Last Call for Lame Ducks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 11:15When Gov. Rell called for a special session to address the rising state budget deficit, her press release said, “Some will question why I am calling the Legislature into session five days before the next regular session is slated to begin.” She is right about that. I am one of those people who question this. To paraphrase a different press release from the Governor’s office, “This is an overtly political maneuver by the Governor. At a time when our state faces significant economic challenges, it is unfortunate that Governor Rell is spending her time on a partisan political ploy rather than trying to help create jobs or help Connecticut families.”
The second press release was actually about Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz’s proposal to discourage commerce; the trading of open U.S. Senate seats behind closed doors. Yet the concern with the how open U.S. Senate seats are filled is closely related to one of the larger concerns with Gov. Rell’s call for a special session, both are about citizen participation.
Special sessions do not require public hearings. Information about the special sessions might leak out in the press, if we have any press left in the state, but bills being considered for special session do not appear on the General Assembly website with as much time for public comment as bills considered during the regular sessions.
At a special session, the bills are introduced by the Speaker of the House and the Senate President. If the proposed special session is called, the bills will be introduced by Rep. Amann, who will cease to be a member of the house five days after the session. It seems as if the only person excited about the special session other than Governor Rell is Speaker Amann.
There are the special costs of having a special session. These are compounded by having the special session in January. Lobbyists badges expire on December 31st. Either the ethics office needs to grant some sort of waiver allowing lobbyists who had registered for 2008 to lobby at the special session, or the ethics office needs to open early enough to let any lobbyists that want to register before the session to do so. I suspect that the same applies for members of the press.
If this were such an emergency, Governor Rell could have called a special session to start much earlier and provided time for citizen input. Yet it seems as if the real issue, like with how an open U.S. Senate seat would be filled, is that Governor Rell appears to distain citizen input. Perhaps that is part of the reason she is seeking to raid the Citizens Election Programs funds as part of her special session.
If you believe that citizens should be involved in our state government, if you believe we should be spending tax payer money on things other than a special session for the Governor, then I urge you to contact your state legislators and urge them to just say no to a special session starting five days before the regular session is scheduled to begin.
(Cross posted to My Left Nutmeg.)
Personal Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/22/2008 - 16:43What a day! It started off simply enough. I got up early to dig out the cars from the weekend’s snowstorms. I had dug out one car after the first storm, so it was fairly easy to dig out the second time. However, the second car had been buried by both storms.
Kim took Fiona down to the bus stop, but the bus did not come. She called me and I checked online. Two-hour delay. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but I was supposed to take my two older daughters to the post office, where they were supposed to meet their mother so we could get them passports. We rescheduled this for a little bit later. At the Post Office, there were all kinds of minor complications, and addressing the complications ended up taking close to an hour and a half.
Then to make things more complicated, my car got stuck in the parking place. With a little shoveling, pushing and rock salt, I finally got out. Mairead and I went to do a little bit of our final Christmas shopping and had a nice lunch together at a Thai restaurant in New Haven. During the lunch, we got a phone call that Fiona’s afternoon bus had been cancelled. Apparently, there had been a bad accident on our street and our street was blocked off.
This led to a long chain of frantic phone calls as we tried to rearrange schedules, get details about the accident, and whether or not we could get to our home, make sure that it wasn’t a neighbor that was in the accident, and so on.
As best as I can tell, from various stories that I’ve heard, is that a snow plow hit a propane tank and there was a leak, or at least the fear of a leak, and the fire department shutdown the area to make sure everything was safe.
I got home, long enough to drop off Mairead and then head up to pick up Fiona. Now, the day is waning. I’ve done lots of shoveling and running around, but very little else. Fortunately, everyone seems to be safe and secure now, and I can start to catch up on some of the other things I needed to get done today.
What Now for News in Connecticut
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/21/2008 - 13:20As the first snow of the year started coming down here in Connecticut, word slowly leaked out that the Journal Register Co. has shut sixteen of its weeklies in Connecticut and laid off twenty-one reporters and editors. These are different papers than the eleven weeklies and two dailies that the Journal Register had announced plans to close in January. All in all, over the course of a month, Connecticut could lose nearly thirty newspapers.
The reactions were fairly predictable. Some lamented the loss of local government coverage and the decrease in public accountability it would produce. Others suggested that the newspapers had long ago stopped providing adequate coverage of local government, that this was part of the reason for their demise, and there would be little change. Still others fretted about the loss of cheap material for wrapping fish or training puppies.
Some blamed the youth for not being more interested in the news. Others blamed the news organizations for not making their news more readily accessible where youth look for the news online. Many blamed the management of the Journal Record Co.
Some people did find bright spots, highlighting the work of CTNewsJunkie and the New Haven Independent as examples of where quality reporting still happens.
Perhaps, some have suggested, online citizen journalism can help take up the slack. I’ve often suggested this myself. However, we need to think very carefully about how this could happen.
Steve Collins has raised the concern about what happens to people that are not online, especially the elderly who are major subscribers to many of these papers. I’ve suggested that one solution is to get people to use community access television to read some of the news. Already, we have good government access broadcasts of various meetings in Woodbridge. Yet getting new community channels up and running is a lot of work, and this would be a large project.
Doug Hardy has commented about the loss of institutional memory. There are reporters who have covered events in Connecticut for many years and they bring a very important perspective of how the current events relate to a bigger picture. This is a big issue in my mind. Sure there may be some Web 2.0 type ways of gathering, storing and searching a little bit of this, but that is a big project in and of itself. Perhaps we need a Connecticut News Wiki. Yet even the best Wiki fails in searchability when compared with asking the person in the newsroom who knows where all the bodies are buried.
Yet there is a greater issue; how do you get citizen journalists to cover events that matter in a fair and informative manner? People write about what interests them. You may find some good coverage of Little League by parents of star pitchers, but what about getting someone to cover local selectmen meetings or the town committee meetings of various political parties?
Here, there is a chicken and egg problem. Unless someone is covering what is going on, others may not realize that there is something important going on in their backyards. If people don’t know what is going on they may not be inclined to produce try and cover events themselves. Even if they to get motivated, it may take a while before they get proficient in writing good articles.
It seems as if this is a place where two interesting groups can and should get involved. The New England News Forum has suggested getting journalism schools in New England to help jumpstart online citizen journalism. Central Connecticut State University and Southern Connecticut State University could play key roles. It would be great to see some conferences around the state on this.
Help Fill the Local News Gap: How to be an Effective Citizen Journalist
Other organizations like the Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists would be great additions to such an effort. The IRE provides great training for investigative reporters and some of their material would be a great addition such conferences and every journalist, whether they be a professional journalist or a citizen journalist should read and adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
The other interesting group would be local good government groups. Organizations like Common Cause and The League of Women Voters as well as people energized by the 2008 Presidential campaigns could bring energy and an important focus on watching local and state government.
Would such efforts help the situation here in Connecticut? It’s better than nothing and I would love to work with anyone who wants to help bring together people to provide better citizen journalism. If people have better ideas, I’d love to hear them to and see if there are ways I could help in that area.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to have happy holidays, and keep up my own writing about events in Woodbridge, in Connecticut, and in the media ecosphere.
Dear Aldon
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/20/2008 - 12:33Every so often, I like to look at the keywords that bring people to my site. Usually, there isn’t anything all that interesting, but the keywords yesterday seemed like people were asking for advice, so I figured I would write a Dear Aldon blog post, after the style of Dear Abby for some of the searches I’ve received.
The most obvious question was
Does Canon SD1000 support high capacity SD cards?
The answer is yes. I have an 8 gigabyte SDHC card in mine and it works very nicely. It allows me to record about an hour of video, and I’ve never run out of space for pictures or videos. However, if you use the Canon Hackers Development Kit, (CHDK), which allows you to do all kinds of neat extra things with the camera, there are a few complications. I run the CHDK modifications to my Canon SD1000, but I had to get an SDHC card reader for my PC and I can’t get the Canon to boot with the CHDK. Instead I have to enable it when I want to. Not a biggie. If it were important, I’d spend the time getting it to boot.
How to modify Motorola razr v3xx
When I wrote about installing CHDK on the Canon SD1000, I mentioned my desire to mod my Motorola Razr V3xx. Back in 2007 I wrote a blog post about using my Razr as a podcast client. I haven’t done that much since then, but it worked, and with some of my more recent mods, it works very nicely.
Subsequently, I have modded my Razr a little bit using P2Kcommander. It is a bit of work, and I never did write up a blog post about how I did it. Let me simply say, it is possible. It takes a little time to get the idea, but once you understand, it’s pretty easy and cool. I haven’t done any sophisticated mods, like creating a new skin for the Razr, but if you want to chat about it, drop me a note.
”net use” and IPv6
Now that I have IPv6 running nicely on my computer and some friends’ computers, I use net use to connect to various IPv6 based computers. I’ve run into two caveats. First, you cannot use an IPv6 address in the net use line. Instead, you should use a DNS address that maps to an IPv6 address. For example, if I wanted to do a net use of ipv6.google.com (not that it is possible), I would have to do net use * \\ipv6.google.com\sharename instead of net use * \\ 2001:4860:b002::68:\sharename The colons drive Net Use crazy. It works nicely between later Windows based machines. However, the second caveat is that I don’t have a patch to samba that supports IPv6, so I can’t do a net use to an IPv6 linux box with Samba. Some day. I’m having the same problem with MySQL, but I do use ssh between IPv6 machines a lot.
Drupal
I got a lot of different searches on drupal. Looking for issues like different theme, one view, theme seo customize primary link and banner and so on. I wrote a lot about Drupal years ago, mostly version 4. Too much to go into in a blog post, but feel free to contact me.
Strangely related to that, someone did a search on free range cat. I wrote about a gathering of Drupal developers years ago in terms of herding free range cats. Probably not what the person was looking for.
was there a person who brought 6 puppies in a dog pound in woodbridge ct in 2006
Umm, I don’t know. We moved here in 2007 and have never been to the pound. Other searcher were looking for dec 19 2008 woodbridge area snow. I don’t know if they were looking for Woodbridge, CT, or for a Woodbridge in some other state, but I had my Woodbridge CT Snow Cam up yesterday. Another search was for the woodbridge ct three year technology plan It is a work in progress. If you have kids at Beecher Road School, you should have received a great survey from the PTO. Please, fill it out. If you want to get more involved, please contact the school. It is still in the formative stage. I will note here, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, that every school district in Connecticut should be filling out such a plan and I would love it if more people got involved in their school’s technology plans and shared ideas.
what is quality journalism?
I’m sure that many people have lots of opinions on this. I’d say start with the Society of Professional Journalists and the Investigative Reporters and Editors as two good places to start. Another search was Stamford advocate Greenwich time. I don’t know if these two searches were related. Somehow, I suspect they weren’t.
Various People
People also came to my site looking for Brian Cohn; I worked with him many years ago, Atty Nick Paindiris; I know him through Democratic politics in Connecticut, Rev Lesley Hay; she was a priest at Christ Church Bethany and has moved to a church in Hamden, we stay in touch, Jim Amann; I don’t have much to say about him, Scott Hanley; I like it that he helps find pound puppies new homes, State Rep Scott Franz; I really don’t know much about him, but I thought he was elected to the State Senate and isn’t a State Rep.
bankruptcy and suicide
I don’t know who did this search or exactly what they were searching for. I believe that there is a correlation between bankruptcies and suicide, but I’ve only heard anecdotal information. However, I want to let anyone know who is searching on this, bankruptcy isn’t the end of the world. It can be painful. You can feel like a failure. Yet it is a chance to start over. True, starting over is very difficult, and unscrupulous companies try to lure bankrupt people into questionable deals, but it can also bring you back to things that matter, family, friends, neighbors and the simple things of life.
I hope that everyone finds what they are looking for this holiday season, or perhaps, something even better than they were looking for. Happy holidays everyone.
Woodbridge CT Snow Cam - UStream Version
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/19/2008 - 13:39The snow has finally started here in Woodbridge, CT. I sent a message out on Twitter to see if people wanted a snow cam, and if so, what format.
@sheilamc7 suggested UStream, so here it is as an embedded stream (Hopefully):
@AlanGayandStr suggested veodia.com, and I may try that next.
Update:
After streaming for a while, I cleaned the window and adjusted the settings, so the video got a little better later in the day. It is now dark outside, so I've stopped streaming, although if it is snowing in the morning, I may try to restart the stream below.
Above the fold, I replaced the live stream with one of the videos that I captured.
Updated 2:
In the evening, I switched over to Fire Cam, using the Adobe Flash Media Encoder. Now that it is day time and snowing again outside, I've restarted Snow Cam.
Here is a clip from Fire Cam
