Comments by Bill Serra

Coastside firefighters’ pay averaged $155,000 per year in 2007

It's easy to be generous with other people's money. The link below discusses how the extravagant benefits accrued by public employees will force Vallejo to declare bankruptcy. http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=money&vid=4fb9c173-289a-4b9a-aa28-7383856a3d77

Letter: I sent this to Comcast today

Does anyone know how many Internet customers Comcast has on the coastside? If there were enough interest, perhaps we could create our own coastal co-op broadband wireless network. The technical difficulties are numerous and some of them beyond my understanding of RF, packet routing and network topology. But those issues can be solved easily. The hard part would be financing the project and maintaining the network to provide a better service than Comcast.

Coastside election results

This has nothing to do with the voting machines user interface but it has to do with the election process. The collection and counting of “absentee votes” (called votes by mail in the current nomenclature) is long and tedious. A simple way to reduce the number of votes by mail is to allow people to vote over the Internet very much like shareholders vote the directors proposals for the annual shareholder meetings. Yes, there are identity, checks & balances, and security issues that would have…

Coastside election results

I was a poll worker in Montara. We could talk for hours about the voting machines but for the sake of brevity I will focus on the selection wheel and the user experience. 124 people used the voting machines in my precinct. Those who gave us feedback provided varying degrees of satisfaction. Most of them told us that they tried to operate the voting machine by touching the screen, as they would have done at the airport or at a modern ATM. We had to remind every voter that the voting machine didn’t…