My current take on Boston’s mayoral candidates

June 29th, 2013

I’ve spent some time taking a look at all of the declared candidates for Boston’s mayoral election. Here are my initial reactions, for those who might be curious.

People worth considering

All of these are people I’d be happy to see elected.

John Connolly

(Web site.) Current City Councillor. I very much liked what he said and did about the Boston Arts Academy / MSBA renovation fiasco (email me if you’re curious). His web site has by far the most detailed platform of any candidate, and I agree with pretty much everything he wants to do. His connections would make him a less adversarial mayor than the outsiders who are running, but they might also prompt him to ignore some of the “business as usual” which really needs to be cleaned up. Overall, after looking at all the candidates, Connolly is currently my first choice.

Bill Walczak

(Web site.) If you’re looking for an “outsider” who has the potential to shake things up and yet also has the strength of character and experience to avoid being eaten alive by the establishment, Bill’s your man. Definitely worth a serious look. Education and community health-care are his two big issues, and he has a huge amount of experience with both of them.

Charlotte Golar Richie

(Web site.) She seems highly qualified. She has been endorsed by EMILY’s List. She would be Boston’s first woman mayor. Unfortunately, her web site is entirely lacking any sort of substantial content about her vision, plan, or platform.

Robert Consalvo

(Web site.) City Councillor. Worth a look, but if you’re going to vote for a current City Councillor, I think Connolly is a better choice.

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Dilbert was broken, now fixed in comics aggregator

June 26th, 2013

Yesterday, the folks over at Dilbert.com changed their RSS feed, which is what the comics aggregator was using before to fetch Dilbert, so that method no longer works. Therefore, I had to refactor the Dilbert support in the aggregator. It should be working again. Please let me know if it isn’t. And please consider supporting my work on the comics aggregator if you benefit from it.

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UPDATED: Awesome flash charger for portable device power on the road

June 24th, 2013

UPDATE [2013-07-31]: I have withdrawn my recommendation for No More Rack, and I discourage you from patronizing them.

It’s rare for me to be so pleased with a particular merchant that I feel compelled to rave about them on my blog, and even rarer for me to feel that way about a particular product, but now is one of those times.

I recently spend more than $20 on a flash charger from CVS, which (a) turned out to hold only 500mAh of power, which is a pittance, and (b) worse, turned out not to be able to hold a charge for more than a few days when not in use. This was obviously not acceptable!

Then I saw an ad in my Facebook feed (yeah, I know they’re incredibly annoying, but surprise! sometimes they actually advertise things you want) for a 2600mAh flash charger from No More Rack. I bought it, and I just had the opportunity to use it for the first time, and boy, does it deliver the goods.

I was on a five-hour bus ride from NYC to Boston (traffic! ugh) and the charging outlets weren’t working. I was down to less than 30% charge left on my phone. I had nothing else to occupy myself, and there was no way the phone was going to make it all the way to Boston with constant use. I whipped out the flash charger, and it was able to bring the charge on my phone up to more than 90% while I was streaming Netflix. That’s a lot of power in a little device.

Seriously, if you’re ever on the road worrying about if your phone or tablet battery is going to make it, and you don’t want to lug around a big charging brick, this is the deal for you. And it’s a great deal! You won’t find a comparable charger for less anywhere else.

If you’re interested, go to No More Rack and search for “2600mAh Flash charger” to find it.

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Fumes in MBTA buses: significant progress

June 20th, 2013

I met several months ago with MBTA management to present my concerns about toxic fumes in certain MBTA buses. Thank you, again, to State Senator Will Brownsberger and his  Legislative Counsel and Policy Advisor, Michael Buckley, for making that meeting happen.

I am pleased to report that the MBTA took my concerns seriously, investigated them, and took corrective action which they hope will fix the problem.

I met today for a second time with Jeffrey Gonneville, the MBTA’s Chief Mechanical Officer, and Troy Ellerbee, Director of Bus Maintenance, and they filled me in on their progress. Read on for the details.

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Mamadou Diallo still, inexplicably, using my email address all over the internet

June 18th, 2013

For some inexplicable reason, some guy who identifies himself as Mamadou Diallo, a.k.a. Bouba Diallo, has been creating accounts all over the internet using my email address for over two years now. I’ve written about this several times before.

It’s still going on… I just got email indicating that he created a Yahoo! account (“m.diallo76″) on May 6 using my email address. Needless to say, as has been my practice, I took over the account and closed it.

I wish I knew what the hell was going on here or what the perpetrator hopes to gain by doing this. I’ve wracked my brain but haven’t been able to come up with any ideas for how this might benefit him. Someone purporting to him posted a comment on my blog in November 2012, but it just made things weirder, without shedding any light on what’s going on. That comment probably really was posted by him, since the IP address it came from shows up as Dakar, Senegal in GeoIP lookups, and that’s where he claims to live in the accounts that he creates.

If anybody has any ideas about what might be going on here, I’m all ears.

 

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Johnny Monsarrat link round-up

June 11th, 2013

Following up on my earlier posting, some interesting reading on the Johnny Monsarrat lawsuit. The ones in bold are the juiciest. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dyn jumps the shark, tries to strong-arm free accounts into paying

June 11th, 2013

I’ve used Dyn, Inc.‘s free dynamic service for many years to maintain a DNS entry for my home internet connection. Their free account allows you to create one or two dynamic DNS entries underneath those domains. They provide software that updates your dynamic DNS record automatically when your IP address changes, usually because your ISP changes it.

In the past, free DNS entries have remained active as long as they were updated at least once every 30 days. The software they provide is configured to send an update every 25 days even if the IP address hasn’t changed, so in the past, as long as you installed and used their software to keep your DNS record up-to-date, you were golden.

Alas, Dyn recently decided to change the rules in a transparent attempt to make more of their free users pay for service they frankly don’t need. Now, using their software to update your dynamic DNS record automatically at least once every 30 days is no longer sufficient; now, you also need to log into their web site at least once every 30 days or your DNS records go away. They’ve claimed that this is to avoid “dormant” accounts, but that’s just stupid. If my account were dormant, then I wouldn’t have software updating its record automatically.

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MA Supervisor of Records denies my appeal based on specious legal reasoning

June 2nd, 2013

To: Shawn Williams, Massachusetts Supervisor of Records
Cc: Lori Sullivan,  the staff attorney in Williams’s office who research my appeal
Cc: Susan Krupanski, the MBTA employee who denied my legitimate public records request
Cc: Will Brownsberger, my state senator and an all-around good guy
Cc: On the Media
Cc: The Boston Globe
Cc: The Boston Herald

Dear Mr. Williams,

I have received your letter dated May 28, 2013, in which you denied my appeal of the failure by the MBTA to provide me with records I requested under the Massachusetts Public Records Law. A copy of your letter is attached for reference.

The legal justification you provide for denying my appeal is specious. Furthermore, your denial of my appeal flies in the face of available facts. Finally, on a purely common-sense level, your response is simply absurd.

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MBTA obstructs public records request, Secretary of State drags feet

May 25th, 2013

A side effect of my attempts to get information from the MBTA about toxic fumes in the passenger compartments of their buses (I will write more about that later, after a followup meeting I’ve been invited to by the MBTA) was my discovery that the MBTA is not terribly good at responding to public records requests within the time frame required by law. Since I view that as a serious problem in its own right, I attempted to shine some sunlight on it in my February 13 letter to the MBTA:

I would like to add an additional item to my request, or if you wish you may treat this as a new, separate request under the public records law. Please tell me how many public records law requests the MBTA has received in 2013, the date on which each was received, and the date on which an initial response was sent. There should be no significant cost for satisfying this request, since there could not have been that many requests so far this year (mine, after all, was only the ninth) and all such requests are presumably handled through your office.

In a letter dated February 22, the MBTA lawyer who handles public records requests informed me that, “… after a thorough and diligent search of files, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has no existing, responsive documents.”

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MIT Peeps: Have you heard what JonMon is up to nowadays?

May 6th, 2013

This post is mostly for the benefit of my fellow MIT alumni.

Remember Jonathan Monsarrat?

If so, then you may have gotten the same impression of him back at the ‘tute that I did, to wit, that he gave off creep vibes.

Judging from what has been written about him online since then, he’s done other things to reinforce that vibe, but this just about takes the cake… He has recently filed a lawsuit against several people, including Ron Newman whom many of you probably also know, alleging that they defamed him in discussions that took place in various forums on LiveJournal almost three years ago.

The lawsuit is clearly baseless and doomed to fail if it makes it to trial, but it seems likely that JonMon isn’t so much interested in prevailing in court, but rather in scaring people into removing their LiveJournal postings by raising the specter of an expensive legal defense.

Ken White has put up the Popehat signal asking for pro bono legal help defending against this attempt to suppress people’s free speech.

I’ve known Ron online for over two decades. He’s a good guy, and if he ends up needing financial help defending himself against this suit, you bet I’ll be contributing to his legal defense fund.

If there’s anything you can do to help — whether it’s providing pro bono assistance yourself, hooking Ron up with somebody who can provide such assistance, or just kicking in a few bucks to his legal defense fund if one is set up — then I encourage you to do so. And if you’re an MIT alum, make sure to mention it when you help…. It’s important to let people know that JonMon’s conduct is considered neither normative nor acceptable to most of the MIT community.

 

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