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This phase of work, work, work is not done (and this is part of it) but not yet taking its toll. To make sure that doens't happen, I did two things: 1) I went to the gym and 2), I went out to just relax. The first thing, the gym, I do every day, or try too. I'm working to keep by weight below 200 pounds. I find I feel best at less than 196. Yesterday I was at 198. The second act was just plain going out. I wound up, as they say, at Luka's and ran into my neighbors and their friend who can dance up a storm. So, for the first time in a a while, I danced to some combination of "house" and reggae. Then, once enough sweat was produced to make think of my desire not to sweat a lot, I stopped, and fortunately so did they, and left. That was fun. It's also a blast to do it with people from your hood. Then I wound up at another place called Mua and ran into a couple I generally see at Cafe Ven Kleef. They had a friend in West Oakland who had a story tip f...

UPDATE: Oakland Tribune online poll "Should Oakland build new stadium for the A's" has "yes" leading 52 to 48 as of this writing but just 235 votes, which means it's too small a sample not to be "gamed".  (I did not link to the front page because the Oakland Tribune will not have the poll up long enough for many to respond and the poll is poorly positioned on the site.) I took this screen shot of the poll: To say that this was an important week in the matter of keeping The Oakland Athletics in Oakland is an understatement.  To illustrate this I combined three blog posts from our Oakland Focus , San Francisco Focus , and Zennie62.com blogs on this matter containing "breaking news" -- all from this week.  Developer Reveals  Oakland Athletics Stadium Plan For Coliseum  The Commissioner of Baseball on Monday March 30th announced a new committee devoted to determining the viability of baseball in the East Bay. In his statemen...

Video Commentary : MySpace , Metacafe , Blip.tv , Crackle , Stupid Videos , Sclipo , Viddler and Howcast John Burris is a well-known Oakland attorney representing the family of Oscar Grant in the wake of the shooting of Grant by Johannes Mehserle on New Year's Day. Burris attended the funeral last Friday, March 27th of the four Oakland Police Officers who were murdered by Lovell Mixon on Saturday March 21st in Oakland. I unfortunately did not attend the event as I was sick, but I did watch it on television. Burris brings up a point that I noticed but given the weight of the matter, put on the back-burner of my mind because I didn't want to think the unthinkable: that not only was the Mayor of Oakland not allowed to speak but Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who was in attendance, was not even acknoweldged by the presenters. That's a huge no-no. Congresswoman Lee is the head of the Congressional Black Caucus. Both are African American. All of the elected offici...

Just a fun video of a common moment in an Oakland / Bay Area Day: BART trains coming into and out of Oakland's Rockridge Station.

The above headline will catch you by surprise, but the wind is blowing in that way.  The point is that several people behind the scenes, in touch with the ownership group, and around the Bay Area are talking about how Oakland Athletics Managing Partner Lew Wolff has, as one person put it "blown $20 million" on the effort to find a new home for the Oakland Athletics. Another contact told me one would be "fired" if they lost even $8 million on such a development project so early into the process.  But the concensus for now is to let Wolff continue to do his work, but he's on a short leach.  The main problem is Wolff fell in love with the "baseball village" concept, where the ownership has to buy a lot of land not just for a baseball stadium but for residential development in the hope that the improved land sells for more than the group bought it for.  That works in a credit-health, prosperous economy, but in today's recessionary and deflationary wo...

First I take a stance on how backing up data is a personal responsibility and how Carbonite - a data protection company -- should take the rap for losing its customer's data, then I get comments on the San Francisco Blog about it, and from some high level folks, and now a press release?  Interesting.  It means our blogs matter in the tech world after all.  Here's the release I got on Promise Technology's news about an onsight parts replacement program: Promise  Announces New ServicePlus On-Site Parts Replacement Program for US and  Canada   Industry leading support program expands to include on-site component  swap offering MILPITAS, Calif., April  1, 2009 – Promise Technology Inc., a leading supplier of  sophisticated RAID storage solutions for enterprise and SMB customers,  today announced general availability of the Promise ServicePlus parts  replacement plan for their VTrak enterprise class RAID storage subsy...

On March 22nd, the Parkway Theater in at 1834 Park Blvd in Oakland played its last set of films to a large audience, then stopped after 12 years of operation and a lot of memories. This is the video story I made from that night: A victim of the economy and a landlord seeking higher rents, Parkway Owners Catherine and Kyle Fisher made a decision to close the legendary business just four days before the last opening night. But no sooner did that happen than a group of concerned Oaklanders sprang into action. They set up a website called http://iliketheparkway.com and a facebook page called "Save The Parkway Speakeasy Theater", then held now three meetings. This video presents much of the action and talk from the second meet: a large event at Roos Cafe on Park Avenue, just three doors from the Parkway itself. Here's the video from the meeting: The meeting attendees divided into several sub-groups and determined possible future programming and business models fo...