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Fiber Optic Cable System Vandalism A National Security Problem

  More at Zennie62.com At YouTube , Yahoo , MySpace , Metacafe , DailyMotion , Blip.tv , Stupid Videos , Sclipo , Viddler and Howcast On Thursday April 9th a criminal incident impacting nearly a million people in three counties of Silicon Valley went largely unnoticed by the media, both mainstream and blogs, yet has enormous national security implications far beyond the scale and scope of September 11th 2001 or "9-11" and potentially impacting millions of Americans. What was it and why? On that day, someone one or a group of people cut a fiber-optic and landline network placed beneath a manhole cover in San Jose, California. No one knows who did it, but the act crippled operations in hospitals, stores, banks, and supermarkets. No one could make a call using a cell phone or regular phone, or get information from the Internet. The full extent of the impact of this act is as of this writing not known, but imagine not being able to call the police or the fire departm

Crime Scene Cleaners Not Making Friends In West Oakland

The good folks on Myrtle Street have a "stone in their shoe" and it's not a rock, but a company called "Crime Scene Cleaners." As I reported earlier this week , the company, which cleans up crime scenes, is dirtying up relations with the locals. Here's what was explained on the blog " Myrtle Street Review ": It's been a rough week on Myrtle Street since Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc., owned by Neal Smither and based in Orinda, moved onto our block. Neal Smither, according to the Chronicle, owns a million-dollar house near the Round Hill Country Club in Alamo, so we are guessing he has no plans to relocate to West Oakland. Our neighbors went over to Crime Scene Cleaners to introduce themselves and were immediately faced with threats and shouting. Residents, apparently, are not allowed on the sidewalk in front of Crime Scene Cleaners or they will get a restraining order and it will take Mr. Smither "about twenty minutes" to arrange th

Giants Baseball Opening Day in San Francisco; Party Economy Still Active In San Francisco

Follow me on Twitter! | SF Chronicle version San Francisco and the SF Bay Area have developed what I call a "party economy" where to the layperson people have events with food and drink and music everywhere, but really are marketing gatherings to present a restaurant or a type of drink or even a car. These happenings are the lifeblood of San Francisco and are prevalent during the Opening Day Game of the San Francisco Giants' baseball season as my video will show . The game pitting the Giants against the Milwaukee Brewers was one I did not see much of. I was too busy talking to old friends and meeting new people and I wasn't the only one. Even with the wet weather, which eventually cleared, spirits were high, smiles were many, and at some events people dressed as if it was 90 degrees outside. I went to meet friends in what has become an annual ritual for us, even though I live in Oakland, like the Oakland A's and even made a game called " The

Security ambassadors making dent in Oakland crime - San Jose Mercury News

Security ambassadors making dent in Oakland crime - San Jose Mercury News : “OAKLAND, Calif.—Oakland officials are crediting the use of so-called "security ambassadors" with helping to clean things up a bit in the city's downtown. Since the eleven ambassadors hit the streets in early February, officials say they've booted out a drug dealer, helped police arrest a purse snatcher and are discouraging youths from hanging around the downtown area. Oakland Deputy Police Chief Dave Kozicki acknowledges the ambassadors are beginning to make a dent in low-level crimes.” -- I've never seen this presence in downtown Oakland. Where are they? And just 11 of them? I'm really in favor of helping people downtown get to know each other. That's the best deterent.

Paul Krugman is WRONG about The Obama TARP Plan - Once Again

On March 24th , I wrote a short post on Economist and NY Times Columnist Paul Krugman Paul Krugman and created this video below. Today, in the wake of Newsweeks' rather unfortunate April Fools Day article on the Princeton Professor (which presented him as a kind of edgy intellectual but lacked real substance in the discussion of why Krugman is wrong about Obama), I decided to offer this expanded blog post. The problem is that Krugman is really angry that the Obama administration is and has ignored him and this emotion has driven a sloppy intellectual approach, paced by the fact that he's not presented a plan for our troubled banks, all the while taking an aim at the President's plan that has the effectiveness of a drunken sailor at an arcade shooting gallery. Who is Paul Krugman? Professor Krugman is a decorated International Economist, who recently - in 2008 - won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his solid theory on two-country trade. Here Krugman attacked t

Proposal Would Raise West Berkeley Skyline - BDP

Proposal Would Raise West Berkeley Skyline. Category: Front Page News from The Berkeley Daily Planet - Thursday April 02, 2009 : “City planning staff have dropped a bombshell on anxious West Berkeley activists: a proposal that would double the height of new buildings and potentially open the area to office complexes. The staff proposal, if enacted without changes, could mean a West Berkeley skyline studded with 90-foot-tall office towers—a host of buildings as tall as the area’s currently dominant high-rise, the Fantasy Records Building. Even some of the more developer-friendly commissioners had questions after Assistant Planner Claudine Asbagh presented the concepts, which are the latest round of a City Council-mandated effort to ease development rules in the only part of the city zoned for light industry and manufacturing. ” -- And drive the poor out of West Berkeley. What's the deal with Berkeley's planning staff? A drive for more property taxes?

Oscar Grant Death a ‘Tragic Error,’ BART Lawyers Blame Grant

From The Berkeley Daily Planet - Thursday April 02, 2009 The BART strategy is unfolding and it spells a grim future for the Oscar Grant case and potentially even more unrest. The BDP reports that BART lawyers are saying Oscar Grants own actions contributed to his murder. I find that hard to swallow and it's a terrible message to have released into the public given the existence of the cell phone videos. BART continues to make PR blunders one after the other.

Color Correlations at Home - By Michael Caton

I was in Guatemala last summer for a wedding. A friend of mine from high school was getting married to a Guatemalan woman. Her family is fairly well-off. They are also not as dark-complected as your average Guatemalan - an observation that is, of course, less uncomfortable for me to make than for my friend's wife. Driving around Guatemala City, I had noticed that the fashion and cosmetic ads on billboards usually showed women who were also lighter-complected than most of the people walking around the city, as is often the case in the global South. One day my friend was busy, but his just-betrothed had to go to the mall. I offered to drive her. On the way there I pointed to one of the billboards: "Juana," I asked, "who are all these white people on the billboards?" "There are light-complected Guatemalans, you know," she retorted. "Yeah," I said, "and all two hundred of 'em were at your wedding." In some ways I feel

Getting Out Late In Oakland After Too Much Work: A Brief Report

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

Oakland A's News: Potential Wolff Firing? Coliseum Plan. Wolff Calls Dellums. Boxer Sends Letter To MLB

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

Mayor Dellums And Congresswoman Lee Snubbed At Oakland Police Funeral; Black Oaklanders Are Asking Why.

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

Oakland A's Ownership Rumored To Consider Firing Lew Wolff

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

Promise Technology Announces New ServicePlus On-Site Parts Replacement Program for US and Canada

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 subsystems.  The ServicePlus program is an avai

"Save The Parkway Theater" Oakland Meeting Of 3-29-09

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

Sean Maher on How Oakland Potholes Point to Larger Problems

Saen Maher wants to have his story idea on Oakland Potholes funded. Here's what http://www.Spot.us writes: If you live in Oakland, you'll be lucky to see the street your house is on get repaved during your lifetime. The city's 2,300 miles of road are on an 85-year resurfacing cycle, more than three times slower than the industry standard. City engineers grade a third of Oakland's streets in poor condition or worse. Facing serious budget cuts, the Public Works Agency has left three of four supervisor jobs vacant, including those overseeing heavy paving, pot holes and concrete repair. A story should detail the challenge Public Works is facing, including its momentum, scope, and possible solutions.

The Problem of Potholes in Oakland

www.Spot (dot) us has a great set of videos on the Oakland Pothole problem. They write: Oakland has a serious problem with potholes. If you are a biker, auto-driver or pedestrian, it is a problem we all have. It can cause material or physical harm - as this individual describes. Help us report on the potholes in Oakland

Fallout from Oakland Massacre - Clinton Killian

Fallout From Oakland Massacre The Mixon massacre brought out the best and worst in Oakland. Like any other tragedy, peoples’ true character and resolve, or lack thereof, came to the forefront. This tragedy will have repercussions in Oakland for years to come. First, you have to admire the courage of our police force. They responded immediately to this tragedy, secured the neighborhood, and pointed out, again, the dangers of their jobs. Other heroes were the Oakland residents in the area impacted by the shootings. Many showed bravery by aiding the officers throughout this tragedy. They risked their lives to comfort the wounded and to stop the killings. Oakland citizens showed their concern, mourning and gratitude in many ways. They organized a vigil at the scene to honor the fallen officers. The Oakland clergy stepped forward and offered comfort for the city and the families, including the Mixons, who were severely impacted by this senseles