I run except that I use Google Maps pedometers to measure rough distance. So, I got this bad boy because a couple of my runner friends seemed to like it a lot. I've had devices like these before, but they've never made the data very accessible before - serial cables or Windows only software and proprietary formats, etc. This one is different - USB cable, Mac software and a half dozen formats for everything. They even have an excellent free online resource to help with all the analytics of your workouts and such. Here is the link and one of the charts from MotionBased website for the easy bike ride Jessica and I did yesterday: http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/2265069 I think that's pretty cool. I've got a 17-18 mile run planned for today, so maybe I can post some data on that when I get back. Fun stuff.

My New Phone

2007-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

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 â€˜p' and â€˜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 â€˜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 â€œmy manager just told meâ€ that there would have to be a $20 â€œearly upgradeâ€ 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. â€œWe can't do thisâ€, â€œOh, you want text messages? That's another $20/monthâ€, â€œYeah, it CAN get video, but you have to get the unlimited data planâ€, 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.

Sunlight Gillibrand

2007-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

How amazing is this? It may not look like much at first sight, but this is the first step towards a far more open and accountable government. That link is to the Sunlight Report of Representative Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, stating what she did on Jan 9th.

* Floor Votes on 9/11 Commission recommendations (H.R. 1) (See Congressional Record). * Steering Committee meeting where Rep. Gillibrand won an appointment to the Agriculture Committee. * House Armed Services Committee meeting to discuss Secretary of Defense Robert Gates committee appearance later this week. * Blue Dog Caucus meeting to discuss organizational issues for the 110th Congress. * Attended a reception held by Women's Policy INC. to welcome the new Members of Congress and discuss women's issues.

I tried to get Jerry McNerney to do this, but they weren't interested, unfortunately. I hope this gets fleshed out more and hopefully adopted by more Congresspeople.

Elfs Lament

2007-01-08T00:00:00-08:00

I was listening in my nerdy way to the podcast of KCRW's Left, Right and Center today and Matt Miller mentioned the Barenaked Ladies holiday song â€œElf's Lamentâ€ at the end of the show, and I have to say, I found it really amusing. I'm adding this to my Christmasy musical magazine next year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qixiv080feg
Lyrics here.

Blog Back Up

2007-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

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.

Back From Africa!

2006-08-07T00:00:00-07:00

Wow, we’ve been gone for three weeks in Africa with Margee, and it was a heck of a trip. Jessica and I went to Kenya and Rwanda, which was our first time in Africa.

We visited the offices, schools and projects of GlobalEyes, did a couple of safaris (including one on bike), stayed in the Hotel des Mille Collines (of ‘Hotel Rwanda fame), saw some incredible and moving Genocide memorials, saw the gorillas (of Gorillas in the Mist fame), visited Rwandan ministers (of State), schools and universities, witnessed a Gacaca trial, and got some Congolese art. It was a truly incredible trip.

We took over 1800 photos (more than 6 gigs), and about 10 hours of video footage that I’m currently going through. I’ll be posting some mini documentaries on YouTube and hopefully CurrentTV soon, but for now, here are some of the Flickrized photos from our trip!

MapChangers and Africa

2006-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

Hey everybody â€“ 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 â€“ the congressional candidate here in the 11th. In fact, I don't think I've blogged about that yet â€“ 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 â€“ 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 â€“ 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.

Tri For Fun 2006

2006-06-22T00:00:00-07:00

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 â€“ I don't think they post them for this event) :

	Distance	Rank	Pctile	Time	Pace

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.

Worlds Smallest Rails Contributor

2006-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

(warning, the following blog post is exceedingly geeky...)
This is about the smallest thing I could have possibly done, but I am now a Ruby on Rails contributor.
I found a bug with Rails Calculations where I was trying to do this :


@object.linking_tables.count(:conditions => ['fieldname = ?', 1])

and it was failing with malformed SQL. Apparently, in 1.1, it is only designed to do stuff like this :


ObjectClass.count(:conditions => ['fieldname = ?', 1])

Which may not look that different, but it really loses a lot of power - the instantiated object and the association are both scope limiters on the query.
So, I thought I'd be all cool and make the former work - so I setup a patch environment and ran the base AR tests and one broke. I figured out what it was that broke and generated a tiny (tiny) patch and submitted it and it was applied to the trunk a few minutes ago. So, now I'm the worlds smallest Rails contributor:
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5268
However, I then soon found out that the Calculations have already been modified in the way I was hoping, after I wrote a few tests and they all passed fine. So, edge Rails works the way I hoped, but I don't get to contribute in a substantial way. Well, at least I know something that will be in 1.2. Hopefully next time I can do something more useful.

Mark Warner

2006-06-01T00:00:00-07:00

I am continually being impressed by Mark Warner's rumblings over at ForwardTogetherPAC.com.
I just found their Flickr feed today.
The pictures are a little bit more candid than what I would have expected â€“ it's reminding me a bit of some of the forward thinking and really embracing the first pieces of an Open Source Politics that I can't wait to see when the presidential stuff starts.
I got a bulk email from them the other day that was short and to the point, letting me know about the new podcast they were launching. It was only a few paragraphs long and the last one was this:

This is just the beginning of the conversation. In future shows Governor Warner will be responding to questions from pod people like you. On our podcast page there's a form for you to submit questions and comments to Mark Warner. Every month the Governor will respond to the most interesting submissions as determined in a very subjective manner by flunkies on his staff. Ask Governor Warner: http://www.forwardtogetherpac.com/pages/podcast

I just like â€œa very subjective manner by flunkies on his staffâ€ â€“ it says to me that they're not posturing and it makes me think he's a little less calculating and a little more trustworthy.
I'll keep an eye on them for you.

Why Spambots, Why?

2006-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

I mean, it's not like this is a hugely popular blog, but I must get 20 spam comments a day, most with links to either poker or xanax/viagra/etc. How is this helping them? I can't imagine people are coming to my blog and then thinking â€œif only I knew where to get some xanax right nowâ€¦â€
Anyhow, now I have to up my spambot protections, in an unending geek war of attrition. How do these people sleep at night? What do they tell people they do for a living?

UVAS Triathlon

2006-05-23T00:00:00-07:00

I completed my second triathlon of the season a few days ago and Jessie took some pictures, so I thought I would do a quick post with how I did and a couple photos.
The first of the season for me (and for a lot of people) was the Strawberry Fields Tri in my hometown of Ventura, CA (actually, Oxnard, but it's basically the same) â€“ I mentioned that one in my last post. It was basically a duathlon (run and bike), since they cancelled the 400yd swim due to unbelievably strong currents.
In that race, I finished with the following time table :

	Distance	Rank	Pctile	Time	Pace

This past Sunday, I ran in the UVAS Triathlon in Morgan Hill. It was longer, though still short of Olympic distance â€“ 3/4mi swim, 16mi bike, 5mi run.
I think I'm getting in better shape, because this one actually didn't hurt as much as the Strawberry fields, even though a) I had to swim, b) it's longer, c) the bike was NOT flat. Actually, there was a mile long honkin hill around mile 11 that was just killer. I saw people walking their bikes up it.
Here's how I did in Morgan Hill :

	Distance	Rank	Pctile	Time	Pace

3 months in 6 minutes

2006-04-14T00:00:00-07:00

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 â€“ there is a lot going on. I was trying to get another site launched â€“ 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 â€“ 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 isâ€¦ 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 â€“ ouch), then an 11mi bike and 5k run. Much fun.
Well, that's all for now â€“ I'll try to be a bit more regular with these from now on.

SSB Guest Post

2006-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

Just an update. The folks over at Since Sliced Bread put the post I just did a few days ago up on their site as a guest post.
They just up and asked me. I don't even know how they found it.
Anyhow, if you're interested in the comments it got (ouch), go ahead and check it out :
Best Revolt Since Sliced Bread

Our Ten Words

2006-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

I just stumbled on a (apparently) new website sponsored by Tom Vilsack and the HeartlandPAC group. The website is called :
www.ourtenwords.com
It means to have everyone collaborate on a single ten word message that represents the Democratic Party message.
From the site :

This site is designed to start a discussion about the Democratic PartyÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s message by obtaining as many ideas as possible. This is a conversation that everyone needs to participate inâ€”it must not be limited to certain members of the party, whether they be the grassroots, elected officials, or policy experts. This effort matters so much that we cannot afford to leave anyone out of the process.

Although I don't really care enough about the outcome to get me to participate in the exercise, I do like that we're seeing more of this participatory type of political website and I also like that an actual politician is behind it. Go check it out.

Best Revolt Since Sliced Bread

2006-01-13T00:00:00-08:00

So, this is interesting. First off, SEIU's Since Sliced Bread competition closed a while ago and the judges went over the 20,000 entries and eventually selected 21. Interestingly, the idea that I entered was choosen, but not my actual entry. The judges choose idea #19132 entitled â€˜Blanket The US With Wireless Access' vs. my idea #125, which is entitled â€˜Wireless America Initiative'. I posted mine on the first or second day of the contest I think, sometime around October 6, while 19132 looks like it was about 2 months later.
In fact, I posted about it here when I did it: Since Sliced Bread.
Now, that is pretty wierd, but the funny thing is the animosity shown by the community about the choices, especially that one. They are really angry about it. You can read some of the comments in response to Andy Sterns post here:
http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/23148

Andy, I confess, I am a bit surprised, no.. stunned, that you think those 21 ideas are amazing. Wireless Internet? That is an amazing original idea??? Of all the ideas posted, that was one of the best 21?
...
I think everyone should vote for the wireless idea.. because a) the internet providers will smash it down in a heartbeat and b) the press will laugh their ass off that so much time and money was wasted coming up with such an â€˜amazing' idea.
...
However, imagine if it did win. It's the most â€œobviousâ€, talked-about, blogged-about, written-about public policy idea out there. Everyone and his brother has read (or written) an article advocating blanketing the US with free wireless, in some technology magazine, or on a popular blog like Slashdot. Hell, even Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit) has probably suggested it on his own blog. If that idea does win, it will just point up what a travesty this whole contest has become.
...
Most of the bloggers seem to agree that the nationwide wireless â€œideaâ€ is questionable at best. Perhaps a run-off of the remaining 49 ideas to choose a replacement for this idea (or add one more to the 21) would quell some of the anger over this particular sore spot would be appropriate.
...
If you were ok with lame, un-original, rehashed magazine copied ideas, then you should have told us up front.

Ouch.
In addition, there are a number of comments where people have found my entry and are informally advising me to seek legal advice in case that one wins, such as this:

If the original submitters of the two ideas I mentionedâ€”â€œWireless America Initiativeâ€ and â€œCivilian Works Corpsâ€ are reading this, you may want to consult attorneys and take SEIU to task for violating its own rules and causing you to forfeit a chance at the cash prizes.
...
Scott, if I was in your position, I would already have spoken to an attorney. We are talking about 100k here. Not some air miles. Since I live out in the country, my only access to a faster than dial up connection is via wireless. At least your idea covers that, even though it is available.

First off, I'm not going to sue. I like the SEIU and the last thing I need to do is waste hard working peoples union dues on lawsuits for an idea that was built on the ideas of others. Maybe if this guy wins we can guilt them into using the money to start a PAC to support politicans who would work for this (which is what I probably would have used it for anyhow), but that's up to them.
Now, as for the merits of the idea. There are four major arguments against it that I have been seeing and I would like to address them â€“ because I do still think it was an appropriate entry and I would like to see it win. The arguments are :

1. It is not an original idea

A National WiFi network is not a commonplace suggestion. I have never heard any party or any politician mention anything close to this save Andrew Rasiej and some of the other Muni WiFi people â€“ but those were municipal, I was asking for a federal initiative. It is quite possible that some magazine has mentioned it but it is certainly not some obvious, rehashed public policy idea â€“ even in San Franscisco when we're just talking about Muni Wifi, people are both unfamiliar with the idea and ignorant of the most important possible benefits. Even on Slashdot, people talk of national wireless networks run by geeks â€“ small bands of open networks, not single signon and not full coverage. People think that I'm talking about free internet access â€“ I'm not. I'm talking about infrastructure â€“ building a network that is publicly owned that business can build products and services on â€“ without each one having to build their own.
However, that being said â€“ I understand the problem. Though I don't think it is commonplace, it is certainly not revolutionary nor something others have never thought of. Had I won, I would not have kept the money to reward myself for my oh-so-brilliant idea. I simply think it is something that is far more important than is being considered by actual politicians and I wanted to see it win so it would get some attention by people who were listening.
I also thought it was good in that context of the SEIU. Countering offshoring is a major concern for unions and building a strong national wireless infrastructure would be far more effective at combating that than the hundreds of â€œideasâ€ I saw entered that suggested vicious protectionism.

2. Verizon already offers this

This is confusing, but an important distinction. Verizon offers cellular broadband access over their cellular network. It's basically a modem that uses a cell phone for connection â€“ it is not WiFi. The difference is subtle but crucial. If you have 10 devices that want to be network enabled, with cellular technology you have to have a seperate account for each one â€“ that is a $50/month access fee for each one. With WiFi, you have a cheaper device, higher bandwidth, and all 10 devices can access the internet on a single account. If you are a small device manufacturer, that is the difference between a viable product and never getting off the ground.

3. Private industry already doing it

The only thing I've heard of that ever came close to suggesting this was Cometa Networks, which was back in 2002 and was supposed to be finished by 2004. It obviously never happened. What we have now is a pathetic hodgepodge of private networks based in coffeehouses and bookstores across the country. You cannot take your laptop with a wireless card almost anywhere in the country and expect it to get a signal (and if it does, expect to actually have an account with the private company that happens to own that network).
There are rumors that Google is trying to do it and have already offered to wire San Francisco for free, but the possibility that they will want to do that nationally is pretty bleak, and I would rather it be publicly owned. That is not to say that private industry would get screwed â€“ I envisioned more of a single payer model â€“ private companies build it out and maintain it, but it is publicly owned and one account gets you one anywhere. Then medium and small businesses that could never have existed can become employers and everybody wins.

Conclusion

This post is too long, so I'll end it. I think that the SinceSlicedBread contest was a great idea and I'm sorry people are so angry over it. Perhaps the SEIU will offer a database download of all the ideas and someone else can do a community ranked system of good ideas for another use. In the end, the contest and website itself â€“ with it's community input and institutional response â€“ was probably the best and ultimately most important and lasting idea of all 20,000 they saw.

Site Update and Ashdown

2005-12-20T00:00:00-08:00

Sorry about the downtime â€“ this site has had some issues over the last few days. I was using a bleeding edge version of Typo and a memory leak kept killing the server. We'll see if this stable version can stay up for a while.
On another note, I have been watching Pete Ashdown's run for Senate in Utah â€“ give it a look, as I'm sure it will be a new front in Open Source politics.

Starting a New Conversation

2005-12-12T00:00:00-08:00

As I mentioned on my Congressional website, I am turning jointheconversation.org into my personal blog again. This time, I will be concentrating on campaigns and efforts across the country that further Open Source Politics or government.
I have imported all the articles I had from the Chacon for Congress race (which goes back about a year) and I will try to get the comments imported a bit later. I will also try to archive a lot of the work of the Chacon for Congress race here for reference.
I think Open Source and Participatory Politics is the future of governance and I'm looking forward to getting started on our next leg of this journey.
Scott Chacon

Stepping Down, Endorsing Margee Ensign

2005-12-04T00:00:00-08:00

I have been quiet on this site for a while now because I am withdrawing my name from the race. When I first started this campaign, over a year ago, I had put myself up as a candidate because 1) no one else was both willing to run and try new, grassroots, open source ideas dedicated to the goal of involving people in their government, 2) I could not find someone I wanted to support in my district, and 3) I had assumed there would be no significant chance of anyone else defeating the incumbent this election.
It became clear early on that this was not to be the case. Pombo has gained national attention for his questionable and controversial acts while at the same time his congressional mentor Tom DeLay is being prosecuted for corruption charges. Because of this negative attention, the DCCC and other democratic-leaning organizations have targeted our eleventh district. Pombo and the Republican party are vulnerable, so now candidates and money are pouring into this race.
The lack of a viable, ideal candidate that would be willing to use technology and grassroots campaigning changed only a few weeks ago, when I met with Margee Ensign about her impending announcement to join the race. Margee was spoken highly of to us by Jerry Hildebrand when we interviewed him for our podcast, so I had known of her already. When Jessica and I met with her, that was the end of this campaign. Margee is unbelievably qualified, technologically savvy, internationally and politically experienced and still amazingly humble. We are continually impressed with her passion, kindness and strength of character. She is exactly who I want representing me. I have volunteered to do whatever I can to help her campaign and she has very graciously accepted. I have developed a website for her that just launched last week at: http://www.ensignforcongress.com and I will hopefully continue to be involved in whatever capacity I can help.
So what happens to this campaign?
JoinTheConversation.org will become my blog, focusing on open source politics and races and will be a place for me to discuss the continuation of GroundWorks. I will continue to develop GW, first for Margee's campaign and also with other local and national campaigns that have shown interest.
Though the campaign is ending, we have accomplished a lot with almost no money and little time. Our campaign produced several political examples that, as far as I know, nobody had done before:

Open Schedule â€“ first come, first served campaign scheduling
Micro Goals â€“ small, easily achievable, specific donation goals with reports
Call Me â€“ Letting people request a personal call from the candidate online
Open Books â€“ realtime feed of donations and expenditures as they happen

I was also the first Congressional candidate with a Podcast and the only one so far with a Tumblelog or a Tag Cloud for the Blog I wrote myself. We were a campaign of firsts, experiments and ideas. Several of them are already being used and adopted by other campaigns, which I highly encourage, and I have learned an incredible amount about all of this.
To those of you who supported me or donated to the campaign, I thank you kindly. You invested in tools and ideas that will be used by many other clubs and candidates for a long time to come. I hope you follow my work at jointheconversation.org as I continue to pursue the open source campaign and participatory democracy one election at a time. If you decide to run for something someday, and I encourage you to, please let me know how I can help.
Thank you all,
Scott Anthony Bylo Chacon

Turning Everything Inside-Out

2005-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

Our campaign just got a nice mention on the Politics and Technology Blog.

The typical approach for such a tough race is to raise buckets of money from big-money donors, unleash an attack ad blitz, and spend every waking moment stumping across the district.

Well, Scott Chacon is anything but typical. He's a software developer running for Congress â€“ and he's using his campaign as the testbed for an open source project to create a new kind of campaign management software. He's also doing just about everything differently.

He mentions the GroundWorks software we're developing, as well as giving a good, simple overview of the campaign and how it's different.

It's a new way of thinking about campaigns. Inside-out, really. Check it out.

No More Bunny Ears

2005-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

You probably wouldn't expect this from me, being such a tech geek, but we don't have cable television. We have an antenna we bought at Radio Shack a few years ago when our previous antenna broke. Yes, the clerk gave me a funny look. Our entire marriage, Jessica and I have never gotten more than 5 channels.
Now, we're not complete TV luddites - we watch some TV shows we have on DVD. However, as far as newer stuff goes, we currently only get about 4 channels, all over our rabbit ear antenna - only one and a half in english. (I don't think fuzzy KQED really counts as a full 'english' vote)
Though this has, at times, helped us work on our spanish skills a bit, it rather severely limits how much TV we can stand. When it takes you 8 seconds to flip through all your channels and you end up on 'Sabado Gigante', chances are it's going to be a short TV night. Which I think is something of a good thing.
At any rate, the reason I am sharing this is that there is a bill being discussed in the Senate to force broadcasters to switch to all digital programming by the year 2009. This makes my story relevant in that they are going to spend about 3 billion dollars (when you say that, be sure to put your pinky to your mouth, Dr. Evil style) giving converter boxes to people that still watch TV over the air. Like me.
The silly thing is that they are doing this regardless of financial status, so, it's going to cost taxpayers about $40 for the one I would need to use. Not directly, the money would come from the sale of the spectrum, I'm assuming to the private sector, but it's less money to reduce our debt regardless.
Also, this is one of the arguments in favor:

The move to all-digital broadcasts will free valuable radio spectrum, some of which will be allocated to improve radio communications among fire and police departments and other first responders.

Does that seem weird to you? I mean, that is obviously important, but is the radio spectrum that crowded that we need to sell off the free, over the air broadcast frequencies? Or, is the technology we are equipping our first responders with not making very good use of the existing spectrum?
My question is: is this really a pressing need, or do the media companies just want to make sure they have digital rights management over everything that goes out? So people couldn't keep doing silly things like tape recording shows without paying extra.
Anyhow, it looks like in the next few years we're (my wife and I) going to have to either cut TV out altogether or finally break down and pay for cable from our designated monopoly. (I've already had this conversation. Me: "What is your smallest package?", Them: "Well, we start at $49.99/mo and it comes with 850 channels, and you need a converter box so we can add another remote control to your life", Me: "How does that compare to your competition?", Them: "Our comp-e-what? [barely stifled laughter]") Maybe by then we'll finally be able to subscribe to good TV by the show and have the episodes delivered over the internet and none of this will be an issue anymore.
Hmm. How much do you suppose the 'Daily Show' + 'Sabado Gigante' package would cost?

Take our land... please!

2005-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

Although Pombo has said that his unbelievable proposal to sell several of our national parks was â€œnot seriousâ€, today the House Resources Committee will vote on a budget measure that could â€œgive mining corporations control over much of AmericaÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s federal public landâ€.
From the news release:

The budget reconciliation proposal put forward by Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, a California Republican, would allow foreign and U.S. mining corporations to buy millions of acres of public lands in the West, including land in national parks, wilderness and other protected areas.
In addition, the proposal would undercut budget deficit reduction by prohibiting the federal government from imposing royalties on minerals and metals removed from public lands.

So, no, he's not selling the parks themselves, just several thousand acres within them so that private industry can rip all the natural resources out of them without having to pay any royalties.
This proposal also includes the ANWR details, which he now calls by the more long winded â€œArctic Coastal Plain Domestic Energy Security Act of 2005â€. How verbose. As long as the title is blatantly patronizing, I think we should have gone with the â€œLiberating Energy from the Ground and Protecting Our Children From Terrorists while Happy Fun Caribou Don't Mind Actâ€.

Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-CA) introduced the Resources CommitteeÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s budget reconciliation plan today, which includes opening the northern coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to energy production and granting more control of offshore energy production to coastal states.

We're drilling everywhere! Off our shores, the Arctic Coastal Plain (the plain formerly known as ANWR), giving out mining patents â€“ if you have a drill, we've got a patch of land for you! We even want you to drill in ambiguously defined regions of public lands :

the Secretary shall hold the first oil shale and tar sands lease sales under the regulation, offering for lease a minimum of 35 percent of the Federal lands that are geologically prospective for oil shale and tar sands within Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

Isn't there some sort of protection that any of these lands have preventing this? Well, Alaska does, but don't worry, Pombo has it covered:

REPEAL.Ã¢â‚¬â€Section 1003 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (U.S.C. 3143) is repealed

That's just what I found by skimming. Feel free to browse yourself. Also, you can feel pretty confident that I am correctly blaming Pombo directly for this. In the top corner of the document, it has this filestamp :

F:M9POMBOPOMBO_130.XML

So, I'm again going to post some time my wife and I have spent backpacking in or otherwise visting federal land in Utah and Wyoming, before someone finds oil shale there.

Culture of Corruption

2005-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

The Bull Moose Blog had this to say about possible upcoming indictments (emphasis added):

Having stipulated his distaste for the Bushies, the Moose will not be as jubilant as some if Mr. Fitzgerald announces indictments, even if one of his targets is Rove (in truth, the Moose will then enjoy some schadenfreude). But, it will be a sad day for America. If Administration officials violated the law it will further weaken trust in our public institutions. Cynicism will be the victor.

I am sad that, to a large degree, my side is focusing on this. They want comeuppance, and in my opinion, rightly so. However, it is not what the country needs, it will not improve politics. Dancing on the graves will only continue itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s downward spiral. Increased polarization, increased partisanship will be the ultimate results.
We are just harping on the Ã¢â‚¬Å“culture of corruptionÃ¢â‚¬?, which I agree is there and needs to be addressed, but I don't think we should just be pointing everybody at it and saying Ã¢â‚¬Å“at least weÃ¢â‚¬â„¢re not themÃ¢â‚¬?. Rumor has it that the Democratic slogan for 2006 will be â€œAmerica â€“ Together, we can do betterâ€.
Here's a thought â€“ maybe we should just BE better. Demonstrate we are not corrupt by introducing a bill or a website that obviously and dramatically increases government transparency. Open all our campaign books with real time disclosure. Make it obvious through action who is actually not corrupt, not just through finger pointing and repetition but through action. Let's think differently, try to raise the bar a bit. What do you think? How can we be better?

1999 and counting

2005-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

365 and a Wakeup is a great military blog that I read often. A few days ago, he wrote about the funeral of SGT Jerry Lee Bonifacio Jr. that he attended. As we will be topping 2,000 military deaths probably within the next few days, please keep this in mind. Whenever you hear that there were four Marines killed in Baghdad yesterday, remember that this happens four more times.

The memorial ceremony for SGT Bonifacio took place in the elegant remains of one of SaddamÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s palatial buildings. Rows after row of simple folding chairs cradled his grieving friends, their heads bent in silent reverie.
The orderly rows of chairs were framed by tall fluted columns, as elegant in their fashion as those in the Parthenon. Groups of soldiers stood beneath these pillars, their eyes fixed on the simple memorial that served as a physical reminder of our painful loss.
During the ceremony SGT BonifacioÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s entire chain of command honored our fallen warrior, their words giving shape and substance to the pain and loss laying heavy in the air. They were followed by SGT Helk, one of SGT BonifacioÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s closest friends. He shared his private memories of SGT Bonifacio Ã¢â‚¬â€œ the songs he would hum in the mornings, and the way he would blare his radio at the end of a long shift. He remembered his friend happily thumbing through the latest comic books, or helping some of the other troops defeat the latest video game.
And above all he remembered the deep and lasting optimism that suffused every aspect of SGT BonifacioÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s being.

What has SGT Bonifacio's death gained us? I would argue largely nothing but huge debt and more danger and hatred aimed at the United States. However, for the Iraqi people, it has gained a whole new world:
(Iraqi soldier and local boy holding up a sign indicating a polling place on election day, taken by the author of â€œ365 and a Wakeupâ€)
I have always thought this Iraq war a mistake â€“ a grevious error of judgement by an overzelous administration misguided by power and unthinking ideology. I do not think it was in the best interests of the U.S. or our future foreign policy.
However, I know that any list of genocides in the 20th century will contain Saddam and his slaughter of the Kurds in the 80's. I absolutely believe he needed to be overthrown and put to justice. It should not have been unilateral, it should not have been under WMD pretenses, it should not have been nearly two decades after the fact. Though unfortunately his overthrow was far too delayed for any other dictator to learn a neccesary lesson, his overthrow is obviously a good thing. Our troops are doing an incredible job under difficult and often unfair circumstances, democracy seems to be slowly winning, and Saddam is currently standing trial. The Iraqi people are gaining hugely, despite many setbacks, at a heavy cost to America in money and lives.
So where do we go from here? Well, I'll leave my â€œofficialâ€ Iraq position for a later post, but as the 2,000th soldier gives his or her life for this adventure, I would ask everyone to think about this from a different point of view than they normally would. A moment of silence for the lost lives and selfless sacrifice, a short prayer for one more country becoming a constitutional democracy. Whether or not you think one was worth the other, original intention or not, I will leave up to you.
We'll talk about Iraq again very shortly.

Democrat and Republican Email

2005-10-24T00:00:00-07:00

I got yet another email from Barbara Boxers PAC the other day that I normally wouldn't read, but this time I did, because I wanted to make a point.
Here is the actual email.
I get these emails from her PAC about once every week or two. Almost always about the political flavor of the week (Roberts, Katrina, Bolton, etc), and always very long on words and rhetoric. They are nearly indistinguishable in all of these regards to the emails I get from MoveOn, John Kerry, and DFA. Edwards is the only breakout, mostly because his tend to seem more personal.
The following are some choice phrases, in the order that I found them.

radical right-wing agenda
Republicans' relentless pursuit for power
Byrd is a patriot, a statesman, and a national treasure
George Bush and the Republican attack machine in Washington
radical right-wing agenda
Bush Administration's rush to war
thwarted the radical right-wing extremists
President's extreme right-wing judicial nominees
Karl Rove and the right-wing smear machine
right-wing extremists
right-wing attack machine smeared and distorted

This email was about 620 words long. Let me sum it up:
Senator Robert Byrd is good. Republicans are bad. Bush is their leader. Bryd angers evil Republicans by stopping thier badness with his goodness. Evil Republicans will now force helpless voters to elect someone else. Give Robert Byrd money.
That was 42 words.
See that? Fewer words by an order of magnitude â€“ easier to read, same message. I like Sen. Boxer, and I will almost always vote Democrat, but this is why people hate politics. What is this supposed to accomplish? People who are on this list don't need to be angered and converted â€“ I think if it was a short, rational call for help, preferably written by Byrd, that would make me far more likely to be interested in helping. What is this angry, head-cut-off red-in-the-face everything-is-at-stake rhetoric about? I get this from everybody, and I'm just tired of it. How is this helping politics? The thing that really burns me about this is that I basically agree with the things they are trying to do, I just hate how they think they have to go about it.
This is not limited to Democrats, certainly the Republican party does it too. I bet actual Republicans are also getting tired of seeing stuff like this spouting about the MSM and the â€œradical bleeding heart liberals!â€ too. Maybe instead of fighting down at that level, we should find a different, better way to get people involved. A way that makes it tolerable to be engaged.
Well, it turns out that the Republicans are starting to do just that. Here is another email that is a call for support for a Republican. However, rather than smearing the other side as evil devils in a 600 word rant then asking for money, they ask you to adopt 25 voters, give them personal attention, ask them to vote and talk about the issues. It is easy to help, easy to read, inclusive and respectful â€“ all in about 200 words.
From the email:

Here's how it works: sign up, and we'll email you a list of 25 voters in one Virginia community. You'll call those voters to ask them to support Jerry Kilgore. One week before Election Day, we'll e-mail you the list of supporters you've identified so you can contact them and remind them to vote. We'll give you everything you'll need to be successful, including detailed instructions and a chance to learn about the issues at stake in this election. It's easy â€“ and critical to make sure we turn out Jerry's supporters on Election Day.

This came directly from the RNC. Where is the Democratic party on stuff like this? I am building my own software to provide my own campaign tools like this â€“ why is that necessary? DNC or the DFA or someone should be investing in open source tools for candidates to use for free that will involve people and harness grassroots power. We should be building on those tools every election, we should be leading the way on this â€“ I have always thought of Democrats as the party of the people, yet here the Republicans are engaging thier grassroots while we're asking for money through mass propaganda.
We could be so much more connected, we could offer supporters so much more involvement. We have to get to a point in politics where it's not all about the dollars. This is our chance â€“ where are the new ideas? I am contributing GroundWorks to the progressive political community, who will help me with it, take it to the next level? Alternately, who will convince the DNC or the DFA that they should build thier own? That instead of a $5,000 check to a candidates PAC, maybe providing free, hosted, powerful community and precinct online tools to candidates across the country might have more of an effect?
More importantly â€“ if you were a â€œdecline to stateâ€, and you got both of these emails, who would you help?

Wi-Fi Cloud Covers Rural Oregon

2005-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

I have been talking about the benefits of municipal wireless setups for some time now. There have been many people commenting that much of my district is too rural for that to be very useful. Municipal Wireless is mostly useful for large cities â€“ San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia.
Well, I just read an online article in Wired magazine that describes a wireless setup in rural Oregon that has some great examples of how a wireless network over a large rural area has great benefits â€“ not the least of which being less of a fight from the big telecoms.
For farmers :

Parked alongside his onion fields, Bob Hale can prop open a laptop and read his e-mail or, with just a keystroke, check the moisture of his crops.
As the jack rabbits run by, he can watch CNN online, play a video game or turn his irrigation sprinklers on and off, all from the air conditioned comfort of his truck.
...
Ã¢â‚¬Å“Outside the cloud, I canÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t even get DSL,Ã¢â‚¬? said Hale. Ã¢â‚¬Å“When IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m inside it, I can take a picture of one of my onions, plug it into my laptop and send it to the Subway guys in San Diego and say, Ã¢â‚¬ËœHereÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s a picture of my crop.Ã¢â‚¬â„¢Ã¢â‚¬?

For the Port:

For the Columbia River Port of Umatilla, one of the largest grain ports in the nation, the wireless network is being used to set up a high-tech security perimeter that will scan bar codes on incoming cargo.
Ã¢â‚¬Å“It has opened our eyes and minds to possibilities. Now that weÃ¢â‚¬â„¢re not tied to offices and wires and poles, now what can we do?Ã¢â‚¬? said Kim Puzey, port director.

And municipal services are all benefiting from this setup, as well :

Now, emergency responders in the three counties surrounding the Umatilla Chemical Depot are equipped with laptop computers that are Wi-Fi ready.
These laptops are set up to detail the size and direction of a potential chemical leak, enabling responders to direct evacuees from the field.
Traffic lights and billboards posting evacuation messages can also be controlled remotely over the wireless network.
And for the Hermiston Police Department, having squad cars equipped with a wireless laptop means officers can work less overtime by being able to file their crime reports from the field.

They have also setup a specialized program that allows local officials to check parking meters remotely, among other things. These are some real life examples of what happens when wireless clouds are setup in any community. This is why I have made my Wireless America initiative part of our American Roadmap goals. It's about improving the economy â€“ from the farmers to the Port Authority, small businesses to big ones.

Moving Forward - An American Roadmap

2005-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

I just put up an outline for a simple, long term vision for America and American politics. It is called â€œMoving Forward â€“ An American Roadmapâ€, and lays out some very simple goals that I think we should pursue as an American nation.

Universal College Education
Participatory Democracy
Balanced Budget
Sustainable Energy Economy
Wireless America

I will be addressing each of these goals in more depth as blog entries in the coming months and linking to those entries from the page. This is my vision for moving America forward and I look forward to hearing feedback on it.
Scott

A Very Special Election

2005-10-12T00:00:00-07:00

We have been getting a lot of emails and phone calls about the special election coming up here at the beginning of next month. It seems fairly obvious to everyone that it's a power play by Arnold â€“ there is nothing on the ballot that couldn't have waited until next year, but there is no stopping it now. So, how should we vote?
Well, most of my choices are right down the Democratic party's recommendations â€“ except for one. To the angst and possible gnashing of teeth to be had by many Democrats, I have to support Prop 77. More about that in a minute, for now, here is how I'm going to vote and some resources to help you decide for yourself :

Title	Vote	Title	Vote
Prop 73 Waiting Period and Parental Notification.	NO	Prop 77 Reapportionment.	YES
Prop 74 Public School Teachers. Waiting Period for Permanent Status.	NO	Prop 79 Cheaper Prescription Drugs For Californians Act.	YES
Prop 75 Public Employee Union Dues.	NO	Prop 80 Affordable Electricity & Preventing Blackouts Act.	YES
Prop 76 School Funding. State Spending.	NO
Prop 78 Prescription Drugs. Discounts.	NO

Resources :

Why YES on 77?

Now, as for my â€˜yes' vote on Prop 77. It's simply a good law. A while back I blogged about a report on redistricting that mentioned the â€œDrawing Linesâ€ report â€“ ~~well, the law was amended to fix almost all of the problems that were found there, and now it is a really good law.~~
The truth is that incumbency reelection rates are unbelievably high â€“ which is what I suppose you get when the elected officials draw their own district lines. You might get districts that look like this. Non-competitive districts result in ideologues in office and moderates unable to compete â€“ it is bad for democracy and bad for government.
The only reason the Democrats oppose it is because they will lose seats. The only reason the Republicans support it is because they will gain seats. We argue that we should not draw districts based on old census data, that we should wait until the next Census, and I agree, but the districts we are currently voting in are based off of 6 year old Census data, so new ones based off the same data can't possibly be worse. It is not ideal, but that's not enough to not vote for it. Neither is party self-interest.
I support this because our state is nearly as badly gerrymandered as Texas under DeLay â€“ we wail and cry about the injustice there, but turn a blind eye to our own district drawing corruption because it benefits us. I don't think that is a good reason, and honestly, I would rather have moderates of both parties in office that favors our side slightly less, than ideologues and districts that discourage participation.
In the end, it is about hypocrisy. If the Republicans controlled the state and this exact same law was to be voted on, I don't think there would be a protest to be heard from our side. It's a good and fair law, and every state needs to pass it's equivalent â€“ it is healthy for politics, even if it's painful for politicians, or painful for my party.
We need to control the legislature because we honestly speak for the will of the people of California, not because we've worked the system better. Vote â€˜Yes' on 77.
And â€˜No' on everything else that self-centered, grandstanding Governor of ours is endorsing. Jessica is a public school teacher, so I'd like to post about our thoughts on some of the other Props later.
~~For good arguments for and against 77, please read the League of Women Voter's Letter to McCarthy, saying that they would endorse the bill if they removed the immediate redistricting clause.~~
Update 10/13: I made a big, yet ultimately inconsequential mistake in this post. I had the wrong bill in mind. I thought that Prop 77 was McCarthy's redistricting bill, which is what Arnold was originally backing. It is not â€“ it is apparently the Costa one. I was not aware that Arnold had switched his endorsement.
The amended McCarthy bill was better, I thought â€“ so that is too bad. However, having now read through the actual text of 77, so as not to mistake myself again, I am still endorsing and voting for it. There are some big differences â€“ there are only 3 judges (as opposed to 5), there is no competitive requirement (though that doesn't rule it out), and there is an additional public vote (which may actually be a good thing) â€“ but overall, I think it is far better than the current system.
I apologize for the mixup, and I have crossed out the sections that are no longer relevant. If you have any comments, please leave them.

Since Sliced Bread

2005-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

Yesterday I heard about a great website from the SEIU. Andy Stern, president of the SEIU and whom I heard speak at the Personal Democracy Forum a few months back, posted on the Huffington Post about a new website they launched just a couple of days ago. The site is called Since Sliced Bread, and it is setup to collect good ideas.
The idea is that there haven't been many good, big ideas coming from government lately, so they setup this website to take suggestions for the next big idea. From the site :

Since Sliced Bread is a national call for fresh, common sense ideas. A call for ideas that will strengthen our economy and improve the day-to-day lives of working men and women and their families. ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s also a place where ordinary Americans and experts alike can discuss the important economic issues of our times. ... The winner receives a grand prize of $100,000 and our commitment to work to make the idea a reality. The two runners-up take home $50,000. All 21 ideas will be featured in a book to be published in 2006.

So you write your idea (175 words or less) on their site, and you can view and comment on other peoples ideas. The winners are voted on early next year. So, if you have a great idea, go try it out.
Here is mine.
I like this because it is another example of how we can use the internet to encourage a real participatory democracy. Ask hundreds of thousands of people what they think, promise to do something about it, and I think we would be surprised at what we can come up with. I have been working on a project related to the campaign that is very similar and I think this is the way government will eventually go. Involving everybody, asking everybody what we should do, asking everybody to participate, and actually listening.
On the front page of Since Sliced Bread, they say :

Ordinary Americans can help determine the future, so join this important national conversation right now

Join the conversation.

Beyond Delay

2005-09-28T00:00:00-07:00

This 13 most corrupt members of Congress thing, in addition to the Endangered Species Act rewrite and National Park selling proposal have gotten Pombo a lot of attention lately.
I didn't link to the actual report yesterday, but the organization has put up a whole website for it at http://www.beyonddelay.org. Pombo's section is here, which details out several of his recent ethical problems, including :

Misuse of Franking Privileges
Campaign Donations In Exchange for Use of Official Powers
- Support for Chevron in Opposing CompetitorÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Bid for Unocal
- Opposition to Environmental Guidelines
- Legislative Assistance to Indian Tribes
- Support for Proposed Freeways
Payments to Family Members
Misuse of Federal Funds for Campaign Expenses

This is one of the more comprehensive and concise collections of recent Pombo ethical violations. If you would like to read about any of them in more detail, please visit the site.
In related news, even the Republicans are starting to get tired of him. Republican Pete McCloskey just announced that if nobody stands up to Pombo in the primary, he will challenge Pombo.

A former U.S. Marine, McCloskey served in the House of Representatives from 1967 to 1983, representing a district on the Peninsula. He made an unsuccessful presidential primary bid in 1972 on an anti-Vietnam War platform, attempting to defeat President Richard Nixon. ... Monday morning, speakers from such diverse groups as farmers, sports fishermen and California fisheries, joined McCloskey in speaking out against Pombo's attempt to change the ESA.

We are going to have an interesting year.

13 / 535 is not good

2005-09-26T00:00:00-07:00

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) published a report recently naming what it determined as the 13 most corrupt members of both houses of and both parties in Congress. Of 535 members of Congress, Richard Pombo was named one of the 13 most corrupt â€“ the list included both Democrats and Republicans.
From the article:

Rep. Richard W. Pombo: He paid his wife and brother $357,325 in campaign funds in the last four years, the report says. He also supported the wind-power industry before the Department of Interior without disclosing that his parents received hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from wind-power turbines on their ranch.
Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Pombo, said that â€œeach of the charges is baseless.â€ He called the watchdog group â€œa Democratic attack group, and all of their charges should be taken with a grain of salt.â€

My question is, how do you say that a charge that you paid your wife and brother $357,325 in campaign funds is baseless when anybody can verify it by looking at his filings?
Annette Pombo, 2004 cycle : $55,284 + $76,105, mainly for â€œFundraising consultingâ€ or â€œFUNDRAISING SVC.â€
Annette Pombo, 2002 cycle : $110,064
Randall Pombo, 2004 cycle : $91,270 + $50,050
Randall Pombo, 2002 cycle : $444,737
That adds up to well over $357k, so I'm assuming they took out reimbursements. Either way, if anything it's lowballing the amount his immediate family got from whatever someone might have donated to his campaign. In filings made public this year, he's already paid his wife $9000 for fundraising consulting, and $6750 to Randall, his brother, for the same thing â€“ and that's only for the first three months of the year.
As if to drive the point home, we get this, aimed at getting people to support drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge :

House Resources chairman Richard Pombo is circulating a draft of a bill that would sell 15 national parks and require the National Park Service to raise millions of dollars by selling the naming rights to visitors' centers and trails.
If drilling continues to be banned in the refuge, Pombo's staff argued, the government would have to sell parks as well as advertising space on park buses, trams and ferries to reach the level of revenues expected from oil leases sales in the Alaskan refuge.

Sell the national parks? Rename the John Muir trail to the Pac Bell Trail? Of course not â€“ they were only kiddingâ€¦

â€œThis document was intended to illustrate not just for leadership but for members of the House that the chairman feels we have no choice but to open (the refuge),â€ said Kennedy, Pombo's spokesman.

So it's a threat, then? Well that's wonderful.
We also have a lot to talk about regarding Pombos fast tracking of his horrible rewrite of the Endangered Species Act through Congress, so more on that soon. For now, I'll leave you with pictures of just a few of the many times Jessica and I have spent in our National Parks.

Paul Rusesabagina

2005-09-22T00:00:00-07:00

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 â€“ 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 â€œAn Ordinary Manâ€ 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 Problem from Hell by Samantha Power.

I Mean Honestly...

2005-09-22T00:00:00-07:00

So I did another triathlon in Pleasanton this weekend â€“ on Sunday, actually. I did better than the last one, but my dumb bike tire popped again. I think my bike may well be allergic to the finish line, because it was an 18 mile bike ride, and the tire died around mile 17. Since it takes me about 20 minutes to change a tire and far less to jog a mile, I just jogged my bike in. So here you have this dumb picture of me crossing the bike finish while not actually riding my bike.

What a doofus. Other than that, it was fun â€“ next time I'm thinking of trying an international distance course.

That's assuming I can get my bike to work for the whole course. Also, in case you're wondering â€“ no, I hadn't ridden the bike since the last triathlon.
The website seems to be holding up pretty well â€“ I just got my first batch of voter file data, so I'll be injecting that and we'll be off and running with a targeted voter list. Who wants a precinct?
Scott

New Website!

2005-09-19T00:00:00-07:00

As you may be able to tell, if you've been here before, our new website has been put up. There have been several new features added, and hopefully it will be an all around better site for everyone.
Among the improvements :

Phone Banking

There is now a full featured phone banking application here. If you sign up for an account, you can start calling other people in our district to let them know about my campaign. The best part is that you can schedule me to call or meet with them while you are on the phone! Imagine saying that on the phone â€“ â€œWould you like to meet the candidate? How about Monday at 7pm? Great, he'll be thereâ€...

Call Me

I now have a Call Me section, where if you would like me to call you to talk about something, you can just schedule me to give you a call. There is a link on the front page that is quick and easy to use.

Better Scheduler

My online scheduler lets you determine my campaign schedule â€“ first come, first served. It is far, far better than the sad version at my old site. Now it checks for conflicts and enforces rules so I can handle the scheduling. It is also much easier to use.

Feeds

There are now a number of feeds on our website, including individual discussion feeds, a campaign account feed, a schedule feed, and there will be more. We will soon have a feed of all the meetings that I go to, with images or video attached.

Open Source

The best part is that this whole website is open source. Feel free to visit http://groundworks.chaconcorps.com to download all of the source code and modify it for your own campaign. Or, add a feature that you would like to see and submit a patch to me. This is the beginning of a web based campaign that spreads to help elect a different kind of politician everywhere.
This is just the beginning. Now we have a framework we can really work with. There is tons of new functionality just around the corner â€“ and all of it will continue to be open and available to anyone else for free.
Again, this is a brand new site, so please let me know if you see any bugs or problems, or if anything is confusing.

Welcome DFAers!

2005-09-16T00:00:00-07:00

For those of you coming over from the Democracy for America Grassroots All-Star House Vote contest, let me introduce myself and my race.
I am running for Congress because I am as tired with traditional politics as the rest of you. I was a Dean supporter because he was different â€“ he invited everyone to the table, depended on low-dollar donors and was more interested in broad and meaningful involvement and feedback than in message and top down control.
I believed in him, because I was tired with pay to play, money dominated politics that has made cynics of us all, and he offered a different type of campaign. He gave the power and control to us, trusted and depended on us. He did not create the campaign, the campaign happened to him, and he allowed it to â€“ in that he was radically different, a campaign that demonstrated participatory democracy. This is the future of politics.
Unfortunately, the end of his campaign was the end of this revolution in political campaigns. Others have used some of his tools, but none have taken this idea of involvement and distributed campaigning to the next level â€“ no one has advanced this new type of politics on a national level.
My campaign is my contribution to trying to move this forward. I am letting anyone schedule my time, first come first served â€“ you are my campaign scheduler. I am limiting my campaign contributions to $100. I am putting my account ledger and meeting details online in real time. I am blogging and podcasting personally. I am empowering Community Captains to walk and call their precincts and run mini-campaigns at their own discretion, with an online, centralized database. I am writing extensive and powerful software to enable all of this, and giving away the source code to anyone for free. Mine is the first Open Source campaign, and if you want to be involved, I invite you to join me. Let us fix politics, let us do it together. Join the conversation.
To see the new website that is incorporating this functionality, go to the Beta site. You can get the source code for this entire website here.
Also, for those of you not familiar, you can vote on the DFA website for them to endorse me here : http://tools.democracyforamerica.com/housevote/

New Website Testing

2005-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

I just put up the code for the new website. We are still debugging it and adding a few features, but in the interest of the Open Source campaign, I invite you to check it out.
It may be up and down occasionally as we tweak the server and add the remaining features and data, but it's essentially working and I welcome any feedback you have. There is also a problem with slowness when clicking on certain specific links, but that's being fixed soon.
The site is being tested at http://beta.chaconcorps.com, and will replace this website within the next few days, most likely.
It is also open sourced as a software project, which means you can download the source code for the whole site here. A warning : it is not a product â€“ it is just my website code and would be a bit of work to make it work for someone else, but it's out there nonetheless. It is written in Ruby on Rails, for those of you out there who care.
Let's hear that feedback!

Andrew Rasiej for Public Advocate

2005-09-10T00:00:00-07:00

New York will be having an election this coming Tuesday. One of the offices that will be voted on is the office of Public Advocate, for which Andrew Rasiej is running. I have mentioned this race a few times in the past, but now they are down to the wire, and I feel that it is incredibly important to help out if you live in New York, or know anyone that does.
Andrew is a different kind of politician. He is the kind of politician I was looking for in local politics before I decided to run. His campaign has depended on low dollar donors, ideas from the public, and the belief that technology can be harnessed to realize a true participatory democracy â€“ where communities are connected to help themselves and their local government make a better community. This is a vision that I share, and his campaign is breaking new ground for a type of politics that I hope to see explode in the near future. Campaigns where control is given to the supporters, where the focus is on the communities and the opportunities, rather than just the candidate. Where support and ideas are more important than who your family knows and how much money they have.
He has been a vocal advocate for municipal WiFi to blanket New York, and I don't think there is a better or more visionary idea from anyone else in the race. In an emerging world where access to the internet is essential for social, educational and economic opportunities, Americans are falling father behind the rest of the world every day. When the Commerce Department says that 95% of new jobs being created require significant computer skills, we are still letting huge telecom interests fleece most of our citizens for $40-50 per month for broadband access. Andrew envisions Municipal wireless as infrastructure â€“ a public good like roads or electricity â€“ that builds business and enriches everyone when it is universally applied to a society.
However, his campaign is not just about that, which some people think it is. That is simply a building block for a bigger vision. A new vision of what government and politics could be. His remarks at the Personal Democracy Forum were words that could have come from my own mouth, were I a more talented writer :

In my humble opinion, we have it backwards. Too much of the energy about technologyÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s impact on politics is focused on elections and what it can do for, or against, individual politicians.
We techno-politicos should instead be focusing on how we can restore health to our civic life Ã¢â‚¬â€ and in particular, how we can get more people connected to each other and their government to raise issues, share ideas and solve problems.
After all, there are lots of good reasons that most Americans hate politics. ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s been taken away from them and turned into a cynical game that is more focused on winning elections than getting things done, where tearing the other side down matters more than lifting ideas up, where people are treated as commodities, and the only ones who get any attention are the people who can pay to play.
So itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s not enough for us to use our skills and creativity to figure out a better way to block a bill or dial for dollars.
We need to aggressively advocate new ways to use technology to foster a more open, responsive, and accountable government.

This is the kind of politics I am also working for, and why I was attracted to attending the PDF conference in the first place. He is not just saying these things, he is working to realize that. A few months ago, he launched WeFixNYC.com, a small example of a big vision where people can take pictures of potholes or other public problems and send them to the website where they are posted on a google map, and when you click on them, you can see the status of the problem. Imagine if all levels of government embraced this kind of involvement and technology. This is participatory democracy, and it shows a taste of what could be possible if a politician who understood technology, and was not just in it for themselves, ever got elected.
If you know anyone in the area, please call them and ask them to vote for Andrew Rasiej on Tuesday. It is an important first step to a new, better politics coming to an election near you.

Katrina

2005-09-07T00:00:00-07:00

Jessica and I have had little but Katrina on our minds in the last few days, as I am sure have all of you. There are many reasons why, and I felt I should write something about it. If for no other reason than to get it off my chest. Outrage and indignation do not begin to describe the breadth of anger and sadness that have been through me in the last week.
I have heard harrowing stories of death and loss. But the human tragedy, though awful, is not what really hurts me. As Dr. Martin Luther King has said at a time of death and tragedy :

Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

Jessica and I have listened, watched and wept for those who have lost everything, but we have more deeply shuddered from the impact of our injured vision of this nation. We share a profound faith in the promise and fundamental decency of America, and that faith was also a victim here.
The events of the past days have shown a country that is not my America. My America doesn't leave our poor, sick and elderly to drown in a flooded city. My America doesn't blame them for not being able to afford to get themselves out in time. My America doesn't take four days to get help to a major city that has been completely destroyed, it's young and old dying in the streets from neglect and starvation. This tragedy hurts me so much because this is not the response that befits the nation I am so proud of.
This is the response of a government that sees fit to run itself like a company, where it's president views himself as the CEO. Where people's lives, especially if they are poor and black, are acceptable risks â€“ not worth mitigating with required resources â€“ where the bottom line is more important than the lives of the poor.
This week, America was on display for the world to see that we are not our brothers keeper. That politics and bureaucracy have strangled our humanity. We purport to be the moral force in the world, and indeed I believe we should be, and yet we have shown that morality has not penetrated our government, is not considered in it's actions in time of great need.
This disaster was not a surprise. The convoys should have been staged to roll out days before the hurricane hit, knowing that this was a more than likely result. Rescue teams and national guard units had days to assemble, prepare and coordinate. Buses should have been available to move people out who couldn't afford to. While those with the means were driving out of town, those with the responsibility should have been preparing to help the remaining. The line we are hearing is that nobody could have predicted this or that, but if that is so true, why was the city evacuated?
They could not have had more warning or more time to prepare an adequate and coordinated response, but it was the slowest response I could have imagined. It was so obvious that danger was eminent that those with the means were told to leave immediately. That presents two scenarios. The first is one in which our government, after billions of dollars and total departmental reorganization and years of time to prepare for the worst, is shown to be completely incompetent â€“ wasting our tax money and showing us as a nation to be totally unprepared for the terrorist attack for which we were preparing. Or, the second option, which is simply that our government doesn't care enough about either poor people or black people to bother themselves with protecting them or responding to their crisis in a timely manner. There really is no other option, and trying to consider which one might be more true makes me sick, sad and angry at the same time.
I am further led to believe that the latter scenario is the correct one. Can any of us honestly imagine that if a massive earthquake hit San Francisco that the national guard and food and supplies wouldn't be there in force quicker than four days? This is not so abstract for me â€“ I work on the peninsula. If all the bridges go down and buildings topple, do you think I'm going to starve? You think I'm going to be guarding the food at my work with a rifle or hearing gunshots in the streets or laying in human waste in Candlestick Park for days, waiting for someone to come and triage us? Of course not â€“ troops and supplies will be here within hours.
In fact, when the hurricanes hit Florida last year, FEMA was in fact on the case. They were properly staged, outfitted and prepared, and they leaped into action. Did the fact that the Presidents brother is the governor, or that the Republicans only narrowly won Florida in 2000 have anything to do with that generous and well planned response? For the mercy of God, I hope not.
I understand that it is hard to believe that I would not want to make this a partisan issue, but I don't. I am at heart a centrist and I listen to and respect moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans equally. I have never been a fan of this administration â€“ I demonstrated against the war, I have voiced my disagreements often â€“ but I did respect the office. Many of my friends and family are Republicans whom I know and love, so I could never join some of my liberal friends in being able to blanket vilify or demonize them. However, that being said, I do believe that this is the direct result of our government becoming so completely controlled by one twisted branch of a party that has lost it's way. We have been led by them to become a country of corruption and indifference; where winning is more important than being right, control is more important than honesty, where the poor are left to fend for themselves in a crisis, where blame is shifted before responsibility is accepted.
No more.
No matter how hard it will be, no matter what the cost, we need to bring morality, humanity and responsibility back to our government. We need to elect people who care about their neighbors, not their power. People who are in it to serve others, not themselves. I honestly don't care if it is moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats, but we need some moderation. How do we do it? The Conversation starts now.
Please give to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army, or any other charity that can help on the ground. There is a good list and how they spend their donations on Give.Org.

$5 Gas and ANWR

2005-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

Pombo on Wednesday said that because of Hurricane Katrina, gas prices could reach $5 per gallon, according to this article in the Record.
I wouldn't have much of a problem with that if he didn't then go on to try to use the crisis to try to get attention for his energy red herring for political gain:

U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo said Wednesday that gasoline prices could soon reach $5 a gallon because of Hurricane Katrina. ... Pombo suggested that the ongoing fuel crisis should increase support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a controversial part of President Bush's energy proposal that Pombo has supported as chairman of the House Resources Committee

The USGS â€œArctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1002 Area, Petroleum Assessmentâ€ (link), estimates that the total quantity of technically recoverable oil in the 1002 area is 7.7 billion barrels, possibly as much as 10 billion barrels, given that per barrel prices are high enough to warrant the extra effort, economically. That, however, makes his argument useless, since it assumes that oil prices are high.
So, at US consumption rates of 20 million barrels per day, ANWR could give us a year's worth, possibly more if oil prices stay high. Of course, it would take the better part of a decade to actually get that oil to market, and it depends so heavily on oil being expensive for extraction to even be worth it, that Chevron, BP and Conoco Phillips are not pushing to open it up. In fact, whoever does develop there will be a private company, which will then be free to sell the oil on the open market. Since China is close and is less stringent about refining standards, it may well be sold to them.
The point is that ANWR does not mean energy independence, it means private profit and continued high oil prices.
Here is a good analysis on the issue.
To use the devestation in the Gulf to try to scare people into supporting this deception is just unbelievable.

Pombo Country

2005-08-31T00:00:00-07:00

There was quite a long article on Pombo in the East Bay Express a couple of days ago, going through in some detail the career of our representative. Jessica even found a copy at her local coffee shop and brought it home. His picture covers the whole front page.

A closer look at Pombo's career reveals a long-standing pattern of using the power of government in ways that would directly or indirectly benefit his family. The latest case involves the congressman's unwavering support for two new freeways that would link the Central Valley and East Bay in new locations.
Earlier this month, Pombo obtained $21.6 million in federal funds to study the projects, neither of which addresses the most pressing transportation issue in the Tracy area. One of the proposed freeways is so seemingly impractical that it has been called â€œPombo's Follyâ€ because of the time it would take to drive, the tens of billions of dollars it would cost to build, and the environmental havoc it would wreak.
What's more, a recent review of public records shows that Pombo and his family could profit handsomely from the highway proposals, even if no freeways are ever built. The Pombo clan owns more than 1,500 acres of land near the two new freeways and the value of its property will likely skyrocket because of the congressman's actionsâ€”and may already have.

Of considerable interest to those of us who have to sit in the 580/205 traffic every day on our way home from work and are aware that a huge pork barrel highway bill just passed, should take a look at this:

Based on the overwhelming support for it, the widening of 205 from four lanes to six is easily the single most important transportation issue in the Tracy area. The project also is vital to tens of thousands of East Bay drivers who get caught up in the bottleneck every Friday and Sunday on their way to and from the mountains. Yet Pombo obtained no federal money for the project, and instead used his political capital on his own freeway projects, neither of which has nearly as much support.

There is also considerable mention of his ties to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff:

Earlier this year, Pombo solidified his relationship with the Republican majority leader to whom he owes his chairmanship. In January, Pombo and fellow Central Valley Republican John Doolittle worked behind the scenes with other House Republican leaders to alter House Ethics Committee rules in order to protect DeLay from further investigation by the Ethics Committee, which already had admonished him. DeLay has been under scrutiny for receiving gifts and travel from Jack Abramoff, a former powerhouse Washington lobbyist for Native American tribes. Abramoff, who was indicted by a Fort Lauderdale federal grand jury on fraud charges in early August, also has donated $7,000 to Pombo's political action committeeâ€”RICH PAC.

And as we have previously posted about, his paying his family almost a half million dollars from campaign contributions:

Federal campaign finance statements reveal that both his wife, Annette, and his youngest brother, Randall, have collected nearly $500,000 in total from Pombo's campaign accounts since the beginning of 2001. The congressman has paid his wife $186,704 and Randall $311,489 in that time. Pombo reported that about one-fifth of the total was reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses. The balance was for â€œbookkeeping,â€ â€œfund-raising,â€ â€œconsulting,â€ and â€œclericalâ€ work.

Overall, the article is very in-depth and is a great overview of why exactly we feel it is so important to challenge him and to show people that there is a better way. Your representative does not have to view this office as a way to line his pockets. This office can be an accessible, dynamic, involving post that gives you a voice into your federal government.
I think the most telling sentence in the whole thing was this one:

Pombo spokesman Brian Kennedy originally pledged to schedule an interview with the congressman for this story, but then neither he, Pombo, nor Pombo's staff responded to any of more than a half-dozen subsequent phone and e-mail requests.

Comment Lost!

2005-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

Yesterday I got a comment from someone sent through the website that for some reason got marked spam and I accidentally deleted it. It was one of those computer things where you see that you don't want to delete it right as you're clicking the â€œDelete Foreverâ€ button. So, if you sent me a comment and I haven't gotten back to you, please resend it.
In other, not entirely related news, I just noticed that Pombo is trying to change his image. Where before the image of him on his House website featured a rather old picture of him with a cowboy hat, now it has been replaced with â€œslick politicianâ€ Pombo.

I'm really a little dissapointed. I honestly liked the cowboy hat thing â€“ apparently he used to wear it on the House floor all the time too, but now has stopped that as well.

Back from Wyoming

2005-08-17T00:00:00-07:00

Jessica and I just got back from our vacation in the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Here are some of the pictures we took there.

We were gone from Saturday the 6th to Sunday the 14th. We drove there, covering over 2590 miles of the American west.

We backpacked for three days and two nights, hiking over 29 miles on one of the most amazing trails I've ever seen, the Teton Crest trail.
We covered over 8 miles the first day, 12 the second, and another 8 the third. If anyone out there backpacks, we would both highly recommend this one. Hopefully these pictures show some of the beauty.

Then, when we get back, I read this in the paper :

The new evaluation by the Bush administration cuts the estimated value of recreation in national forests from $111 billion to $11 billion, leading some environmentalists to warn that the study could be used to justify increased logging.
...forestry trade groups and the timber industry hailed the reassessment, saying it more accurately reflects the true value of natural resources to the nation's economy.

We spent much of our time on this hike in national forest area, as the Teton Crest trail goes in and out of park boundaries. I have to say that after having just lived and breathed this, I find it utterly missing the point to be putting a price on it at all. They say they want to be able to have numbers to compare â€œapples to applesâ€, but I don't see that as possible.
My wife and I just spent three days enjoying the raw beauty of America â€“ saying that was worth $450 to the government is insulting to me and our experience.
That aside, if you get a chance to go on a vacation like this, consider hiking in the Tetons rather than it's big cousin, Yellowstone. I promise it is worth it. It is far more amazing than these pictures.

I think that more accurately reflects the true value of these natural resources than a dollar figure, what do you think?

On Our Way to Wyoming

2005-08-06T00:00:00-07:00

We're almost ready to launch the new site and much more, but first Jessica and I are taking a short vacation. We're just right now finishing packing to go on a short trip to Wyoming to visit my sister who just moved out to Utah, and spend some backpacking time in Grand Teton National Park. We'll be back next Sunday, and I'll tell you all about it.
Scott

Back from Poland

2005-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

Jessica is now back, safe and sound. Her trip to Poland and the Czech Republic was great, and we have about 2.5 Gigs of digital pictures from the trip. We'll put up some of them for everyone to see as soon as they're all white balanced and such.
As for the me, I'm at the end of the first phase of the campaign's new website construction. We have been hard at work making a website framework that will allow us the kind of flexibility we want to build the tools we need for a new kind of campaign. It will be open source and the project website will be announced at the same time as the new site is launched.
Also, a word on podcasts. I stopped producing them regularly all of a sudden, which I apologize for. I am rethinking the format and will start them up again soon, with more interviews and guests. It is pretty exciting to see our podcast feed in the new Apple iTunes directory, though!
That's it for now, look for the new site soon.
Scott

Tri For Fun

2005-07-16T00:00:00-07:00

I just got back from the Pleasanton Tri-For-Fun Triathalon. It is a 400 yard swim, 11 mile bike and 3.1 mile (5K) run. Wow â€“ for someone who a) hasn't done a triathalon in probably 8 years, and b) hasn't swum (swimmed? swam? â€“ probably swamâ€¦) 1 yard in several months, I was doing pretty well, I thought.
This is how much thought I put into this race â€“ I got interested around the time Jessica did her lake swim â€“ it seemed like fun. I was actually both a distance swimmer and cross country runner in high school (though that is about the last time I have done either of those distances), and I guess most Triathaletes don't come from a swim background, which gives me a bit of a lead. Whereas biking is generally easiest for most â€“ I am much stronger in the other two events.
Case in point â€“ I sign up for the Triathalon on Tuesday. Wednesday I realize that I in fact have no bike. I don't even have a mountain bike. I came to this realization oddly while training on the stationary bike in the gym, and thinking that I can't actually compete on one of those. So, Friday (yesterday â€“ the day before the actual race), I walk into the Dublin Cyclery Bike Shop, to purchase a bike. Which, by the way â€“ is just a great shop. Everyone was really friendly and helpful and the guy didn't even look at me oddly when I told him what I needed the bike for. No â€œperhaps you should have owned a bike before you registered for the raceâ€ looks anywhere to be found.
So, for the guy who has now owned a bike (and I don't mean this bike, I mean a bikeâ€¦) for less than 24 hours, who figured out how to shift gears last night before he went to bed, I can't tell you what a thrill it was, and how thoroughly prepared I was for it, when the front tire of my bike went flat about 9 miles into the 11 mile bike leg. Also, how much fun it is to walk a bike back to the finish line. Luckily, I didn't have to walk all 2-3 miles, since the course was designed so I was at the opposite side of the park and could just cut through it. So, my time doesn't really count. However, I did end up coming in behind people I had been riding with (as I passed several of them on the run), so if anything, my time is probably a little slower than I might have had (Though, not everyone else had a nice leisurely walk to rest up a bit in the middle). At any rate, it was good fun, good exercise, and a time to beat in the August one. After I learn how to fix a bike.
If the pictures aren't too embarrassing, I might post some later.
Back to working on the campaign software and materials!

Jessica in Europe

2005-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. Independence Day was also Jessica's birthday, but unfortunately you can't wish her happy birthday right now, as she is on her way to Europe with the Jewish Labor Committee's Holocaust Teachers Program. In Europe, she will be visiting Poland and the Czech Republic to study with leading Holocaust scholars and visiting the camps. Hopefully she'll have some time to see a bit of the less sad sides of Warsaw and Prague as well.
From the JLC's website:

In Poland, we will spend time in Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin, where teachers can still touch history. They can see traces of the former death camps, gas chambers and crematoria. They will visit the Jewish Historic Institute in Warsaw, a worthwhile museum with important archives, Holocaust materials and exhibitions that attract many international scholars and educators. Teachers will listen to prominent historians from Yad Vashem and Lohamei HaGetaÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ot, as well as to testimony from survivors still living in Poland.
In the Czech Republic, our group will visit the infamous Theresienstadt concentration camp, where the Nazis brought Jews from many countries. This camp was supposed to be a German Ã¢â‚¬Å“showcaseÃ¢â‚¬? for the International Red Cross; in reality, it was a camp of suffering, of pain, of death and most of all a transit stop to the gas chambers of Auschwitz for thousands upon thousands of men, women and especially children.
After Prague, we will travel to Washington, D.C., for three days of evaluation, lectures and workshops at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The pattern of telling people about this trip is almost always the same : â€œWhat are you doing this summer?â€ â€“ â€œI'm going to Europeâ€ â€“ â€œHow much fun, what are you doing there?â€ â€“ â€œVisiting the ghettos and death camps of the Holocaustâ€ â€“ â€... oh, um â€¦ yay â€¦â€
In reality, Jessie has been studying this for quite a while now, and has used it as a case study for her units on human rights and genocide in the 20th century. We both feel that it is very important to teach these subjects meaningfully to her students, and I am very proud of her for being accepted to this program. It has been over 60 years since Auschwitz (one of the camps she will be visiting) was liberated, and there are only so many more years we will have first person witnesses with us.
So, wish Jessica luck and I'll keep everyone updated on her adventures.
Scott

Ripon Wireless Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Leading the District

2005-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

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.

Iraq Blogger Injured

2005-06-24T00:00:00-07:00

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.

Machado and Matthews Out

2005-06-23T00:00:00-07:00

We got a mention in the Tracy Press today, in an article titled “Pombo wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢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.

Ã¢â‚¬Å“I believe that PomboÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s abuse of power and ethics problems are becoming far more widely known in our district,Ã¢â‚¬? Chacon said. Ã¢â‚¬Å“PomboÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s actions have given us an opportunity.Ã¢â‚¬?

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

School's Out

2005-06-19T00:00:00-07:00

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

Send Your Mail Again!

2005-06-12T00:00:00-07:00

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.

Podcast

2005-06-11T00:00:00-07:00

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

mp3

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

Servers and Terrorism

2005-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

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.

Walking and Running

2005-06-08T00:00:00-07:00

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

Goings On

2005-06-03T00:00:00-07:00

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

mp3

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

Memorial Day

2005-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

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 an internee in WWII, in the Pacific theatre. His father was working in the Philippines when the war broke out, and his whole family was interned as civilians in Manila for the remainder of the war. He was also liberated by American soldiers.

This Memorial Day, I think of the men of the 1st Cav who died to liberate his camp, and the countless others who died in the European theatre to open up the Nazi camps.

I will leave you with an excerpt, after the fold, taken from the 1st Cavalry Division Association’s newspaper, that my Grandfather, Peter Wygle, wrote about the liberation of his camp :

<!~~-more~~->

SANTO TOMAS RAID by Peter R. Wygle* Published in the January/February issue of SABER

One of the most awe-inspiring yet historically little remembered missions of World War II in the Pacific were the four rapid-fire prisoner of war liberation raids in the Philippines . These four raids, Bilibid, Cabanatuan, Santo Tomas, and Los Banos, all took place in a one-month period between late January and the end of February, Ã¢â‚¬â„¢45, and the men who planned them faced many of the elements of potential failure; the raids, with the exception of the Bilibid liberation in Manila, were independently planned in very restrictive time-frames by at least three different headquarters; they involved every branch of the American military, with enormously important help from, and sacrifice by, the Filipino people and their guerrilla Army; and they employed practically every method of attack and means of transportation known to man. In spite of all this potential for confusion and failure, each of the rescues was pulled off without a hitch. These prisoner raids Ã¢â‚¬â€œ collectively Ã¢â‚¬â€œ killed, wounded, or scattered about a thousand enemy troops and resulted in freedom for almost eight times that many allied prisoners of war, including the largest number of American civilian internees ever taken prisoner by an armed enemy in the history of our nation. All of this while sustaining relatively light Ã¢â‚¬â€œ though certainly not insignificant Ã¢â‚¬â€œ causalities among the American forces and their supporting Filipino guerrillas.

Legend has it that General MacArthur was so impressed by the Cabanatuan raid by elements the 6th Ranger Battalion Ã¢â‚¬â€œ which was still in progress at the time Ã¢â‚¬â€œ that he went immediately to MG MudgeÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s 1st Cavalry Division headquarters in Guimba. There he ordered the formation of a Ã¢â‚¬ËœFlying ColumnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ to accomplish the same thing with the 3700 civilians interned at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. Nobody knew about the 1300 or so military and civilian prisoners at the old Bilibid prison which was only a few blocks from Santo Tomas.

The oratory attributed to the general during this conference was typically MacArthur: Ã¢â‚¬Å“Go to Manila! Go over the Japs, go around the Japs, bounce off the Japs, but go to Manila! Free the prisoners at Santo Tomas and capture Malacanang Palace and the legislative buildings.Ã¢â‚¬?

Two-thirds of this grandiose mission was practicable from where the 1st Cavalry Division sat. Santo Tomas and Malacanang Palace were in the north end of Manila , the same side that the 1st Cav was on, but the legislative buildings were on the south side of the Pasig River. This large river runs east-to-west through the middle of Manila and there were only three or four bridges across it. The chances of the Japanese destroying the bridges and turning the river into a major obstacle were pretty good. If the Japanese managed to do this, it would make the legislature buildings relatively hard to reach.

When MacArthur decreed the formation of the Ã¢â‚¬ËœFlying ColumnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ the 1st Cav troops, to whom he had decreed it, had come ashore at Lingayen Gulf on 27 Jan.. Ã¢â‚¬â„¢45 after 72 days of continuous combat in the mountains of Leyte, and the division had just completed its move 35 miles south from Lingayen to Guimba, arriving there on the 30th. As fierce as the combat on Leyte had been, the memory that usually gets shared by the 1st Cav troopers that were there is the fact that during 40 of those 72 days, 35 inches of rain fell. The troopers had earned some rest, but there was to be none. They received Ã¢â‚¬Å“MacArthurÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Flying ColumnÃ¢â‚¬? decree on the day after they arrived at Guimba. MG Mudge spent the rest of the 31st gathering the troops he thought it would take to accomplish his new mission. These troops included, in addition to parts of the 5th Cavalry and 8th Cavalry Regiments and some miscellaneous support people, the 44th Tank Battalion, a bunch of air cover from Marine Group 24 and 32 and Ã¢â‚¬â€œ luckily – a Navy demolitions expert, Lieutenant (JG) James Patrick Sutton. MG Mudge divided the Column into three serials, assigning missions to each, and, at one minute past midnight on the morning of 1 Feb., Ã¢â‚¬â„¢45, led them out of Guimba. The race to Manila was on!

The Column, carrying only four daysÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ rations and the absolute minimum in arms, ammunition and fuel, had to tread carefully for the first few miles because the Cabanatuan prisoners were still being evacuated across its path. Once in the clear, however, it fought its way at top speed down Highway 5, slowing for a day of heavy firefights at Cabanatuan and Gapan. An ambush at a road intersection during the fight at Gapan cost the life of LTC Tom Ross, commander of the third serial. This was the serial with most of the 44th Tank Battalion assigned to it.

After this fierce early fighting the Column sped south, depending totally upon the Marine flyers for flank security. The 1st Cav moved toward Manila, pausing only to bypass blown bridges and to engage the Japanese in hit-and-run fighting. It hit a snag however, at the Novaliches Bridge just south of a road junction that became known as Ã¢â‚¬Å“the Hot CornerÃ¢â‚¬?. They were still about ten miles short of Manila .

Mines had been set, the fuse was lit, and the Japanese were laying down heavy sniper fire on the bridge to discourage all efforts to prevent its destruction. Bypassing this particular bridge was not an option because the gorge was deep and the river was swift. It was here that having Pat Sutton along turned out to be a stroke of good fortune. He, apparently protected by some sort of a providential Star Trek force field that seemed to repel sniper bullets, ran out on the bridge and cut the demolition fuse, enabling the Column to cross the river with dry feet.

LT Sutton also helped in clearing a path through a minefield further south on the approach to Manila. His next running Ã¢â‚¬â€œ with his brand new Distinguished Service Cross Ã¢â‚¬â€œ was for Congress where he won a Tennessee seat in the House of Representatives.

After the Column crossed the river at Novaliches it moved down Quezon Boulevard straight toward Santo Tomas Internment Camp and Malacanang Palace.

Inside the prison camp, 3700 apprehensive civilian men, women and children were watching the approach of the tracer-bullet fireworks in the evening sky with a strange mixture of excitement and dread. After three years in the Ã¢â‚¬Å“protective custodyÃ¢â‚¬? of the Japanese Army, they were excited that SOMETHING was happening Ã¢â‚¬â€œ even if they didnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t know what it was Ã¢â‚¬â€œ but mixed in with this excitement was dread of the possibility that the pyrotechnic display was, in truth, being caused by the bad guys headed their way with malice in their souls. Rumors had been rampant for some time that the Japanese intended to kill all of their prisoners.

Late on 3 Feb., Ã¢â‚¬â„¢45, after a couple of wrong turns and some heavy fighting in the mixed-up outskirts of Manila, the Santo Tomas Column picked up CPT Manuel Colayco, a Filipino newspaperman and clandestine intelligence officer, who guided them to the main gate of the prison camp. At about nine in the evening, after a brief flurry of resistance by the Japanese guards during which CPT Colayco was fatally wounded by a grenade explosion, the 44th Tank BattalionÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s M-4 Sherman Ã¢â‚¬Å“Battlin BasicÃ¢â‚¬?, closely by the Ã¢â‚¬Å“Georgia PeachÃ¢â‚¬? knocked down the gate and the war was nearly over for the internees.

The Flying Column was 66 hours into its mission. With time out for the fights at Cabanatuan and Gapan, and delays in bypassing some of the blown bridges, it had covered 100 miles. The 1st Cav had toeholds Ã¢â‚¬â€œ tenuous as they might actually have been Ã¢â‚¬â€œ at Santo Tomas and at the Malacanang Place .

For the Santo Tomas internees, their liberation was followed by a night of delirious happiness, a standoff and hostage crisis in one of the campus buildings, and two or three days of murderous artillery dueling.

The artillery battle resulted when the few hundred men of the 1st Cav, not having all that much Manila real estate under their control, had to set up their artillery inside the Santo Tomas complex and begin making enough noise to discourage thoughts of counterattack in the minds of Admiral Iwabuchi and his twenty thousand marines defending Manila. The good news was that no counterattack materialized; the bad news was that the presence of American artillery in the front yard invited counterfire from the Japanese, and the internees were in the middle. This several day artillery duel caused the only prisoner causalities of the Santo Tomas liberation Ã¢â‚¬â€œ with the possible exception of a couple of internees who reportedly ate themselves to death in the first day or so. Seventeen internees and several 1st Cav troopers were killed in this exchange of fire and many more were injured.

After the shooting died down, only a couple of months of stomach aches from the unaccustomed good food and headaches from the seemingly endless interminable processing stood between the ex-prisoners and, for many of them, repatriation.

On 3 Feb., Ã¢â‚¬â„¢05 the 60th Anniversary of the Santo Tomas Raid will be celebrated in Manila by many of the surviving civilian internees and their families Ã¢â‚¬â€œ all thankful for their liberation by the 1st Cavalry Division! ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s a Great Team! ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Our Team! ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s the FIRST TEAM!

*This is an excerpt from a paper by Peter R. Wygle entitled Ã¢â‚¬Å“Jeb Stuart Would Have Loved It!Ã¢â‚¬? that covers the four mentioned POW camps. Pete Wygle was a civilian internee at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp, a boy of about ten or 11 years old at the time. He also authored the book, Ã¢â‚¬Å“Surviving a Japanese POW CampÃ¢â‚¬?, served on active duty in Korea and later in the Army National Guard retiring as a Colonel. He was also very active in the American Ex-Prisoners of War Association. Pete died of cancer in September 2003. PeteÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s window, Nancy , has graciously provided a copy of this paper for inclusion in the 1st Cavalry Division Museum archives. Edited by R W Tagge, Executive Trustee, 1st Cavalry Division Association Museum Foundation.

Walking Flyers

2005-05-26T00:00:00-07:00

Here are the general flyers that I will be passing out as a leave behind when we walk. I’ll order 1000 of them for hand delivering in our precincts. I tried to get most of the ideas and feel of the campaign into it – let me know what you think and if you have any improvements for the next run.

CFC Walking Flyer

I did reuse that stupid womanless graphic again, but I like the feel of it, and this flyer had to be one-color for cost reasons. Later in the campaign, I may do full color flyers, but they are far more expensive.

Feedback, my friends – what do you think?

Scott

Community Captains Start

2005-05-26T00:00:00-07:00

We are going to be walking soon, hopefully this week if we get the materials done in time, and I don’t want to waste any chances, so I set up a Community Captains volunteering site to record people who are interested in the program here : www.CommunityCaptains.com.

Captains Flyer

In order to recruit people who might be interested when we are out walking, I’ve created this flyer to hand out to people who sound interested. I wanted to post it here to let everyone take a look at it and tell me what you think.

I realize that of the people in the graphic, none of them seem to be women – that is not intentional, it was just the best art I could find in my price range. I’ll try to replace it at some point if I can find better art with women in it.

Other than that, is there anything you notice that could use improvement – would it make you interested in volunteering?

Let me know what you think.

Scott

MicroGoal

2005-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

Our second Micro-Goal was completed tonight, the last donation was contributed by Matt So – thank you Matt! This Micro-Goal was to print materials and voter lists for our first county for walking, and we are in the process of getting quotes right now. As soon as I get my FEC number, the voter data will be purchased as well.

When we have started the walking, I’ll publish the second report for everyone who contributed and all of our supporters.

I have posted our next Micro-Goal, which is for printed materials for our Dublin precinct walking. Thank you everyone who contributed, and if you haven’t seen it yet, please take a look at the example Micro-Goal Report linked in the last post.

Micro Goal Report

2005-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

In order to create an example of a Micro-Goal report, I have created one out of what was a Goal for a short time, but was then changed. This is not a real Goal report, in that no actual campaign funds were spent on the Personal Democracy Forum trip, but I created a report from the trip nonetheless.

Example Report

I am just shy of completing my second Micro-Goal, so when the work on that is done, I will submit to you all my next report, but in the meantime take a look at this example and let me know what you think should be added or subtracted. Imagine that you contributed money to a goal, what would you want to know about how it was spent or used? Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks! Scott

Podcast

2005-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

I recorded this morning, yet I didn’t actually post until tonight. However, as it is 10:45pm and I am off to bed, I’ll just post the file without a whole lot of blab here. It’s mostly about the PDF conference, which you can read about below anyhow.

Oh, and I also mentioned ChicagoCrime.org, which is a pretty neat idea and application of technology to bring powerful information to citizens. Let me know what you think about that, and any ideas you might have to bring powerful information to our communities like that.

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

mp3

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

Rasiej Stuff

2005-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

Two things from Advocates for Rasiej today that I wanted to share. I have been continually going back to this because his election is in a few months, and is by far the most similar in tactics and certainly in spirit to mine that I’ve ever seen.

He just posted the text of a speech on his website that he delivered to us at the opening of the PDF conference that I could have written (if, of course, I were a more talented writer).

(emphasis added by me)

We see how politics, instead of being a dirty word, could be what it meant in the original Greek: the engagement of all citizens in the decisions that affect their lives.

...

We techno-politicos should instead be focusing on how we can restore health to our civic life Ã¢â‚¬â€ and in particular, how we can get more people connected to each other and their government to raise issues, share ideas and solve problems.

After all, there are lots of good reasons that most Americans hate politics. ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s been taken away from them and turned into a cynical game that is more focused on winning elections than getting things done, where tearing the other side down matters more than lifting ideas up, where people are treated as commodities, and the only ones who get any attention are the people who can pay to play.

...

We need to aggressively advocate new ways to use technology to foster a more open, responsive, and accountable government.

I used to have “government that is open, efficient and empowering” on my front page. Now it’s openness, community, conversation – but you can see why I liked this speech. It goes on, and the whole thing is both well written and exciting in what it means to us. If this is the future of politics, as I am also working to make it, then we are looking at a better future for politics.

Also from the Rasiej front, I got an email from him today (mass mail), an update on his campaign. As you may remember, he is also running a $100 campaign. Here is what the email said :

Something’s happening here.

In just two weeks, our campaign to reconnect New York signed up 818 supporters and raised $72,000. With no contributions over $100. No fundraisers. Just a powerful message about reimagining our possibilities and recharging our democracy.

This is unprecedented in New York politics.

That’s because it shows that you don’t have to chase big checks to run a successful campaign. It also shows that there are a lot of people like you who are hungry for new leadership.

...

In the coming days I will be launching a new feature on my website—IDEAS4NYC. Each week we will post a question on a different issue, and ask you to give us your specific solutions. We’ll share the results on our blog. And we’ll take the best ideas and add them to the policy agenda we are developing.

Together we are going to prove that people matter more than money and ideas matter more than influence.

So there you go – both a good idea (somewhat in the spirit of my Collaborative Bill Writer, but more structured), and also another example of a $100 campaign working.

Not enough time for a podcast today, perhaps tomorrow. Have a good day everyone!

Scott

New Business Cards

2005-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

I almost forgot – I am getting some business cards printed up for the precinct walking that will begin in the next week or so, and I wanted to pass the design by everyone. I’ll print up a limited amount for the first round, but if there are any design ideas, or ideas for other useful information to add, or possibly something that is confusing or inaccurate, please let me know in the comments.

Here you go :

Fezzik and PDF Pictures

2005-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

I uploaded some of my pictures from the PDF conference, and added them into the previous posts. Since this trip was originally a micro-goal, I’m going to produce a microgoal report about it as a final wrap-up, and as an example of what the reports will look like. Look for that later. For now, I will leave you with my good friend, Fezzik.

PDF Wrapup

2005-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

I didn’t quite finish my notes yesterday, but the last forum was not incredibly useful, though it was fun to see Ariana Huffington – she was by far the most interesting part of the forum. The part that sticks out most in my mind was Chuck Defeo (Bush-Cheney ‘04 eCampaign manager) trying to convince us that the Bush campaign gave up a lot of control over the campaign to their volunteers, and then Arianna pointing out the “loyalty oaths” people had to sign to get into the campaign rallies was not indicative of an “open” campaign. Another fun part was Tucker Eskew (Deputy Assistant to the President in the White House Office of Communications) make a “strategery” joke. (in a SNL satire of the 2000 debates, when asked to sum up his campaign in one word, Bush said ‘strategery’)

An interesting experiment that they did at this conference is to have a chat room that anyone in the room could post to displayed behind the panel. This was basically used for good, and I can see this being a useful tool in some contexts, but it was not really fully taken advantage of here – I think we could brainstorm some great interactive town hall conferences with this sort of idea. However, the point is that in the last forum, this was somewhat taken advantage of – people started posting silly things, trying to get a laugh out of the audience, which just ended up distracting the panel. I have a shot of them all looking over their shoulders at the display to see what everyone was laughing at. It would have been really useful to put the chat in the background but not on the wall, and a second chatroom on the wall,reserved for questions. Then the panel could answer any of the questions they wanted to – this would prevent people from plugging their own websites or projects in the form of a question, which is what tends to happen when people get to stand up to a mic for questions.

In the end, I think the conference was interesting, but in my case, preaching to the choir. I am already convinced of technologies role in improving and democratizing politics, of blogs role in changing media, and in the need for municipal broadband. I would have liked to hear of Andrews plans for actually running an open source campaign, brainstorming of new tactics and ideas for involving people and giving up control of the campaign in new and powerful ways, but that wasn’t in the cards this trip.

As for me, I woke up at 4:30am NY time, spent an hour and a half on the NY public transportation system (subway/AirTrain), missed my flight by 5 minutes, mostly because I missed a subway stop and had to backtrack, flew standby on a later flight that got delayed for two hours due to a broken seat, and am now in Las Vegas airport waiting for my reassigned connecting flight (that was neccesitated by the two hour delay) back to SF. Since I woke up this morning, I have been traveling for 12 hours now. However, the good news is that I got a few hours of sleep on the plane, and they showed The Incredibles, so I got that going for me.

Also, in case you’re curious, JFK has no WiFi at all, SFX has Verizon if you want to pay, and Las Vegas has free WiFi. Well, now they’re boarding, so I’m off.

Update: ~~- 3:23pm -~~ I made it, just landed 5 minutes ago, and now I’m BART bound. How much public transportation can one person take in one day – I believe I will have hit 5 different systems in 2 days. Thank you for following my short trip, I’ll try to get some pictures up pretty soon.

If you want to see my view on the subway and running for the plane this morning, and my view as I’m writing this, you can see my cell phone uploads on my Flickr Feed. OK, just snapped one of me and my laptop in the airport walkway. Enjoy, and I’ll talk to you later – possibly a podcast soon.

At the Personal Democracy Forum

2005-05-16T00:00:00-07:00

So here I am at the Personal Democracy Forum, sitting in the auditorium, listening to the first presentations. Andrew Rasiej started with a great speech, I’ll need to remember to get a copy of that at some point. We then had Scott Heiferman, and then Mindy Finn from the GOP. I’ll try to keep notes online from this point on. I’m able to do this because they have wireless in the building. One of the most interesting parts is the chat room that people in the room are using in the background.

I’m a bit tired, as I got on the plane at 10:00pm West Coast, and now it is 9:03 NY time. I have had almost no sleep, since the airplane was about the most uncomfortable place I could have imagined for sleeping. I almost just put my head on the shoulder of the guy next to me (I was in the middle seat in the middle isle of a 767), just so I could get a few minutes. Then many trains and a few blocks of walking, and now I’m blogging from the auditorium. Maybe I can find a back room somewhere with a bench at some point. :)

I’ll keep everyone up to date on whats going on here – and I’m trying to take a few pictures and audio, too. I won’t be able to upload them until I get home, though – I don’t have the cables.

Scott

Tag : PDF2005

Updates : ~~- 12:25pm -~~ I fixed the NYC time from 7:03 to 9:03, since apparently the Mac doesn’t update the time, and my body now has no concept of time. I am now at a forum with Kos, Hugh Hewitt, Carol Darr, Josh Marshall, and Chris Rabb. They are talking about blogs, mostly in relation to traditional media.

~~- 12:43pm -~~ The wireless is very slow, and the forum is getting slightly more angry at each other. There appears to be about a 4:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives at this conference. Hugh just said he wanted the Patriot Act renewed and people hissed – there is a certain meaness still in the group, which I suppose comes from that ratio.

~~- 12:54pm -~~ Now they’re talking about if comments are important on a blog – Josh is talking about his site, since it does not have comments. Personally, I think that they are important – the real importance of the blog from my point of view is the 2 way feedback mechanism. If there is no commenting system, then it is a one way conversation. Now Hugh is scaring people about leaving the comments section open, or you might get sued over it – some copyright issues. He also doesn’t like Diaries, like Kos does – which I also disagree with. He thinks of it as massive publishing, while I tend to view it as collaboration.

~~- 2:13pm -~~ 30 hours now with no real sleep – and counting. And the fun continues. Now we’re listening to an online advertising forum. Now, the funny thing, as with much of this conference, is that much of the beginning of this discussion is around convincing candidates or campaigns to embrace this technology – whether it is online advertising or wikis or blogs or podcasts or what have you. The funny thing is that I already am. My response to not being able to convince candidates is to do so myself, so some of this stuff is not that helpful. I can see it being very helpful to some others, but not really to me. So far my favorite part was the 5 minute speech by Andrew, so I hope he comes up here again.

I’m watching this online ad forum, and right now it’s rather like a commercial for this one online ad company, but I still feel as though this stuff is not helpful for democracy. I suppose we could do little flash versions of 30 second TV spots, but do we really want to? I don’t feel like that’s really doing anything new or evolutionary – we’re not advancing the dialoge. I think online advertising is great, and I absolutely plan to use it, but I think it can be more helpful than what we do on TV.

As an aside, I hear the phrase “join the conversation” a ton, but it doesn’t have to do with my site. I think that just means we choose a really great slogan. Apparently, under the surface, that’s what people are really trying to go for here – getting people involved in a real way.

~~- 2:32pm -~~ Andy Stern if the SEIU is now being interviewed, and it is amazing how plugged in the guy is. He is very down to earth and knowledgable about technology and it’s potential in his organization.

http://www.unitetowinblog.org/

He said he had to overcome all the lawyers saying “you shouldn’t blog”, then all the people who said “they are not going to say nice things”, but that’s part of being a leader is hearing things that you may not agree with . It is a good point, and one that is difficult to convince people at the top normally.

He just mentioned that text messaging might be more useful to experiment with, because of the universality of it. I have been thinking about this lately, and I think I mentioned it in one of my podcasts, because it is true and overlooked. Everyone has a cell phone – the digital divide is much less prominent with cellular technology. How can we use SMS and texting to organize and get people involved?

Off point, but I just really noticed that there are a LOT of Macs here. I wish I had taken a picture, but there were like four guys sitting on the ground, each with a Mac laptop, all in a row.

~~- 3:00pm -~~ Promise of Municipal Broadband

My question was : How are the lower income families affording computers to access the wifi? It wasn’t answered, but I think she addressed it on the “On the Media” show she was interviewed on.

A couple of sites from the forum : Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee, Civitium (a company that did the ROI for them), MuniWireless, NYC Wireless, TOC Wireless (Carrboro Wireless Project).

Andrew said that telcos are getting prohibative language in the redo of the 1996 Telecom Act against muni wifi right now. If only we had politicians representing us who didn’t take big money from them.

This is interesting, with the conversation in the background. The forum has this great big screen behind them, where people can post questions and comments over the wireless (I’ll put some shots up later), and some of the questions are quite good – it’s an interesting dynamic – what a great town hall that would make.

One of many interesting ideas that Andrew had for what universal city wifi would enable us to do : “Fireman can download a blueprint to a building on the way to a fire”. There are hundreds of great ideas like this that we could build on top of a solid infrastructure like that.

~~- 3:24pm -~~ “Getting it : Changing your organizations internal structure”

This was a really great forum – the best of the day, and I’m glad I made it there. I took a bunch of notes (it’s pretty hard to break out the laptop in the small room), so I’ll have to transcribe them (more or less) later.

~~- 5:17pm -~~ The Future of Political Media Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Chuck Defeo, Tucker Eskew, Arianna Huffington

Jeff Jarvis spoke first, and once again I heard the phrase “join the conversation” – I think we’re on to something here.

~~- Wed Night -~~ Edited post to add pictures.

Podcast

2005-05-12T00:00:00-07:00

Good morning!

Here is the new podcast – this week is a little different in that I have been keeping the blog pretty well up to date, so the podcast is mostly going over things I have already blogged about – Rasiej, PDF, FEC packet, Radio Open Source, GRASS GIS, etc. So, see my previous posts for more information.

PDF is on Monday, and my sister Megan is getting married this weekend, so it will be a busy next few days.

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

mp3

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

GIS Instead of Podcast

2005-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

I put off the podcast for today, because I was working on some GIS stuff and I actually got a break. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems – it is technology used to make maps, and it will be very important to this campaign. Normally custom GIS is not used in Congressional races unless the candidate is willing to spend several thousand dollars on the software and experts needed to use it. The easiest software I have seen is Maptitude by Caliper, which sells for only $500. ESRI sells it’s popular and powerful ArcView software which is used pretty often for this, but it is more like $1500 for the software alone – hiring someone that can use it is something else entirely.

I want to run this on Mac and/or Linux with some custom database and automated scripting, so I’m using GRASS, which is both open and free.

However, it is a bit of a learning curve, especially when you don’t know much about GIS to begin with. However, I made a breakthrough this morning, learning how to import and view both Shapefiles and TIGER/Line data. Which means I can map and overlay the congressional districts, voting precincts from 2004, county and full street and landmark information for all 4 counties in my district. Here are some quick maps : (full street maps of all four counties; blue is district lines, light grey is 04 voting precincts, black are streets)

(04 precincts on top of districts by color – green is mine)

It’s not very useful by itself, but I can zoom down to any precinct and see the street layout, and I will be able to start marking houses I have visited, voter ID results, printing custom walking maps for volunteers over the web, etc.

It will be invaluable for door to door planning and precinct captain organizing, as well as data and progress visualization.

So, no podcast – technology called!

Scott the Republican

2005-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

So, this is the first of my “Dirty Laundry” posts. I don’t think there will be many. I mentioned this in a podcast earlier, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it then. I wanted to put anything at all that I could think of that someone might use against me at any point on the website for everyone to see. Basically, post my own opposition research on my website. I want to do this so that : a) there are no suprises, and b) I can earn your trust.

They will be filed in the blog under the category “dirty laundry”, and I will do them as I think of them. Today I will post the only two I can think of, both of which I have mentioned in earlier podcasts.

1) My Bench Warrant

When I was in college, I was driving just about every weekend from San Diego (where I was attending UCSD), to San Luis Obispo (where Jessica was attending Cal Poly SLO) to visit the lovely woman who would eventually be my wife. Anyhow, one morning I was driving rather too quickly along the 101 South, very near where they shot the recent movie Sideways actually, and I got pulled over (for good reason). So, I got my ticket and I lost the thing they sent me in the mail. The problem was that I couldn’t remember what county I had gotten my ticket in. I knew it was between SLO and Santa Barbara, so I called Santa Barbara County and asked if Scott Chacon had a ticket there and received the telephone version of a blank stare. So, eventually I missed my court date, my mother who works for the Sheriff’s department let me know quite irately that there was a bench warrant in my name, and I found the county and paid the ticket. I don’t know how this comes off in blog form, but in person this is often an amusing story. I hope you all can forgive me.

2) Scott the Republican

When I was in high school, my Government teacher made everyone in the class register to vote. She handed out a sheet of paper that had all the party one-liners on it, and had us choose one and register as that. As I had never really been exposed to politics in the household, I choose my party based on the one-liner. ‘Republican’ sounded good to me – ‘old fashioned values’, ‘low taxes’; whatever it was, it was catchy. When in that class we were asked to choose sides in topics for debate and I was the only one in the class who would voluntarily choose to defend gay marriage and oppose the death penalty, I believe in retrospect that perhaps that would have been a good time for my teacher to have pulled me aside and explained the possible confusion in my registration decision. However, that was not done, and I remained registered for many years after. Initially, because I did not remember how I had registered, and later because I liked getting all of the Republican mailers and literature. I felt at the time, as I do still, that it was interesting to know what the people who disagree with me think, and why they think that. I also enjoyed the opportunity to vote in the Republican primary for John McCain. How many other Democrats can say they got to vote against George Bush three times? In any case, despite the fact that I have never voted for any Republican (against a Democrat), I was registered as one for many, many years. This comes up because I found this in a book today :

So, there you go. For better or for worse, you will always get the truth from me. What a concept.

Update (05/25): I edited this post slightly to fix some spelling errors that were pointed out to me.

FEC Packet Came Today

2005-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

So, the packet of information that the FEC sent me got here today. I was waiting to file my Form 2 (Statement of Candidacy) until it got here, but it looks like there is nothing in it that I didn’t already have. Which is actually good. Everything in the packet is available online, so I sealed up my Form 2 and I’m sending it off tonight. Actually, hold on…

Ha! Interactive blogging! I just ran down to the corner and stuck the envelope in the mail. Here is proof :

Anyhow, it turns out that the packet contained this :

Forms 1 and 2, with instructions, from here.
This guide, printed out.
This brochure.
A list of state addresses to get copies of filings.

That’s all, so not a whole lot of help there, but it was nice of them to spend $3.50 to send it. If we weren’t internet savvy, and didn’t have copies of all of those things on our computer, they would have been a big help.

Also, as the FEC website says :

If you don’t find what you’re looking for on these pages, please contact the FEC’s Information Division, toll free at 800-424-9530 or by e-mail at info@fec.gov.

So, there you go. It’s done – I’ll post my FEC Number as soon as I get it.

Advocates For Rasiej

2005-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

I just read this article at Wired on Andrew Rasiej who is running for Public Advocate of New York City this year. Among his campaign ideas :

$100 contribution limit
active blog, and eventually a podcast
election day SMS cell phone reminders
campaign sponsored municipal wifi

I encourage you to read his Ideas page, not only does it have some great ideas, but it has a submission form to get elicit more ideas from anyone reading.

Here are some highlights from the Wired article:

WN: Your campaign will rely heavily on the internet. What are some net-savvy approaches to politics you are taking?
Rasiej: For one, I’m blogging as much as I can find time for, and we’re going to podcast and video-blog as well. We’ve already built into the site the ability for people to give us their cell-phone number to schedule a text-message reminder on when to go vote, and we’re going to post every suggestion a person makes to the site, both on how to make the city better and how to improve the campaign. We’re going to demonstrate the viability of universal broadband by getting some volunteers together to “light up” some buildings in poor neighborhoods with Wi-Fi. We’re going to get volunteers to show how easy it will be to use cell phones for civic engagement, by informing people when the next train is due in at some subway hubs and by encouraging people to post pictures of potholes and other things that need fixing to Flickr or a similar photo-blogging platform.

I am absolutely going to recycle some of these ideas. Here is some more :

But most important, we’re encouraging people to use this campaign to think and act creatively and collectively in ways that the net makes more viable. The network will come up with the best ideas on how to approach politics, and I’m listening as hard as I can. I can’t become New York’s public advocate without all the other public advocates in this great city. We can only be elected together. If elected, the public advocate’s office will be their office.

Talk about an open source campaign. I truly hope that this is the future of politics – toward low-donor, connected, open, listening campaigns. Campaigns that are truly of and accountable to the people they strive to represent and serve.

So, I wrote him an email saying that I liked his campaign, and asking if he would be attending the Personal Democracy Forum since it is in NY. I was even helpful enough to give him the URL for the conference website so he could find out some more about it. How useful of me.

From the About section of the website :

Andrew Rasiej is the Founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and has served as an advisor to Senators and Congressman and political candidates on the use of Information Technology for campaign and policy purposes since 1999.

Ah. How especially helpful of me to have pointed the conference out to him. Still, he was very kind and replied personally very quickly. I look forward to saying ‘hi’ at the conference next week.

OpenSourceRadio

2005-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

I was contacted yesterday on AOL Instant Messenger (my username is ‘repchacon’, by the way), by a guy named Brendan Greeley, who is apparently a site editor for PRX, which I’ve mentioned here before (although I’m pretty sure he didn’t know that).

Anyhow, it turns out that Brendan is working on a new WGBH produced, Public Radio International syndicated radio show called Radio Open Source that is recording pilots right now. In fact, they just released their very first one today.

From the Starting Points page…

Everything we do at Open Source will be Ã¢â‚¬Å“open to inspection, improvement, adoption and reuse,Ã¢â‚¬? in Doc SearlsÃ¢â‚¬Ëœ neat formulation. We will make all the content of Open Source available under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use, with the standard proviso that our work is credited and further use is open.

This project is fascinating to me, and I will follow it closely. The reason that Brendan contacted me is because he was interested in what I was doing with podcasting in my campaign for the first show, although it looks like they are thinking of possibly including me in a different show later on instead.

So, something interesting to keep your eye on. If you want, you can subscribe to their feed.

Scott

New York Trip

2005-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

So, now that I’m going to the Personal Democracy Forum, I went ahead and bought my airplane ticket today for $380. Ouch.

Here’s my itinerary.

If anyone knows a good way to get from JFK to 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th street easily and cheaply, please let me know. I was thinking AirTrain JFK, but what do I know? If anyone has a better idea, send it on. I have from 6:18am to 9:00am to get there from the plane landing.

In case you’re curious, here is what I’ll be doing there.

Alrighty, I’m off to bed. Goodnight, everyone.

Podcast

2005-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

Good morning everyone!

This week I found a couple of useful websites I would like to mention to everyone :

conversate.org just launched today or yesterday, I think. It’s a site to have short conversations with several people – kind of like an instant blog, but more concentrated on the comments section.

Backpack launched today, about 5 minutes ago. I had a Golden Ticket, so I have used it for a couple of days already, and I think it’s pretty neat. If you have a hard time keeping your thoughts and notes organized across computers, check it out. It is as clean and simple and easy to use as their excellent Basecamp application.

Also, the AnnualCreditReport.com site is one I just found. I had heard about it before, but I actually used it last night, and it’s pretty easy to use. Please go there and check your credit reports and challenge anything that doesn’t look familiar. You get a free credit report every 12 months.

I changed the front page of my website here around a little bit – added a picture of us (where my clothing matches the site colors) and cleaned up some of the styles a bit. What do you think?

Lastly, the big news is that I was invited to go to the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York on May 16 for free. I am really interested in this conference and the ideas of many of the people speaking there. I’ll keep everyone up to date on what I see and do there. I’ll even see if I can get some podcasts going. Also, if you’re interested, they offered my readers a $100 discount on the registration fee. Just go to their website to register and enter the promo code ‘pdfc195’.

The Personal Democracy Forum Conference boasts a comprehensive roster of speakers including Meetup.com’s Scott Heiferman, SEIU’s Andy Stern, The RNC’s Michael Turk, Technorati’s David Sifry, Linux Journal’s Doc Searls, Grassroots Media’s Dan Gillmor, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, bloggers Jeff Jarvis, Josh Marshall, Markos Moulitsas and Chris Nolan, and many more!

Also, thanks xian!

What is a mensh, you ask?

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

mp3

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

Kitten War

2005-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

The vlog Rocketboom mentioned this website today – it made me smile, so I thought I would share : KittenWar.com

I believe Hugo Grumps is my favorite.

What can’t the internet do?

Another one doesn't get it

2005-05-02T00:00:00-07:00

Steve Westly, who might be running for governor of California, has attempted to understand Podcasting. While I think it’s great that more politicans are trying to get involved in these types of outreach, there is definitely a line drawn between those who get it and those who don’t. This is how to identify someone who doesn’t get it :

(from the website:)

What is a PodCast? If you have an MP3 player, you can download the file, add it to your music library, sync it up, and listen to it on your iPod or any other MP3 player.
Step 1: Click here Step 2: When prompted, save file to disk Step 3: Save to your music folder where you keep your MP3s Step 4: Add it to your music programs library Step 5: Sync it to your iPod (or MP3 player)

First of all, the file was corrupted when I downloaded it, so I don’t know whats going on there. Second, there is no feed, which means you can’t subscribe. I don’t think you should be defining what “Podcasting” is on your website if you don’t really know. I am not going to go to this guys site every day to see if there is a new show I can listen to.

I point this out because this is what I was expecting from politicans – perhaps not so soon, I’m excited that people are catching on so early and quickly, but when it did start happening, this is how I expected it. Not quite full comprehension of why the medium is so powerful, but a half hearted attempt to tell people you’re going after the youth or tech vote – posting mp3 files of stump speeches every few months.

I wanted to contrast this to what John Edwards is doing over at his One America Committee website. He and Elizabeth (and I think this is mostly Elizabeths doing) have done a couple of podcasts in exactly the format I would like to see from more politicans. There is a feed to subscribe to, it is fun and informal with a feedback mechanism. I think it really helps you connect with them, and I hope people like my podcasts as much as I like theirs. They get it.

I also have some news about the Personal Democracy Forum, but I think I’ll post about that tomorrow.

Podcast

2005-04-29T00:00:00-07:00

I recorded this morning, but I’m just getting the post out around 11pm, so I apologize that you all couldn’t enjoy this podcast all day today. However, it’s still technically Thursday, so here’s the Thursday podcast. Twenty two shows, and the format is still changing around. This show I am basically just talking about the campaign and some things that are being done on my house.

I have normalized the Statement of Vote data for the past few years and crafted a data model that will accomplish the number of votes that I need to win here. That gives us a goal, and even registration and GOTV goals in each precinct. I am setting up a centralized online database, so the really neat thing will be that as our volunteers do Voter ID, we will be able to see how we’re doing according to the working model in close to real time. This will not only be one of the most technologically sophisticated grassroots Congressional campaigns ever, but the tools will be available for anyone to use the next time around. That is very exciting to me.

I also finally faxed in a password request form to the FEC, so I can register as a candidate and our PAC, but the chicken and egg syndrome hit again, and I found out that we need to send in the paper forms first, then we can do the electronic filing from then on. If you are running for Congress, here’s lesson number one : start here : http://www.fec.gov/info/contact.shtml

Information Division Greg Scott, Assistant Staff Director Telephone: 800-424-9530 (press 6) 202-694-1100 202-219-3336 TDD E-Mail: Submit your campaign finance law questions to info@fec.gov, and a specialist will research your questions and respond within ten business days.

Honestly, the FEC people are very useful, helpful and nice. If you call the Information Division right off the bat and whenever you have questions, they are great at helping out. That is your “How to Run for Congress” lesson of the day.

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

mp3

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

Open Source Politics

2005-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

When I was interviewed by Mike Panetta from runforcongress.com, he referred to my campaign as an “open source” campaign. I haven’t really been referring to it as such, but it most definitely is. I come from a software background, so it makes sense to me, but most people have not heard of open source, I would wager.

Open source is basically a collaborative project. In the software world, it means a project where the source code is freely available as long as any changes to the program that you make and distribute are made freely available as well. It is a project where everyone benefits – the user gets free software to use, while the developer gets people to work on their project for free. Some important aspects are complete transparency, peer review and feedback, powerful non-monetary incentives and open participation where your status in the community is based solely on the quality of your work.

There is an interesting paper on this at Demos.co.uk, a British think tank, covering many “open source” projects and initiatives. It is an interesting read, if a little long, but it is very interesting to read in light of this campaign. Quite a lot of the material is directly applicable to how I am running this campaign.

http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/wideopen/

On a side note, in this paper they mention a website used in Britain to track their MPs – what they say, what they do, their voting record, etc. It allows you to read through transcripts of arguments with links to who said what, members interests, expenses, notes other users have left and more. Plus, a great name :

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

I think this is a great idea, and although there are several sites where you can look up info on your representative, there isn’t really a good site where you can comment effectively on them and their legislation. I got involved shortly in opencongress.com, which I think will fill that gap eventually, but it wasn’t nearly far enough along for me to get involved quite yet.

Anyhow, things to ponder. What would be interesting information to know for you to accurately and satisfactorily track your representative? What would be involving, innovative, open source tactics that I could use in our campaign? What should I have for breakfast? Leave me your feedback.

Scott

Podcast

2005-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

A long weekend of campaign preparation behind us, Jessica and I are taking a day each off of work to be home for contractors fixing things in our kitchen. It was supposed to have been fixed when we moved in, but a year later is fine too.

This podcast is all about my campaign journal – what we have been working on, materials we have finished, etc. I also talk a little bit about data processing for the targeting process, so I can tell you, it’s all about excitement.

I want to start writing more in the blog, and I think I’m going to do a ‘campaign journal’ category here, for those of you who are curious but don’t listen to the podcast. You can find a lot of it in the shownotes, but it’s pretty impersonal. I’ll try to put some effort into that. I really want to document as much of this as possible, I’m just not the natural writer that some bloggers are. I will work on it.

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

mp3 | shownotes

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

Thursday Podcast

2005-04-14T00:00:00-07:00

I did a podcast on Tuesday, but the sound was too annoying to listen to. In this one, I go over all the stuff I did in the last one, plus a bit more. I talk about taxes, campaign data processing, Grace Cordero and Katie Lopez, Daily Kos, and money raising.

Be sure to call in with comments at 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Phone Line Back Up

2005-04-14T00:00:00-07:00

The k7.net line I had stopped working for a bit, but I have it back up again. So, go ahead and leave a message for me at 206-20-CHACON! It will work again!

Scott

RunForCongress.com Interview

2005-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

Todays podcast is my recording of an interview I did last night with Mike Panetta of RunForCongress.com, which is a new podcast that he is starting up. I am the first interview he has done for that site, but if you are a podcatcher, be sure to subscribe because it looks like it will be interesting. We talked about my campaign and my site, and also a bit about my district. I edited out the beginning, when we were a couple of monkeys trying to figure out the sound settings, and the very end right before we hung up, but other than that it is unedited, so there will be sirens going by and such.

What was most fun about this is getting the Skype interview setup properly. I actually had two microphones, one going into my mixer and recording straight to a track (which is why my voice sounds clear) and another going into Skype that he hears. That means that if you listen to the interview on his side, my voice will probably sound a bit different. The only pain was that my mixer recorded our voices onto two different tracks and I had to stitch them together later. Oh well.

The only other thing I have to say at this point is that I found out that when I talk to other people, I say ‘you know’ way, way too much. Forgive me, I’ll work on it.

Be sure to call in with comments at 206-20-CHACON

mp3

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

I'm Not Dead Yet

2005-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

Just a quick minicast (8 minutes) to let you know that I’m not dead. Just got back from Camp Wellstone and we’re trying to get back into the groove. Right now I’m finishing up my formal plan for winning, which I might just post on the website, but I’m not sure if that’s a great idea or not. I do want to share it with you though, so let me know if you’re interested.

Be sure to call in with comments at 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Back from Yosemite, Off to Camp Wellstone

2005-03-31T00:00:00-08:00

Howdy everybody. Jessica and I spent our Easter weekend in Yosemite National Park, just a few hours east of here. We hiked to the top of Yosemite falls, took some pictures with Jessie’s medium format camera, and came back down.

It was a great weekend, and now that we’re back and I’m just getting around to putting the pictures from that up, we’re off to Camp Wellstone at USC for the remainder of the week and next weekend. So, no podcasts this week, but I’ll have some whoppers next week with news and events and goings on.

For now, here are a few pictures from the hike, and I’ll try to get the medium format shots up when we get them back.

Thursday Podcast -

2005-03-24T00:00:00-08:00

It’s the Thursday podcast, which today covers Jessica going to Europe to study this summer, John Edwards podcast, me on BuzzWebster, and more.

Be sure to call in with comments at 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Pombo lashed on mailings

2005-03-23T00:00:00-08:00

From a recent article in the Sacramento Bee entitled Pombo lashed on mailings :

Rep. Richard Pombo, the Tracy Republican who heads the House Resources Committee, was taken to task Wednesday for sending out committee mailings last fall that critics contend were intended to influence the presidential elections in a key battleground state.
The charges came during a House Administration Committee hearing on the 2005-06 budget Pombo submitted for his committee, including another $100,000 for mass mailings over the next two years.

There’s some well spent taxpayer money. Yet another reason why I am running.

By the way, if you want to read these articles without signing up for every newspaper that has a required registration, try out the Firefox plugin called BugMeNot.

Tuesday Podcast

2005-03-22T00:00:00-08:00

On today’s podcast : Terry Schiavo, Laurent S.D., and Micro-Goals!

I am launching my Micro-Goals fundraisers, so please donate to help me go to the Personal Democracy Forum.

Comment line: 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Representa-what?

2005-03-19T00:00:00-08:00

I just saw this again, and wanted to point it out. This is on the Vote Smart page for our current representative, Richard Pombo :

REPRESENTATIVE RICHARD W. POMBO REPEATEDLY REFUSED TO PROVIDE ANY RESPONSES TO CITIZENS ON ISSUES THROUGH THE 2004 NATIONAL POLITICAL AWARENESS TEST

REPRESENTATIVE RICHARD W. POMBO REFUSED TO PROVIDE THIS INFORMATION WHEN ASKED TO DO SO BY:

Major News Organizations

and key national leaders of both parties including,

John McCain, Republican Senator Geraldine Ferraro, Former Democratic Congresswoman Michael Dukakis, Former Democratic Governor Bill Frenzel, Former Republican Congressman Richard Kimball, Project Vote Smart President

I think you should know how your representative stands on the issues. The National Political Awareness Test (NPAT) was taken by hundreds of other candidates and representatives, and I will put up my responses to the questions in it here on my site in the next few months.

John McCain doesn’t even have to ask.

Chris LeDoux Farewell Podcast

2005-03-17T00:00:00-08:00

The 15th podcast of mine covers drilling in Alaska, Congresspeople who blog, Yahoo 360, getting a P.O. Box, and a tribute to the life and music of Chris Ledoux, who recently passed away.

Comment line: 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Chris LeDoux Comments

2005-03-17T00:00:00-08:00

I wanted to copy the comments I made on the Political Dogfight post of the passing of Chris LeDoux here:

“That’s terrible to hear. I had no idea that Chris had died. My wife and I have been Chris LeDoux fans for many years, in fact one of our first dates was at a Chris LeDoux concert at the Ventura Fairgrounds – every time I hear ‘County Fair’, I think of that. We saw him in concert the week before we got married, and his “Two in a Million” was our wedding song.

(our first dance to ‘Two in a Million’)

Every time I hear “Western Skies”, I am reminded of our honeymoon in Montana, and “Song of Wyoming” brings up images of our vacation backpacking in the Tetons. His music is the spirit of the American West to me, and I am incredibly sorry to hear of his passing. I’ve been to many of the concerts he did here in California, from one in Moorpark all the way up to a few Mid-State fairs when he played on the free stages. I remember when his drummer took off for a while and his kid filled in for a few months, and then his drummer came back and they had two drums going at the same time on stage. I even remember when he had that surgery and then started touring again, but he had to stop riding the bull at the end of his show. I remember him saying how long he’d been married to his wife, and how much he still loved her after all these years, before singing “Gravitaional Pull” every time.

I remember his energy, his enthusiasm and his wonderful music. In the current pop country music world of the likes of Rascal Flatts and “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”, Chris’s music always reminds me why I liked country music to begin with. It is about cowboys, rodeo, friendship, love and freedom. I guess I’ll just put on “Melodies and Memories” from my old box set and say a little ‘goodbye’ to a real American artist.”

Dogfight’s Stuart O’Neill says it best – “It’s a hell of a bad day…”.

Politicans who blog

2005-03-15T00:00:00-08:00

The Personal Democracy Forum blog, which is associated to the conference I have been talking about that is happening in May, has posted a few entries discussing politicians who blog. I commented on one of the threads, and now my name was mentioned in the most recent post.

From the entry :

Molly Chapman Norton’s recent article about Members of Congress and blogging has an interesting thread going, including Molly’s discovery of a list maintained by the National Conference of State Legislators of state reps who blog, and word from one 2006 congressional candidate, Scott Chacon, who is blogging, podcasting many of his posts, and running with a voluntary limit of $100 a contributor (could Joe Trippi be advising him?).

I would highly recommend this site – the features and blog sections are both excellent, and I am really looking forward to the conference. I should probably sign up soon. Stupid money.

Jon Garfunkel then comments on me :

Well, as you noted, the $100 challenge is nothing new. But an 18-month, online-brewed campaign for Congress, that could be the start of a trend.

I have trouble finding out much about Scott on his site though… that picture on the right is not of him.

For one, I just put up some more content, including a page about me. Second, let’s hope a trend starts.

By the way, Trippi is not advising me, but that is where I got the idea.

Delayed Podcast

2005-03-15T00:00:00-08:00

This was recorded Monday morning, but I think the sound levels are a bit low, and the website was down all morning, so I wasn’t able to get the file uploaded. On this show we discuss Ruby on Rails, Working to Contract, Democracy in the Middle East, and several campaign ideas.

Here it is, Podcast Number 14.

Comment line: 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Drilling Offshore with Pombo

2005-03-11T00:00:00-08:00

The SF Chronicle published an interesting story today about Pombo (11th CD incumbent) passing around a bill dealing with offshore oil and gas drilling. From the article:

The powerful House Resources Committee, headed by a California Republican lawmaker, is quietly circulating what environmentalists call a “stealth strategy’’ to overturn nearly a quarter-century of bans against new offshore oil and gas drilling along much of the U.S. coastline.
The obscure draft legislation, called SEACOR, or the State Enhanced Authority for Coastal and Offshore Resources Act of 2005, would expand state control over energy development in offshore waters—and at the same time eliminate the blanket West and East Coast moratoriums given by Congress since 1982. ... Environmentalists fear it could get slapped onto the energy bill in last- minute joint House-Senate conference meetings and become law without public scrutiny.

Together with his agressive pushing to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I would say the Oil and Gas industry is getting it’s $85,693 worth this cycle, what do you think?

Website Downtime

2005-03-10T00:00:00-08:00

I’m sorry about all of these website downtimes – it was down almost all day today. I will try to figure out what is going on, but in the longer term I will be moving to a new server soon. Hopefully after that happens this won’t be so much of a problem.

Podcast-less Week

2005-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

As you can see, I did not do a podcast yesterday, and I will not do one tomorrow. I have been busy in the mornings trying to get some content finished for the website. I have also begun planning out the framework for what will be the final website. I will continue my podcasts next week, and hopefully have some extra content up as well.

The final framework, when I get started on it, will be open source, so anyone that is interested is invited to join the project. It will be somewhat Civic Space like, but more focused on only what a candidate would need and hopefully a bit more elegant. I will let everyone know more as I get farther into it.

Conservation Easements

2005-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

The American Farmland Trust just sent me a few emails dealing with the Bush budget and some current proposals to slash conservation easements for farmers and ranchers. From one of the emails :

Faced with the need to reduce federal spending, President BushÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s proposed budget for 2006 calls for cuts to agriculture programs of $5.4 billion, including cutting commodity payment rates by 5 percent, over the next five years. Conservation programs for working farms and ranches were slashed by 31 percent, again making them take a disproportionate share of the cuts. AFT welcomes the AdministrationÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s initial efforts to reduce the deficit and reform subsidy programs but decries the cuts to conservation programs, which will result in dirtier water, more soil erosion, less wildlife habitat and less farmland protected.

If you are a farmer or rancher and would like to share your views about commodity payments and subsidies, or conservation easements, please leave a comment or send me an email, I’d like find out more about the subject, and how you feel about them.

http://www.farmland.org/policy/bush_budget_stmnt.htm http://www.farmland.org/policy/fed_policy_0205.htm

Friday Podcast

2005-03-04T00:00:00-08:00

The end of the week podcast, and lucky number 13. We talk about the Dublin DFA I now organize, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Public Radio Exchange, my new website design and current events.

Comment line: 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Tuesday Podcast

2005-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

It’s the Tuesday podcast, I hope you’ll give a listen. We discuss tomorrow’s DFA meetup, the mention in the SF Chronicle, the Count Every Vote Act and Earth Day volunteering.

Comment line: 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

In the paper

2005-02-28T00:00:00-08:00

I was mentioned briefly in a San Francisco Chronicle article today, which was on the topic of podcasting :

Scott Chacon, 25, a Democrat from Dublin who plans to run for Congress in 2006, hopes to use the new medium to reach far-flung voters in California’s 11th Congressional District, which includes parts of Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara and San Joaquin counties.

Just to clarify, you don’t need to be far-flung to listen.

<!~~-more~~->

It’s not much, but it’s a start. I spoke for a while with the writer, Benny, and I mentioned it briefly in one of my podcasts. He had mentioned that the Chronicle was considering doing a podcast of it’s own, and I think the reference to the Ventura County Star comes from information I told him as well.

On another note, I did a lot of work on the website this weekend. It is still on my laptop, but it will be live here in the next few days. I can’t wait to hear feedback on it.

Scott

Thursday Podcast

2005-02-24T00:00:00-08:00

It’s Thursday, so you know what that means. Today’s show goes over teachers demonstrating everywhere, San Ramon online forum, real redistricting reform, class action lawsuits and Camp Wellstone. Let me know what you think.

Phone line: 206-20-CHACON

mp3 | shownotes

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

Double Digits Podcast

2005-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

Here it is, we’ve reached the 10th podcast, finally in the double digits. Many podcasters never make it this far, so I’m glad we’ve gotten here. My wife and I went to the Dawn and Drew party in SF this weekend to meet several other podcasters, including Dawn and Drew, Devan and Kris, Steve Gillmor, Michael Geoghegan, Michael Butler, Adam Curry, Sam Levin, and Curtis the Podcat.

I’ve changed my voicemail line so that it’s easier to remember, I have a custom outgoing message and the audio quality is hopefully a little better. My new number is 206-20-CHACON. Be sure to leave me a message, so I can play it on the air.

mp3 | shownotes

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

Podcast 9

2005-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

Happy Thursday, everyone. The week is almost done, and here’s my last podcast of this week. I talk about Pombo and DeLay, Journalists in Iraq, Dean as DNC chair, and US citizenship. If you want a free gmail account, just leave a message on my comment line, and I’ll be happy to give you one.

Hopefully, we’ll have some more good website updates in the next week, so keep an eye out.

Comment line : 1-915-808-2925

mp3 | shownotes

Technorati Tags: chacon, conversation, podcast, campaign, politics, liberal, political podcast

Tuesday Podcast

2005-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

Here’s our first interview! Jerry Hildebrand from Katalysis chats with my wife and I about microcredit. (By the way, the “pretty face” comment at the end was in reference to Jessica, my wife, who was there with me – just wanted to clear that up.)

Some of the URLs :

Comment line : 1-915-808-2925

mp3 | shownotes

Valentine's Day Post

2005-02-14T00:00:00-08:00

Happy Valentines day, everybody!

Jessie and I had a great weekend, we met with Jerry Hildebrand of Katalysis for an interview on Saturday, and stole almost 4 hours of the mans time. We talked about politics, my race, his organization, you name it. He was in the second Peace Corps deployment, helped fight poverty in Appalachia, and worked for Robert Kennedy, among other things. Jerry is a kind and fascinating man, and I hope that comes out in the interview. I recorded almost an hour and a half of material, which I’ll edit down to about 30 minutes for use in the podcast, but I’ll put the unedited version on this website as well. Jerry is one of the many people I’m sure I will meet during this process who is smarter, kinder and more experienced than I, but who would rather spend their talents getting things done, than the maddening pursuit of selfish politics. Just a great person and an inspiring organization, I hope you enjoy the interview – I’ll hopefully have it all ready by tomorrow’s podcast.

<!~~-more~~->

The interview was actually problematic to record, since I was using my laptop and some cheap computer mic. Then the software I was using to capture the sound and do the on the fly dynamics compression died because it was a trial version that I had purchased but didn’t put the key in correctly or something. So, then I had to fiddle for several minutes and figure out how to record straight to disk. So, the recording you will hear will have been heavily post-processed, via SoundSoap and other fun tools. However, for future interviews, I just bought one of these, so hopefully future interviews will be a little smoother. I’ll let you know who’s up next and how the new setup works.

Until tomorrow!

Scott

My District

2005-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

For those of you who want to know why I think we need to pass redistricting reform.

My district:

Friday Podcast

2005-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

Happy Friday, I hope you all enjoy your upcoming weekend. I have an interview to conduct this weekend, so I’ll let you know how that goes on Monday. Enjoy the show, and don’t forget to call in.

Phone line : 1-915-808-2925

mp3 | shownotes

Podcast 6

2005-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

Sorry that everything has just been podcasts lately, I’m just trying to get in the groove here. It’s a little more difficult than you might think to produce these. I will try to start blogging a little more.

I hope you enjoy this show, I cover the Fed, Jogging for Congress, and an AIDS vaccine. Enjoy your Tuesday!

Phone line : 1-915-808-2925

mp3 | shownotes

Podcast 5

2005-02-04T00:00:00-08:00

Seems as though the sound is a little better. Social security, booing the president, Food for Oil and Rumsfeld quits, all on todays podcast.

Be sure to call in with comments and questions: 1-915-808-2925

mp3 | shownotes

Retracted Podcast

2005-02-02T00:00:00-08:00

I apologize for the few of you who downloaded the podcast I released this morning, but the sound levels on it were so low it was almost impossible to hear. I removed the post with the enclosure in it until I can amplify the sound tonight and upload it again. I’ll re-release it tonight or tomorrow morning.

Thanks for your patience,

Scott

Podcatch How-To

2005-02-02T00:00:00-08:00

I have heard that some people don’t know what to do with these podcasts, so I thought I would post a little example. I’m stealing this from this article in the Mercury News. However, since it is about the shortest article in history, I’m quoting all of it here. In any case, its a good way to get started. I have only really edited it to fix some slight mistakes.

1. Download software that reads RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosed audio files from sites like www.iPodderX.com for Macs, or iPodder.NET (or iPodder Lemon) for PCs.

2. This software automatically downloads audio files to your computer and moves the tracks to iTunes or other music management software for transfer to your iPod or another digital music player.

3. Subscribe to the feeds you want. Sites such as iPodder.org, Podcast Alley, iPodderX directory are good places to start your search. Your computer does the rest. It will automatically search for the latest Podcasts and move the audio files into iTunes or other media jukebox software.

4. Simply synchronize your iPod or other portable digital music player with the computer to transfer the Podcast.

4. If your media management software doesn’t automatically download the Podcast to your digital music player, you can drag the audio file directly into the player, as you would any MP3 music track.

Let me know if you have any problems.

Scott

Podcast 4

2005-02-02T00:00:00-08:00

OK, it’s fixed. Podcast number 4, the hits just keep on coming! Notice that I now have a podcast icon at the end of the sidebar there on the left. If you need to know how to subscribe to the show, see yesterdays post on how to “podcatch”. How does everybody like the new site design?

Until friday, everybody enjoy the State of the Union!

Scott

1-915-808-2925

mp3 | shownotes

No Podcast Today

2005-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

Sorry, but there is no podcast today, even though I said there would be. I had all the stuff ready, I pressed record and a few seconds later the recorder ran out of batteries. I did not have enough time before work to get new ones so it will have to wait until Monday. Until then, I do have a new voice message line that you can leave me voice messages on so I can play them on my show. I will mention it in the actual podcast, but if you want to leave a message for me this weekend, the number is :

(915) 808-2925

<!~~- more -~~>

Yes, it’s a Texas area code, and I can’t customize the outbound message, but its free thanks to j2.com. I hope to hear from you. If the line becomes more popular, I’ll upgrade to the fancy-pants version.

Second Podcast

2005-01-26T00:00:00-08:00

First of all, I apologize for the poor sound quality of this podcast – I had a small problem with the last one in that it was too quiet, so on this one I used a different program to move the sound from the mic to the recorder and the mic volume is too loud, so now it distorts at times. I also had a “The Least You Need to Know in the World” spot that I had to delete entirely from it because I played background music that was louder than my voice for the entire piece, and it was horrible. So, that being said, here you go. I’ll do better next time.

mp3 | shownotes

First Podcast!

2005-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

I have released my first Podcast!. This post has an enclosure in the RSS2 feed that links to the mp3 of my very first podcast.

What is podcasting, you may ask?

Podcasting involves the recording of internet radio or similar internet audio programs. These recordings are then made available for download to portable digital audio device. You can then listen to the podcast internet radio program while you are away from your computer or at a different time than the original program was broadcast.

mp3 | shownotes

<!~~-more~~->

Being my first show of hopefully many, it is obviously not perfect. If some of the sound is off, or bad quality, or I make any factual mistakes, please contact me, so I can fix it next time. Let me know what you think!

Huge thanks to NetCrucible for the XSLT transform stylesheet.

Martin Luther King

2005-01-19T00:00:00-08:00

Howdy all, it’s been a while. I got it in my head a few weeks ago to start podcasting, and I had hoped it would have begun by now. Apparently, there are a few important things I didn’t know about audio. I shall share once I actually get it working.

I had wanted to write about Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, since my wife and I were lucky enough to have this Monday off in honor of it, but I was far too busy sleeping in and such. I felt it would be a good time to write a little something about him now.

<!~~-more~~->

When most people think of Martin Luther King Jr., the first words that enter their head tend to be “I have a dream”. Indeed, of most of the articles I read about him this weekend, there was not one that did not at least make reference to that phrase. His legacy as a civil rights leader is ingrained in us from middle school on, and even on the current INS immigration study test, the answer to the question “Who was Martin Luther King Jr.?” is : “a civil rights leader”.

I will only touch on this, since I don’t want to patronize many people who actually lived through this era, as I did not. However, for those of us who did not, or were there but do not know, I feel it is important to see King as a man and a leader, and not simply a sound bite. He was not just some feel-good moral leader, he was a radical and a pacifist. He studied the likes of Ghandi and conquered armies of hatred and oppression with compassion and non-violence.

I do not presume to be an expert on Dr. King, nor am I a pacifist, nor would most people probably consider me a radical. However, an honest discussion of Dr. King’s beliefs and message are worth having. The next time I get a day off of work to commemorate the life of a man who was powerful and influential not because of his money or social position or armies, but because he was a true man of God who lived for love and truth and to spread his message of peace, I will try to engage someone in real conversation about that. I ask you to do the same.

That conversation may well include topics and material from some of his more controversial speeches, like this one. Perhaps from it, we may draw parallels to our own time, and our own war :

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism"
[...]

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

With all of this recent punditry talk of “moral values”, it is interesting to hear a man who is actually moral speak of values :

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word”.

What do you suppose Sean Hannity or Rush would have to say about Dr. King today? I may not agree with everything he says, and the reality of foreign policy may well be more nuanced and complicated than that, but to honestly listen to his message and consider it against our current options in the global community would pay far more respect to his life and his message than a day off of work.

I urge you to listen for yourself, share with your children, and discuss within your own house.

Arnolds State of the State

2005-01-07T00:00:00-08:00

Arnold gave his State of the State speech two days ago, while I was on my way to the Stockton DFA meeting.

It was actually a very interesting speech, and I would encourage you to read or listen to it, if you haven’t already. You can find it at the Governors website. He addressed things such as California’s budget, the effect of special interests and lobbying groups on politics, public school merit pay, and redrawing district lines. He also mentioned something called the Hydrogen Highway, which I had not heard of before, but have since seen some amusing pictures of the Gov filling up his Hydrogen Hummer on said Highway.

<!~~-more~~->

I would like to address some of the issues he spoke of in his speech for a moment. First is merit pay for public high school teachers. Arnold says (see if you can read this without doing his voice in your head…):

Let me say this to every California teacher who is opening the minds of our children and nurturing their lives: I want to reward you for your hard work. I want to reward you for the sacrifices you make. I want to reward you for the learning that you instill.

But I cannot do so under the current system. Help me change it.

We must financially reward good teachers and expel those who are not. The more we reward excellent teachers, the more our teachers will be excellent. The more we tolerate ineffective teachers, the more our teachers will be ineffective.

So, in the special session, I propose that teacher pay be tied to merit, not tenure. And I propose that teacher employment be tied to performance, not to just showing up.

And I want to say to every Californian who has a child: “Your child deserves a good teacher. An educational system that rewards and protects a bad teacher at the expense of a child is wrong. And I intend to change that system.”

So, he has some good points here, good teachers need to be retained and recruited and encouraged, while bad teachers should be retrained or let go. However, I personally feel that his solution will be counterproductive. For one, it is very difficult, if at all possible, to quantitatively measure a teachers merit. The pay will be based off of standardized test scores, which only makes our schools dependent on them further. If a teacher is judged only on the test scores he elicits, then teachers are given even further incentive to teach to the tests. Do we really want a school system that only excels at turning out students that can take multiple choice logical-mathematical tests? When I post my issue statement on education, I will argue that the answer to that is ‘no’, but for now, I would like you to ask yourselves that question. Is doing well on standardized tests really what it means to be well educated?

Arnold spends a lot of time in the speech speaking of how much we spend on education, and how badly our system is doing :

California will spend $50 billion on K through 14 education this year; that’s $2.9 billion more than last year. Nearly half the state’s budget is dedicated to education.

...

But $50 billion, and we still have 30 percent of high school students not graduating. That is a human disaster.

$50 billion and we still have hundreds of schools that are failing. That is an institutional disaster.

$50 billion and the majority of our students cannot even perform at their grade level. That is an educational disaster.

Dire indeed, but what he fails to mention is that while we spend a lot on education, we also have a lot of children here. The total amount is very high, but spread over all of the children that we have to educate, we rank 44th in the nation in spending per student. Our student to teacher ratio is 21 to 1, the second highest in the nation. Adjusted for living, teacher pay is 32nd in the nation. Merit pay will not fix this problem, and merit pay based on test scores will only make things worse.

Next, Arnold addressed district lines :

Fourth, we must make California’s elections democratic once again.

When I was studying to take my citizenship test, I learned about gerrymandering and how politicians changed the boundaries of a voting area to protect themselves. For a long time I thought that was something that happened way back in the 1800’s, but the practice is still alive and well today.

Here is a telling statistic: 153 of California’s congressional and legislative seats were up in the last election and not one changed parties.

What kind of democracy is that?

I will propose that an independent panel of retired judges-~~not politicians~~-determine California’s legislative and congressional districts.

They can draw fair, honest district lines that make politicians of both parties accountable to the people.

The current system is rigged to benefit the interests of those in office . . . not the interests of those who put them there. And we must reform it.

I completely agree, and here is something you will only hear from Arnold, or people that are challengers and not actually in office. Every legislator will come up with reasons why this is bad – hardcore Republicans are saying he’s out to replace them with moderate Republicans, Democrats are saying that he’s out to replace them with Republicans, etc… I think this is incredibly important, and is one of the root causes of the rampant and rabid partisanship we are all tired of today. Candidates are getting more and more ideologically extreme, because they know they will not lose. If you think that districts are drawn for any reason other than getting the incumbent re-elected, take a look at mine.

Happy New Year

2005-01-03T00:00:00-08:00

Hello all, I hope everyone had a happy holiday season. Jessica and I got to spend a lot of time with our families, and even spend a couple of days in and around Yosemite. I made it onto the internet once in the last two weeks, so the blog postings have been sparse. OK, nonexistent. I was saddened to hear of the tsunami, and the continuing aftermath. If you can, please visit this site that Google set up, with some good links to places you can donate and places you can find ongoing information.

<!~~-more~~->

I have been planning the site redesign and the issues area, and working on the first two issues that will go up, election reform and education. Let me know if you have any good resources you would like me to check out on either topic. There will be room to comment on the issues pages themselves, but if you know of anything that is really excellent, please send me an email.

Thank you, and I hope you all had a happy holiday and a hangover free new year.

Scott

Participatory Politics

2004-12-18T00:00:00-08:00

I found a new website yesterday that was very interesting to me. They are looking to do many of the same things that I am, using the internet and new technologies to improve democracy. They are at Participatory Politics.

<!~~-more~~->

From their website :

The projects we are currently developing will take advantage of the internet’s ability to keep records, allow feedback and re-engagement, and provide distributed access. Specifically, people will be able to more easily work with others to focus ideas and conversations. And they will have access to productive political tools that will enable discussion to become political action.
The primary reason that we’re interested in developing effective online infrastructure and motivating discourse is to shift political power towards individuals and small groups. We hope to remove barriers to participation at every significant tension point: information-gathering, real life and online discussion, action-oriented organizing, and engagement with government.

They have several projects they have started on, and the Bill Tracking project looks especially interesting, I’m curious to see what comes of it. I will definitely link to it when it goes live.

On another note, I apologize that I haven’t put up a personal bio type statement yet, Jessica and I have been busy this week, since it was her finals week for her Masters degree class. I’ll try to get something posted for that this weekend. I haven’t forgotten, honest.

Scott

Dogbert Speaks the Truth

2004-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

Jessica thought this was particularly funny :

Howard Dean Op-Ed

2004-12-10T00:00:00-08:00

I just read this Op-Ed by Howard Dean on the future of the Internet in political campaigns. It is a great read, and he very clearly articulates many of the same ideas that I have about how the Internet should be utilized.

<!~~-more~~->

In a practical sense, using the Internet isnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t even about getting votes. Its strength is in building a richer democracy by bringing more people into the process. We learned over the past two years that a campaign website can be more than a clearinghouse for basic information. It can become a hub for turning committed supporters into true stakeholders.

...

But getting the Internet right means a new kind of relationship between an organization and its supporters. And the more we accept the prescription for success online Ã¢â‚¬â€ honesty, clarity and respect for the people Ã¢â‚¬â€ the better chance we have to succeed off-line.

Convincing candidates of this is a very hard thing to do, because it means a loss of control. The thing that really strikes me about this article, however, is that he is one of the very few politicans who understands that the Internet’s greatest strength is not in it’s ability to raise money. This is the lesson that most people took from his presidential campaign, but what interested me about that campaign was not how much money he raised, but the relationship that people involved felt they had with him. It was a very real involvement, and people were brought into the process. Howard Dean only scratched the surface of the involvement that is possible to achieve with the Internet, and I would like to find out with this campaign just how far we can take that.

I have recieved a few requests for a bio of some sort since the DailyKos comment link, so I will put that up in the next few days. In response to another request, I did get a donations page up, so donate away!

Southeast Stockton Malnutrition

2004-12-08T00:00:00-08:00

This story just aired on NPR. This area may or may not be in my district, as the boundry lines cut out quite a bit of the heart of Stockton, but the story is interesting nonetheless.

From the summary :

Stockton is just a short drive from some of California’s richest farmland. Yet in economically distressed southeast Stockton, it’s difficult to find fresh fruits and vegetables. Markets mainly sell high-salt, high-sugar foods and alcohol.

<!~~-more~~->

The story is about how type 2 diabetes cases are exploding in the black community of southeast Stockton because local markets don’t sell fresh fruits and vegetables. This is particularly disturbing because of the location of Stockton – right in the middle of the San Joaquin valley. The availability of fresh , healthy food should not be a problem in California’s farming heartland.

Near the middle of the piece, they mention farms plowing under their crops that ripen late. There must be some volunteer gleaning crews in the area – let me know if you work with one, or know of one in the area.

If anyone lives in this community, or lives near here, and would like to show me this personally, please contact me. I would like to hear your story.

Pombo Paying Family

2004-12-07T00:00:00-08:00

So I found out today that I could have been a reporter. About a month ago I was looking at Pombo’s finances at OpenSecrets. I was looking for contribution amounts, but I wandered into expenditure amounts. I found that when you sort by amount spent, the places Pombo spent the most money wasn’t media consulting, as I expected, but members of his own family. Then, I saw that some lines were “Pombo, Annette” and others were “Annette Pombo”, so the real amounts were even higher – you had to add more than one line item. I told my wife, but I assumed this was just how the system worked – it turns out that I’m a better investigative reporter than I thought.

<!~~-more~~->

From the Stockton Record this weekend :

Federal records show that Rep. Richard Pombo used campaign funds to pay his wife and brother a total of $255,916 over the past two years—or 25 cents for every dollar the Tracy Republican raised for his re-election effort.

Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission also show Pombo’s campaign paid the congressman’s wife, Annette, an additional $39,938 from 2001 to 2002. His brother Randall received $169,299 during the same period, bringing the total payments to the family since 2001 to $465,153.

Although a few other representatives do pay their family members for staff work, no one else even comes close to these amounts. This isn’t really outright illegal, as far as I know, but what does it say about his character? I just wouldn’t want to be someone who gave $100 because I believed in his campaign, only to learn that $25 of my money went to his brothers or wives personal bank accounts. To think of it another way, Pombo gets 55% of his money from PACs, which means that special interests are almost directly paying his wife $50,000 per cycle for “clerical” work. In the interest of fairness, maybe there is a good reason for it, and if I hear one, I’ll post it.

If you want to see the numbers for yourself, please do.

The San Jose Mercury News also covered this story.

Thats it, the next time I find something news worthy, I’m posting it here.

Update : It appears that this story was posted at DailyKos, and a friend of mine linked to this site. I am not really fully up to speed as far as the site goes, but I will be over the next few weeks. If you are from dKos, welcome, and please tell me what you think.

Wiki Bills

2004-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

The Wikimedia group is doing some great things with collaborative work. I have been a fan of Wikipedia, their online encyclopedia for some time now, and have recently found new projects they are working on. Among them a dictionary, a media repository, a source documents site, a quotations site, and now a news site. They are written by the community, and are extensive and multilingual.

By the way, a “Wiki” is a group of linked pages online, each of which can be edited by anyone. It is used to create documents openly, in large groups.

In this spirit, I have just put up a Wiki page here on this site for collaboration in this community. It can be a place to build documents and projects together, and the first thing I have put up is a Bill Creator. I encourage everyone to think of a bill you would like to see passed, and sketch it out in our Wiki. We can fill them in together, as a group. There is no reason I can see for special interests to have all the fun.

Elections we can trust

2004-11-20T00:00:00-08:00

I found this image in the back of Wired magazine this weekend, and I thought this was a great idea.

I am very concerned about the lack of confidence that many Americans have in the current electoral system. I live in Alameda county, where we had touch screen poll machines with no paper printout and no optical scan ballots as mandated by our Secretary of State. There are five major types of voting systems used across the country, with several companies producing each, and each state deciding its own standards. This lack of standardization leads to confusion and mistrust.

<!~~-more~~->

This week John Kerry wrote to everybody on his email list :

I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It’s unacceptable in the United States that people still don’t have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process.

We cannot have elections where no matter which side wins, nobody trusts the count. We need national standards, national funding for uniform voting equipment, regular audits and complete transparency. I think electronic voting systems are great, they are accessible and easy to use, but there needs to be a verifiable paper printout and the systems should be open sourced.

I like this image because it gives us a real, tangible goal. Elections need to be reliable and valid in every way, and this is a glimpse into what could be. I would like to ask everyone in the community here to let me know what you think about the current voting system. Send in stories, experiences, thoughts and what you believe elections in America should be. Please keep this discussion positive and proactive; let’s discuss the issues and find solutions together.

Running in 2006

2004-11-18T00:00:00-08:00

After thinking about it and talking it over with my wife and my friends, I have decided to run for California’s 11th Congressional District seat in 2006. I think that the internet can be a great democratizing force, and I want to see what will happen if a candidate fully embraces it as a campaign medium. I will blog personally, not through a staffer. What you read here will be my thoughts, my voice, not press releases. The forum will be open to all, and I will be the most frequent user. A campaign directed by the voters is a campaign committed to communication and one that values the people in its district – I intend to run such a campaign.

It may work incredibly well, it may not, but we will work together to keep the discussion honest, open, and focused on values and issues that matter to everyone. I have been brainstorming how to build a campaign that is inclusive and engaging. I am starting by limiting all campaign contributions to $100 per individual. In addition, I am putting up a campaign schedule that is open to the public, where anyone can schedule my time wherever they would like me to be. So I ask you – what else can I do? What do you wish your representative would do?

I am moving my blog to this site, and I will keep everyone updated on the race as time goes by, as well as actively soliciting your feedback. I have been taking notes on ideas I have, and I will post them as they start to be fleshed out. Lets stop complaining and figure out how to do this together. Join the conversation.

Fixing Democracy

2004-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

We are a few weeks away from the Presidential election, and I have decided to become even more involved in our political system. I think that the internet is having a bigger and bigger role in our democracy, and is shaping it for the better. I have decided to begin exploring the ways in which the internet can fix the problems in our system, and this blog is one of my first steps.

I began about a year and a half ago, during a long drive with my wife, where we started brainstorming ways to use the web to improve depressing correspondance I have continuously experienced with my representatives. I would write them, and weeks later a staffer would send me a form letter vaguely dealing with the subject. I can see that for my senators, but for my congressional representative, that is just not right. Tools are possible to create to make that interaction a more personal and responsive one, they are just not built yet.

Howard Dean then became a sensation, mostly due to his unprecedented use of the internet to bring people together and communicate quickly, cheaply and easily, on a massive scale. No candidate in this election cycle has surpassed Deans use of the internet, with the possibility of Kerry, who is now wielding online supporters quite effectively, but is not really expanding the paradigm much.

Candidates should have an engaging, interactive website that allows them to communicate with their representative on a personal level, become involved in thier community and democracy. My project for the next two years is to build the software for such a site and find a candidate who will use it in the next election cycle. I am specifically aiming at the congressional district level. Wish me luck.Fixing Democracy

Internet Politics

2004-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

The internet is in fact beginning to have a big impact in politics, my candidates preferences aside. In the VP debate last night, Cheny was trying to mention FactCheck.org to make some point that he wasn’t getting any money from Halliburton, so that can’t influence his current decisions, but instead said FactCheck.com. The site was owned by a small fry, who was getting deluged with traffic, so he pointed the traffic to a George Soros site. This article sums it up pretty well.

<!~~-more~~->

The important point is that the fact that a candidate can say the name of a website and drown it in – traffic means that people are logging on and going to a site almost immediately after it is mentioned on TV. This is making TV more interactive by association. Candidates don’t have to rely on just 30 second spots, or even 60 minute debates – they can say ‘to find out more, go here’. Thats a powerful force in getting our democracy to work better, people engaging themselves, not just passively listening. The internet has made the effort to get involved cheap enough to be worth their time. Maybe they won’t go walk precincts, but they will read a blog, or check some references, or register to vote online. I think this is an important trend to note, to try to explore how we can take advantage of that in order to reform our political system.

Election Stuff

2004-10-05T00:00:00-07:00

So unfortunately, its been quite a while since I posted here, even though I’ve been so incredibly busy. I started volunteering for a local congressional campaign, Jerry McNerney. I got really involved, walked precincts every weekend for the last three weekends and set up this great website for him. I had a blog and a forum that was starting to take off, a newspaper writing tool, all sorts of fun stuff. It turns out that some people are still not ready for the internet to have a place in politics. His campaign manager thought it was not a good idea to let people write whatever they wanted on the site – open dialogue is apparently dangerous. I know that someday soon the internet will be the future of politics, I’m just trying to figure out how to help it along. I will probably be posting quite a lot on this topic in the near future.