MBTA service cuts - the dance begins

So the MBTA, crippled by the additional debt assigned to it from the Big Dig, is now proposing significant service cuts as a partial solution to their chronic deficits. Public transit serves a public good, yet it is almost never profitable on its own. Should a public service be run like a business? Thousands of people depend on the MBTA for access to jobs and shopping, many more use it for tourism. What would be the impact to Boston if day trippers couldn't take the train into the city?

This is an ancient kabuki in government services. Drastic cuts are proposed, something happens to prevent it. The MBTA has made some strides over the last few years in curbing expenses. They still have capital costs that are high, given all the obligations the state has placed on them. Here in Salem they're obligated to build a garage facility (and there's another one going up in Beverly), but due to their financial issues the Salem garage is being chopped from 800-900 spaces to around 500 - barely more than the parking lot it replaces. Hingham got a $50 million tunnel because residents were so opposed to a grade crossing - that money would have built the entire garage here.

There's also a legal agreement to expand the Green Line into Somerville, and plenty of other obligations. The money's not there to fund it. So what's the solution?

My take is this (and I proposed something similar back in my pre-politician days): Currently we have a portion of sales tax revenue dedicated to the MBTA. It's obviously not enough. We also have a decaying road system, and only small sections of roadway that are tolled (the Tobin Bridge and Mass. Pike/harbor tunnels are the only tolled roads in Massachusetts - Route 93 isn't tolled at all). We have increasing road usage, so to me the obvious choice is to freeze tolls where they are (I think tolls are discriminatory - why should some roads be tolled and others not at all?), and increase gas taxes by an appropriate amount to compensate. Compared to some of the other states in the area (CT, NY, ME), we have one of the lower gas taxes around. They've been at current levels for a long time. I'd support raising gas taxes in Massachusetts by at least 15-20 cents per gallon, with the revenue split between the highway system and the MBTA. Gas taxes are a far more fair revenue raiser than tolls - the more you use the roads the more gas you consume.

This also gives you a further incentive to drive more economical cars as well - the less gas you use the lower your costs are. And a 20 cent raise would generate (based on numbers I looked up from last year) approximately $50 million per month - or $600 million dollars per year. That goes a long way towards solving the MBTA's woes and helping to repair our crumbling highway infrastructure. If we can also begin the process of eliminating tolls, so much the better.

Two weeks down

Swearing-in was in January 2nd. Pretty cool, and well-documented online via my Facebook account, Salem Patch, and all sorts of other sources. Won't go much further with that. We've had a couple of meetings and votes, mainly routing things. I've got a few constituent issues I'm working on now as well (and had one issue out of my ward that I got called about by an out-of-town landlord who didn't know what ward her building was in).

Business-wise, we're pretty busy right now, though things are now quieting down a little bit. From early December through now has been insane, so the respite is nice for a couple of days. We are also signing up new accounts at a decent clip. All good.

Mainly right now I'm just taking advantage of a quiet weekend to try and clean out my home office better - there's a lot of excess stuff in there right now and I'd really like to get it tidied up. Got an old computer to get moved as well. The effort remains ongoing.

Wrapping up the year in us

So 2011 was one of our more interesting years, as readers of this space may have noted. It started on a sad note with the passing of Jane's father, right after we had visited them for the holidays. He had had health issues for a number of years but it was still never something you expect to have happen, and he was the first of David's grandparents to be lost. Hopefully he won't lose any more for quite some time.

The remainder of the winter was lost in the record-breaking snows, with snow days to boot. I got to travel to NYC with David in April, while Jane went to visit her mother. June marked our first family trip of a week or more in almost two years. Between family issues and work we hadn't done that since July of 2009 when we went to Cape May.

Then, we came back and things really got busy. I made the fateful decision to run for office - the story of and results from have been well-documented here and I won't rehash it all. But from early July until November, that consumed us here. I worked on campaign activities (and my day job) while Jane and David went to Cape May at the end of July. Jane did activities for me when I went away Columbus Day weekend. It was pretty much at the center of everything.

While that all happened, David's school moved for a two-year stretch as he graduated to Grade 4. My business was able to continue improving our results from the horrible 2009, and we began the process of spinning off our database and CRM efforts into a separate company (I'll still have a hand in it but not daily). I lost an employee in mid-November who was very good, and I think he had a great opportunity. But the way they forced him to leave with only the minimum notice - well, there's a certain company that makes home music systems that I won't be using or recommending. Their name starts with "S" and they have an iOS app to control their stuff. I hope he does great there, though - he's a good guy.

Outside of Washington, DC, the world I live in is a better place than it was a year ago. That helps. The year-end has been busy (I was shorthanded all week), but good for us. I worked a very solid 4 days. Monday? We got another cat. I think it'll work out.

My plan for the last day of the year is to work out in the morning, veg all I can during the day, and go out to supper early. Might be in bed before the ball drop. Got a really busy 2012 to look forward to!

So what's in the cards for 2012?

Well, I'll talk about the personal year in another day or so. This is about technology. Yeah, I know it's not thrilling, but I have a pretty good track record of predictions here - way better than most of those who call themselves pundits. Then again, maybe it's because I do this for a living. Go figure.

First - Apple will introduce an iPad 3 sometime in the February-March timeframe. Done deal. This year's model with have their "A6" processor and it'll be quad-core. Graphics will be via a 2048*1536 "Retina Display" for the iPad. It'll be the same size as the iPad 2, and get about the same battery life. RAM may go up to 1GB, but I'm not so sure about it. Storage will increase to a maximum of 128GB, but the low-end model may or may not stay at 16GB. I kind of thing they'll go to 32GB.

And the iPad 3 will still dominate the tablet ecosystem, with pundits saying Android will take over any day now.

Second - Amazon will sell the Kindle Fire well enough to keep it on the market. After a minor hardware revision mid-year (addressing things like volume buttons) it'll be clear that the Fire crushes the tablet market from below the way the iPad does in the mainstream. At least one second-tier vendor will abandon the market entirely.

Third - RIM won't finish the year as an independent company. They will either collapse and be broken up Nortel-style, or be sold as a server and software company. Their handset market will vanish. That sign has already started to appear.

Fourth - Apple will have an "iPhone 5" this year, but only if an LTE chipset of adequate power usage can be gotten. Right now I'm not sure. When the LTE iPhone does ship, it will have a form factor change, though I doubt a radical one.

If the chipset isn't there, we might see the iPhone 4S last through all of 2012.

Fifth - Android apps will start to sell better, but iOS will remain the developer platform of choice, and the sales will continue to reflect that. But some developers will be able to make a living catering to Android first, which hasn't been the case to date.

Sixth - Although I'm not really making many desktop predictions, I'll make two here: Windows 8 will ship late in the year, and be decent. It won't be more than a blip in the numbers until 2013, and won't ever make much of an impact in the tablet market. Also, Apple will have an update to the Mac Pro in 2012. That will be the swan song for the platform. Any redesign will be shrunken to a more mini tower form factor, and cheaper to manufacture. Don't expect that until 2013, either. But I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong about the Mac Pro in any way at all.

That gets us through most of the year. I didn't make any real predictions in desktop/server areas because all the action is mobile nowadays - not a lot of change will happen there, and not many new developments. Chipzilla will have a new desktop/laptop chipset platform shipping in the spring, everyone will revise their systems to use it. Linux still won't be on any desktops. Done deal.

Why I use Kerio Connect instead of MS Exchange

A week ago, my server died. I raced up to the office, grabbed a spare MacBook Pro I was about to give to my new employee (so he had to wait a little bit, oh well), and in about an hour I'd transferred the whole system over to the laptop and had it all running again. Try that with Exchange!

Then this past Sunday, armed with a rebuilt server i was back up there again and transferred it all back up. Not a message was lost.

Speaking of tech: One More Thing:

One more thing for the moment: I had a post back in June predicting the next iPhone. I missed that they would keep the RAM the same (512MB) and that they wouldn't support VoRA. other than that? Nailed it. Even said it would be probably called the iPhone 4S.

I am patting myself on the back in congratulations now.

Anatomy of a (successful) campaign

So as those of you who have followed me through any other media (Twitter, Facebook, my website, or local print/online news) know by now, the election is over and I won my race - the vote was 466-288 in my favor and I will be taking office on January second. I've gotten a lot more local attention than I really expected with the win, and I've used all the other places I post to thank my wife, Matt Veno, and all the other people who helped me. I thought here in longer form I could discuss the dynamics of the race and also why I believe it is we won. This isn't an all-purpose blueprint for local politics, but it worked here.

I think most would-be politicians wouldn't necessarily share most of this, but I'm trying hard to do things a little differently. I want to be as transparent as possible (of course I'm not going to share things told to me in confidence), and help people understand how I'll work, and why I'm voting the way I will. This, to  me, is part of that process. Also of note, though: When you are an actual in-office politician, there are legal and other reasons for being careful about what you say in print and online. I'll still be maintaining this blog, but I'll likely be posting pretty rarely and sticking to non-political subjects. Not that I write a lot of political and/or local issue stuff here, but I'll be doing even less of that and mainly sticking to things like sports and tech.

I also haven't been a major poster on Patch, but I've participated in some issue discussions as a candidate that I won't be able to do as an elected official. I haven't posted on Salemweb in about 6 years, but I won't be starting now... My Facebook page will still be a place to keep people informed, but mainly targeted to residents of the ward I'll be representing. A lot of city officials have some form or another of electronic presence, but I think I'm pretty much the first to use it so heavily. So there's going to be a period of finding a balance. Don't expect any postmortems of Council meetings here, though.

About the race itself - Councillor Ronan (my opponent) is a good person - and I actually like him, but in office he was much more conservative than I think most of the ward expected from him based on his pre-election talk two years ago. There's plenty of places online where you can look up specific policy issues over the last two years, but I believe that voting away from the ward's interests opened up an opportunity to challenge (it is what galvanized me - before this June I had no interest at all in getting into politics). Similar things happened in Ward 3, and there was also a successful challenge there.

The next factor was our campaign strategy. Our early effort was to get support from families we knew were aligned with us politically. We also tried to place as many signs early as possible. We started in early August with stickers and signs - at times it seemed like our house was full of them but over the four months of the campaign we placed about fifty signs and got almost a hundred stickers on cars. Lawn signs and stickers don't move many voters. What they do is solidify supporters psychologically (after all, they care enough to display support in public) and they also help you establish a level of credibility to the rest of the voters. Without signs you're an unknown. We had signs out over a month before our opponent, and I believe that provided a show of strength early. We also got crucial early support from Councillor (at large) Furey, who knew me well enough to expect the sort of change on the council he was hoping to see.

We also obtained the registered voter list from the city and put it into a spreadsheet for analysis and into a Filemaker database for reporting. That was roughly 3200 voters. We also bought the list of voters that came out in 2009 to the last municipal election. That list was our bible. 2009 had only about 830 voters show up. They were likeliest to show this year as well, assuming they were still living in the ward (most were). And we had a very good turnout among that group, despite not having a mayoral race on the ballot this year. So our strategy was to target the heck out of the 830, make sure I met as many of them as possible, and got exposed to them as much as we could. Then came the hard work. I didn't ignore the other 2370 voters entirely, but I didn't go out of my way to target them - they weren't likely to vote and most didn't.

I walked to almost every door of the 830, and met a good number of them in person. When they weren't home, I generally left a hand-written note on my palm card and left it in their mail slot or door. I also left cards with neighbors who were available to talk to, or displayed a sign for another citywide candidate - even if they weren't on my 830 it meant they were interested this year. We printed well over a thousand cards and there's only a handful left in my house. I finished door-to-door last Sunday, doing it from August onwards and pretty much only taking the Columbus Day holiday off to go on a fishing trip with my son.

We also sent out a mailing of a letter that former Councillor Matt Veno (who was the campaign head along with my wife) wrote along with a copy of my card. This was sent to about 500 households (the 830 - removing hard supporters of mine and my opponent's, and accounting for homes with multiple voters) on Halloween weekend. We wanted to make sure it was seen and the closer to election time, the better. That helped us move the needle.

A few days later, in the middle of the final week, we then followed up by dropping (by hand) a letter I'd written myself introducing me and asking for support. My wife and a number of our friends delivered them to the 830 over a 3-day period. We also guessed that if the Salem News provided any endorsement at all, it would be of me. So we designed a 4-up postcard that we could drop it into if that happened (in the hope it would be something we could use). When it did, we had the text pasted into the postcard by 9AM Friday, and we printed and hand-cut over 800 postcards Friday into Sunday that were delivered right up to Monday morning - again, Jane and all our friends did the delivery by hand. I did all the printing/cutting.

Besides this, we had several friends and supporters making phone calls on my behalf to their friends and neighbors. We had meet and greet events in each neighborhood of the ward over the four months - the last one was the Sunday before the election. Our initial fundraiser was in early August. That was a big success because a lot of people came who needed to know that we were credible. The biggest issue with it, though, was that the cost there was a lot higher than we'd anticipated so we only came out a little bit ahead. That put us in an early fundraising hole but we were able to keep costs down otherwise.

Finally, the electronic portion of the race mattered as well. I used my Twitter account (@joshturiel) as a tool to communicate with supporters and to help find them. I set up a personal Facebook page (I'd avoided it until this year - my wife is the big Facebook user in the family) and then used it to create a campaign page. That proved to be an effective way to help get even information, photos, and even video out to people in the ward and around Salem. Lastly, I also set up an email list of all the people who gave me their addresses - around 50 so far. We sent out a few email list updates during the campaign and it helped with support.

I met people during the campaign that I hadn't known before at all, and some that I only had known online. It was really one of the most rewarding experiences I'd ever had, and I surprised myself by enjoying the in-person aspect of it so much. Election Day was nerve-wracking even though we were fairly confident by then. The video of me on Patch that night? Yep, I was exhausted. Now the hard part begins.

It's a heck of a challenge to serve in elected office. Even the people I have political issues with are people I respect for taking on the responsibility. Now I get a turn at it, and I hope I can do my city and my ward proud.

Education of a candidate - Final Week

As I write this blog entry, there's exactly one week remaining in the campaign. Election Day is on November 8th. We've survived another Halloween season here in Salem, the police logs are still being tabulated but as far as crowds go, the nor'easter on Saturday night combined with a non-weekend Halloween to lower crowds a little on the final weekend. Still busy, but not as insane as the last few years have been. Not as good for the tourist-orinted businesses but better for a lot of the residents.

David's soccer team, by the way, is 5-1-1 going into the final week of the season. They had a scoreless tie as the storm got started this Saturday.

In campaign news, the buzz I'm getting back from people is good. We wound up having to print more signs and palm cards. I made some round button-sized stickers that people have been wearing around town - a ton of kids and parents wore them during the Halloween parade earlier in October. That was pretty cool. I've gotten out to do door-to-door campaigning at least 1-2 times per week, including a stint yesterday. We also did campaigning during trick-or-treating time last night. By about 9 when we finally shut the lights out, it was only our house and my opponent's that were still handing out candy. Kind of a perverse Halloween arms race.

During the past month plus, I've had my own debate (in September - still available at SATV's website), been to the main At-Large debate, traveled to Hull on the wind turbine fact-finding trip, met with at least 400 people between events and door knocking, and held 3 meet & greet events. Running for office may be more work than serving in office!

More seriously, I've enjoyed it a lot more than I ever thought I would have. I'm not the sort of person who normally revels in going out and mingling with rooms full of people, or knocking on the door of a stranger. The first few times are hard. Then it gets easier - and after a few more times you start enjoying the interaction. I've met people I normally never would have known existed, and it's turned out to be one of the highlights.

It's also awesome and a little scary the way people put their hopes in you. There's a lot of responsibility involved in any elected office, and you realize it pretty quickly. On the local level I never thought it was as big a deal as it was for national-level candidates. Then I became a candidate and saw it for myself. You lose your jadedness pretty quickly.

So we've still got some more activities to go in this final week, I've got a busy weekend of door knocking ahead of me (and a pair of soccer games - indoor season starts Saturday night!), and a lot of last-minute work. It'll likely be a close election in the end, and I've got to motivate people this week to show up on Tuesday.

See you all online in a week!

The value of preparation

I've been running the Mac OS 10.7 Lion since release as my main OS. And I've been working with all the ensuing developer betas as well. I adopted the encrypted file system early in production, but when I migrated to a bigger SSD a few weeks ago I had to disable that to efficiently migrate over.

Well, yesterday I tried to re-enable it. Didn't go so well. The encryption process failed and left me with a not-quite-usable hard drive, and Disk Utility could have nothing to do with it. Were I a client of mine, I might well be out of luck at that point. But because I actually do the things I tell clients they should do, I had options. Here's how I was prepared for it, and what I did to fix it:

- First, I had a second SSD (a small one) installed in my laptop. I took out the Superdrive to install it last winter. On that SSD I keep a full install of the latest OS, in vanilla form. I also keep copies of Carbon Copy Cloner and Drive Genius on it. The main use for the drive is archiving installer files, though, and storing all my Parallels VMs.

- I also had a fairly current Time Machine backup from Friday if needed. That would have shut me out on some recent photo updates, though, so it wasn't my best option.

- I use Backblaze for offsite backup, and that was current if I needed it (photo recovery)

- And finally all my recent document changes were mirrored on Dropbox.

So at that point I had a plan to go forward as needed. First, I rebooted to Lion's Recovery Partition and tried to fix from there. No luck. Next step was to reboot from the second drive (at home, you could use a 16GB or 32GB flash stick much the same way as I use my SSD, but it'd be slower), and try Drive Genius. I couldn't fix the drive, but I could see it and mount it (along with the Finder warnings that it's not fixable, back up and erase ASAP). Now I was out of the weeds. I was out of the house (at a meeting) when this started happening, so I put the Mac to sleep and went home.

Once I put the Mac back on the desk at home, I connected my FW800 drive that I use for Time Machine backups. It's a 2TB drive, with plenty of space for additional backups. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from the mounted drive to the external (this is still booted from my secondary SSD, by the way). Then I erased the drive, and re-cloned back to the now fixed volume.

After that was completed (took about 2 hours each way for the 260GB of data - I did the initial clone right when I got home and started the clone back before bed), I verified that the drive would now boot and changed the startup disk back to it.

Sure enough, it worked. Back to normal. I had to re-connect Dropbox and also change Backblaze's settings to accommodate the new volume ID, but that's it. Now that this was done, I went and updated my Time Machine backup to be 100% current. Usually I do it about twice per week, strictly manual.

Had the cloning effort failed (If I couldn't get the disk to mount), I simply would have restored from my Time Machine backup from last Friday, then remirrored Dropbox and restored my iPhoto pictures from Backblaze. That simply would have been more complicated but I could have done it fine.

The lesson for all of you: Even when you are a tech professional like me, things go wrong. When they do, don't panic, have a plan, have fallback methods ready just in case, and always make sure you have backup alternatives that you are using.

Under a month of campaigning to go!

iPhone 4S - the "S" is for Steady as She Goes

So once again, Apple's done an incremental update instead of a radical one. Millions of dollars have been lost - mainly by case makers who got faked out on the design. Why did Apple just release an incremental upgrade to last year's iPhone? Well, that depends on your perspective:

• First of all, it's not really incremental. The outer shell is basically identical. That's it. Oh yeah, the screen as well. Battery life is a little better, performance matches that of the iPad 2 (2+ tines the speed of the iPhone 4), it's got a new radio and improved antenna system (the death of "you're holding it wrong") the imaging system is all new and way better, and I'll give good odds that when it's torn down you'll find more than 512MB of RAM in it. This is a far bigger update than the update from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 3GS was.
• That said, the iPhone 4 has been an enormous success, and is still pretty much a state-of-the-art form factor. And it's still the best-selling smartphone on Earth. Why mess with it too much?
• The biggest thing in the iPhone 4S is Siri. Plain and simple. Between Siri and the Nuance dictation system that has been built into iOS 5, the iPhone 4S has the muscle to handle voice processing and the integration only Apple can really do (as the only company besides RIM that builds the phone and the OS both). Siri is going to be huge. It's Jetsons stuff.

There will, of course, be an iPhone 5 at some point. And it'll likely have a redesign to go with it. But that will come when LTE chipsets work well enough (and carrier deployments are far enough along) to justify putting them into a mainstream phone. There isn't a company right now betting everything on an LTE phone. It's not mature enough.

In the end, Apple doesn't sell you speeds and feeds. They don't say a lot about RAM or processors or gigahertz. They say as little as possible about the guts of their devices. What Apple focuses on is the experience, the underlying glue that ties a computer to the user. And it's not a language that analysts speak well - which is why the iPhone 4S is so underwhelming to them.

The lines at every Apple Store next Friday will say otherwise. Consumers get it.