Gabe Wachob Uncorked - Miscellaneous

San Mateo Citizens Academy Week 5

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:26:54 -0400

Sep 20th was "Support Services", including Dept of Public Works, the
Information Services Division, Employee & Public Services (which
includes the 911 Dispatch Center which was the highlight of the
evening).

Dept of Public Works: Cities have their own versions - this is for the
county. Dept doe things like roads, sewers, motor pool, etc. 4
Divisions (my notes are unclear here). DPW Engineering (property
lines, property maps). Resource Protection (Env. Waste, Flood Control,
Recycling, etc): AB 939 - set in place waste reduction goals - county
didn't make it (no others did either). DPW administrates 40 special

San Mateo Citizens Academy Week 4

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 17:54:57 -0400

This week was Environmental Services Agency part 2. We were at the Millbrae library, which, let me tell you, is *nice*. Definitely worth a visit.

We heard from Planning & Building Division: they are responsible for the San Mateo County "General Plan" - a policy document for land use. Policies and goals in several areas - (incomplete list) landu se, transportation, safety, housing, cultural concerns. There are also other specific policy documents in these areas and others. Then, there is the zoning ordinance which implements the General Plan. The zoning ordinance creates zoning districts wach with development standards (e.g. setbacks) and allowed uses. Design standards are also specified (mostly for coastside and bayside) to manage how buildings look and blend in with surroundings. "Planning entitlements" are permits & variances which are the result of the review process for each of these districts. This process is through staff and/or commissions/committees. Inspections (uniform building codes) and code enforcement (zoning violations) also under this division. Code enforcement is done on a complaint based system.

Jacob Applebaum

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:15:12 -0400

Jacob Applebaum ('ioerror' on #joiito) has been in Algiers, Louisiana helping to set up community communications infrastructure for the aftermath of Katrina. He's been documenting his work and experiences on his Blog, but today's entry, a life story interview, blows me away. Even as Jacob goes through recovery from personal tragedy in his life, he inspires others to make this world a better place.

San Mateo Citizens Academy Week 3

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 02:02:02 -0400

This topic was at the Housing Dept and covered Child Support Services and the new Housing Dept. There was so much information on this night that I was unable to keep notes because there were a lot of handouts. Hopefully I'll be able to link to them.

Some highlights:

* The Child Support services dept acts like a collection agency for parents who are owed child support. They are more effective at collection (current & arrears) than the California average and the National average. Pretty darn impressive. They server 14,500 clients a year, helping the clients get child support from a parent (usually a father) who owes that child support to the other parent. On average, family gets $3000 a year. Most of the clients are or have been on public assistance. There were a lot more numbers given, but I one important fact is that the money collected by this department often goes to pay back the welfare being received by the client, saving the state money. The CSS dept is mandated in every county in the country. They are going to be migrating to a centralized collection system where employers, etc can pay all the withheld paycheck money to a central system.

San Mateo Citizens Academy Week 2

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 01:45:06 -0400

Week two was held in the Coyote Point Museum for Environmental Education. A great place to take the kids.

This session focus on the "Environmental Services Agency" (part 1). This agency should really be called "The Miscellaneous Civic Services Department". Notes follow:

* Marsha Raines, Director of Environmental Services - city-type services in one agency. Consists of weights & measures, animal control, UC Co-op extension, county fire (contracted to Cal Dept of Fire), Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), county library system (11 smaller cities + unincorporated -- works with peninsula library system), parks rec & trails.

Katrina Peoplefinder

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:14:26 -0400

I spent my weekend lending technical expertise, performing volunteer greeting in cyberspace, and just general organizing for the Katrina Peoplefinder Project. From the wiki page:

Several dozen sites have been established to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina find their loved ones, and to allow people to report missing people. This creates a difficulty for people trying to locate missing persons - they need to search dozens of separate databases and message forums.

So we've decided to create a centralized database, where you can search the data from all of these at one time.

First San Mateo County Citizen's Academy Class

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 01:34:16 -0400

This year, I applied and was accepted to the 2005 Citizens's Academy, a set of 15 "classes" where folks in SMC can learn about county government by meeting and hearing from folks running various parts of county government.

I'm going to try to blog the notes I take each night to my blog, and this is the first entry for 08/23/05.

The first session was an introductory session, describing the county history and its political and organizational structure. We heard from the County Manager, the County Counsel, Supervisor Jerry Hill, as well as received short greetings from a number of other county department heads.

Link Technorati Tags Using XRIs instead of Technorati URL?

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:10:15 -0400

Tags: xri, technorati

Kevin Burton and a few other folks make a good point in talking about problems with the new Technorati tagging system. One thing that bugs me in particular is that it's basically a technorati-only solution that is a metadata standard based on a site-specific URL pattern. This seems brittle and more than a little hackish. I mean, great start, don't stop, but lets come up with a better solution.

Practical Issues with Instant Runoff Voting

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:40:40 -0500

Tags: irv, electoral reform

I like IRV. Let me state that upfront. But I was thinking about its practical widespread adoption and I thought of two issues that I don't see an easy solution for. I'd like to hear answers to issues around recounts and aggregating votes across multiple election offices.

Upgraded to Drupal 4.5.2

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 02:47:47 -0500

Upgraded to Drupal 4.5.2

Playing with Technorati and seeing what is easy to do and what isn't.

Wish me luck.

Technorati approval

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:05:04 -0500

I don't know how this works.

I want to claim the blog for technorati.

Full Disclosure

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:40:03 -0500

Journalists have a fairly high set of ethical standards. Disclosure of things like personal interests in a news story are extremely important. In interviews, journalists usually disclose agreed-to limitations on the type of questions they were not allowed to ask.

Why don't bloggers have to do this?

Here's my disclosure: About the only thing I won't be talking about in my blog is work. Just can't do it. First, my employer is in an extremely competitive business where even the slightest business intelligence leak can cause a great deal of damage. Second, and perhaps more importantly, my employer's brand is extremely valuable and well-protected - making any statements that affect the perception or value of the brand, whether on purpose or mistake, can cause me a lot of grief at work.

Whoa, who is reading this blog?

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:24:53 -0400

I had occasion to look at my apache logs for my web sites and noticed that there are a number of folks pulling rss feeds from my site. No problem yet, but I'm really kind of surprised.

I didn't think anybody really cared what I had to say, honestly.

Well, maybe now I have an incentive to write more ;-)

Switch to pyblosxom?

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:23:20 -0400

I'm seriously considering a switch to pyblosxom. While I really dig drupal, I'm running an old version and there are way too many features for me to play with and I'm always worried about security.

The blosxom model looks so attractive to me, and if I can get it in Python, so much the better...

Anybody with experience bad or good with pyblosxom, please email me.

You can't trust me anymore

Mon, 25 Aug 2003 02:00:47 -0400

I turned 30 today.

It probably surprises a number of folks that I'm only 30.

I feel a lot older today.

Ok, on to the next 30 years of my life.