The Internet is Helping Us in Natural Disasters, But Not Enough

I just published a new post on the Silicon Valley Moms Blog about what's now being called the "Summit Fire" in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Watsonville. As a kid who grew-up in tornado country, I was completely clueless about wildfires until yesterday. Now I've been studying everything available online to track the blaze because it's just a few miles from my sister's dream home, her animals, and one of the most beautiful pieces of property I've ever seen in my life. I don't know if I'm at liberty to describe it, but even if I did, still, it's one of those places where you have to see it to believe it.

In any case, what I learned over the past 24 hours is that although we have 2700 firefighters on the scene to battle these fires, we only get semi-accurate updates about once a day about where the fires really are. People are in their homes waiting for calls or knocks on the door to evacuate. The neighbors who may or may not have phones or power communicate to the best of their ability, but they're still not certain how far away it is. They see the smoke or possibly the flames, but it's difficult to discern the distance. I found one live blog site where there was some minimal conversation via locals about what was going on to help sift through the mystery, but that was it.

So what I want to know is where do we go from here? What is the future of emergency response online? It has to be better than a few news sites and links. I'm not saying what we have now isn't good. I'm happy we have the resources we do. But I know from my technology background that we can do better. We've put together phenomenal outreach programs and online activism to raise money and repair devastated areas. Why not create a place where communities can create ad-hoc emergency response sites as they arise? It's possible something like this already exists, but not enough of us know about it.

What I found was one site for firefighters that said how to listen on short range scanners, some articles on the local newspaper site, a few maps that are only updated daily, the state fire site with data updated periodically (like every day or half a day), one satellite image of the fire, brief TV and radio coverage, a state road closures page, one live blog on the local news station web site where people exchanged notes, and a totally overloaded fire detection map at noaa.gov that nobody can use because everybody's trying to get to it. And when watching the news and hearing from locals, it seems that the firefighters and police are keeping things barricaded for safety and not allowing any information transferral during the process.

Fires are dangerous, but if people can use personal weather stations and webcams like linked on the Weather Underground, why not have a system that applies locals as information centers online and includes what's coming across the waves from emergency support services? Anyone out there have an idea of how to do this?

Announcing Playborhood - A Site for Developing Neighborhood Communities Surrounding Play

I'm participating in a new project - Playborhood.com - just launched within the hour, where our goal is to reach out to people who seek better play-based communities and neighborhoods for their children. So many families now have structured play all the time and neighborhoods where they don't feel safe letting their kids just go out and play, we're lucky to find the rare place where they can (I did - I feel lucky anyway). So Playborhood aims to become a great community resource where parents can go to find the right neighborhood for them and engage others in that neighborhood in the process of creating a safe, inviting Playborhood. Please check out the site and send us feedback.

Here are two articles on the Playborhood site about why this issue is important: "Mike's Manifesto" and "What Kids Want Most In a House is Not in the House". Playborhood.com is already full of great resources for parents who want to be proactive and help their children grow up with the same opportunities for free play outside as we had when we were young.

Help Save Berkeley Landmark Ice Rink!

If you're a figure skating fan, could you picture figure skating history without Kristi Yamaguchi, Brian Boitano, Rudy Galindo, and even Sonja Henie? Of course not, that's absurd! Well, the Berkeley Iceland (in Berkeley, CA) was home to all of these skaters at one time or another - some only on occasion but it has been around for 65 years. It's now closed - land to be sold to the highest bidder and demolished for whatever purposes they choose.

Berkeley Iceland is one of the largest, most beautiful rinks I've ever seen. Tucked in a hidden pocket close to campus, the rink spans Olympic size 200'x100' and includes grand stands for viewing hockey games and performances. The family who own it ran into financial troubles (rinks are expensive to maintain) after having some cooling equipment issues. So now a nonprofit group has banned together to Save Berkeley Iceland. Let's hope they can be as successful as saving Kepler's Bookstore here in Menlo Park has been so far.

Yes, there are rinks in Oakland, San Francisco and Dublin now that aren't too far away for skaters, but none of them is quite like this one. It truly is a historical building. This Thursday, a group meets in the City of Berkeley to determine whether the building can become an official landmark. Whether that has much bearing on its fate remains to be seen, but if you love figure skating, please consider helping Save Berkeley Iceland turn it into an environmentally sustainable rink that will last another 65+ years.

Missing Cable Coop

I just moved, so I apologize for the lack of posts this week but it's been crazy. (See my "Stuck in Contractor Hell" post on the Silicon Valley Moms Blog from a couple weeks ago.)

In any case, we're finally in the house and I am using CAT5 in the wall that works! Cable modem's hooked-up and running. I downloaded a 57MB file in 30 seconds yesterday. Whooee! But the process of getting Comcast here and getting everything working left a little to be desired... I miss the days of the Palo Alto Cable Coop. Not that I could get their service in Menlo Park anyway but still, it was nice to have a local provider. We haven't hooked-up Tivo yet; we'll see how that goes. I have to be able to get through the boxes to the jack first.

Macs Running the Home of the Future Now and the IRIX File System

MacWorld unveiled a "home automation tool" called Indigo. Supposedly it lets you do things like turn on your lights with your cell phone and change your sprinkler schedule from your laptop in bed. The epitomy of laziness and complete convenience. I read about it on the O'Reilly Network. Adam Goldstein profiled Indigo and its uber sci-fi cache of stunts like determining how to turn on the coffee pot 5 minutes before sunrise. For parents, it has the ability to turn off things like fans and heaters in the kids' rooms without going in and waking them up. Pretty spiffy.

I couldn't get over the name Indigo, however, because I knew it had been used before... then I remembered there was an SGI Indigo. Wikipedia says it first came out in 1990 (I feel old). It ran IRIX and NetBSD. It had a 32-bit MIPS R3000A RISC processor. Ooh, ahh. I'm dripping with nostalgia, recalling the first time I saw one of these babies in a dorm room at Iowa State University. It had this really cool 3D file system demo that I'll never forget, because every time I see the movie, "Hackers", it jogs my memory. In the film, they have a pathetic GUI for their security system at this big evil company where they observe files being attacked from different ports. It's completely hokey but I'd be willing to bet the special effects team got the idea from the much smoother IRIX. I digress...

Did tech suddenly run out of words? All of the sudden, Steve Jobs declared that it's open season on usage of the same word twice to describe different technical products? iPhone and Indigo were this week. What's next week?

SOMA Twins To Tower Over San Francisco

Paul Boutin reported Friday that two buildings to meet the #3 in height in the US were proposed to the City of San Francisco. The Sears Tower and Empire State building would be the two taller structures. It's actually 5 buildings in total - "... two 1,200-foot towers, two 900-foot structures and a 600-foot companion."

Here's the Chronicle article about it. According to SFGate, the two towers will be 350 ft. taller than the Transamerica building. They are to be built at the corner of First and Mission. From my real estate research in the area, that's about as seismically stable as you can get in San Francisco - right at the base of Rincon Hill - solid rock as opposed to the sandfill you find a few blocks away in South Beach.

New House

We'll be moving sometime in the next month to the Allied Arts area of Menlo Park, for Bay Area and more specifically Peninsula locals who know neighborhoods. We found a great house that suits our needs well and are looking forward to being there. But that's why I haven't blogged in the past week much - we closed on the house and I've been in meetings nonstop with contractors on top of the usual holiday-related chaos. I look forward to a little bit of a lull as Christmas approaches. I'll write more soon.

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