Matthew Zagaja

The New York State Senate has been doing a lot to increase engagement with its citizens. The Director of Technology Innovation Noel Hidaldo recently gave a presentation (below) at the IgniteNYC event. Some of the stuff is procedural such as assigning their content a Creative Commons license. Other he touches on are much more substantive such as holding a digital town hall. Connecticut should start thinking about adopting some of these ideas.

Over the summer I was fortunate enough to get to work for Dan Malloy's exploratory committee. Today I got to see him announce his candidacy in Hartford. Dan's pitch is simple and compelling: he successfully ran Stamford and therefore has the experience needed to be successful in running Connecticut.

Today I got the 4GB of RAM I ordered to upgrade my 13" MacBook Pro. Installing the upgrade was quick and painless procedure. However after I successfully installed the RAM the backlight on my keyboard stopped functioning. I called up AppleCare support and after a few prompts I was connected to Megan. The first surprise was that Megan did not seem to be from a foreign country. Second was the manner in which she counseled me through my new problem. She was pleasant and after informing me I was out of phone support she advised me of all my options.

Today I added a Creative Commons license to this blog. While you might not be familiar with Creative Commons if you've used a website such as flickr to host your images you may have already have encountered and even used it. The license I chose gives permission to freely use the content as long as proper attribution is made. There may be little to take and remix now but maybe in the coming year I will write an interesting post you want to build on or finally learn how to make the next viral video. If you are interested in more information just check out the Creative Commons website or click "read more" to see a video from Prof. Lawrence Lessig explaining the importance of Creative Commons.

I know I've neglected this blog quite a bit lately. I pulled a new theme for it from the Drupal theme gallery which I believe looks a bit cleaner than the previous one. I also cleaned up the spam. I hope to update this blog a little more frequently over the coming year. If you have suggestions on issues to write about or for a better theme please feel free to let me know.

Imagine it is Election Day. You wake up, turn on your TV, and notice that every ad actually is a campaign commercial. You open up your bills. Inside is a candidate leaflet. Your credit card bill strongly suggests that you vote against your senator because he’s making your interest rates go up. On TV pharmaceutical companies start peddling politicians instead of pills. It may seem strange today but after the Supreme Court’s ruling, if Congress doesn’t act, it could become reality.