Dan Dunn

Last night the Finance Committee met for the first time this year. You can see a few photos from the meeting on Tabblo. The town has been working on the fiscal ’08 budget for months, but FinComm doesn’t really start until January. Over the next few weeks the FinComm subcommittees will meet with the relevant […]

Monday Feb 5 at 7:30 PM, 2nd Floor of Public Safety Building. Tentative agenda: Warrant article review.

….. I worked from home today while Verizon installed Fios service into the house. Did we really need to upgrade our internet service? Of course not. But since we could, of course we had to! I actually think we’ll save money in the deal, too. On the left you see what’s in our basement now. […]

I was distressed by today’s Globe article about Governor Patrick offering legislative leadership pay raises in exchange for power over existing quasi-governmental agencies. It’s a bad idea. I question whether or not he understands the effects of what he’s doing, and not necessarily for the obvious reasons. According to the article, Patrick is offering raises […]

Massachusetts is a one-party state. The effects of that are hard to catalog and harder to prove. But this week’s Globe story about the cascading effect of Kerry’s decision to stay in the Senate adds an interesting item to the list. Read the quotes from the story. Philip W. Johnston , chairman of the Massachusetts […]

The Globe has another story about the woman who’s never seen a deadline that she can’t miss. Senator Dianne Wilkerson’s legislative agenda is on hold because she failed to file her proposed bills with the clerk on time. If I was one of her constituents, I’d be ticked – but that would be old news. […]

The web provides such powerful ways to display data, and I’m delighted when people take advantage of this.  It looks like this one came out almost a year ago, but it’s new to me – and maybe new to you. Gapminder let’s you look at various statistics about countries.  It’s incredibly rich.  Press play and […]

On Thursday the Arlington Information Technology Advisory Committee reached a significant milestone. We’ve been working for more than a year on a “technology needs assessment.” We interviewed department heads, town employees, and citizens, wrote reports, collated data, and synthesized common themes. Without claiming that it’s finished, we reached a point where we could share the […]

Most of you know that I enjoy experiencing the extremes of weather – particularly when those are the winter extremes. I’ve always been fascinated by Mt. Washington in particular. I remember being a freshman in 1990 and finding that I could get up-to-the-hour weather updates from the mountain, and configured my Athena account to tell […]

This is only funny if you know what Second Life is.