Skip to main content
And Davis still leads in the polls?!?!?!?



The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Oracle-pact scandal grows



Gov. Gray Davis' director of e-government personally accepted a $25,000 political contribution from a lobbyist for the Oracle Corp. last year, shortly after the state signed a controversial long-term software contract with the company, The Bee learned Thursday.



E-mail communications from the administration obtained Thursday, meanwhile, provide the strongest indication yet that Davis may have known about the contract after all. Davis aides have maintained the governor himself knew nothing about the contribution or the contract at the time.



As the scandal gripping the Davis administration's ill-fated deal with Oracle continued to escalate Thursday, California Highway Patrol officers descended on the state's technology offices to prevent document shredding, while Oracle officials and Davis aides said they were moving to rescind the deal.Ah, California politics....



Second story is Offices raided to prevent any shredding:



State law enforcement officials raided the offices of the California Department of Information Technology on Thursday to prevent the destruction of documents related to the state's botched software contract with Oracle Corp.



California Highway Patrol officers and state Department of Justice officials descended on the downtown offices shortly after noon, where they supervised the collection of office paper shredders, removed a huge garbage bin from the back alley, interviewed employees and sequestered two computer hard drives for inspection.
Not that Davis had much use for DOIT anyway. He created his own technology counsel, made his own technology dictates, etc. DOIT, or him, is more in the way than an asset.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Not the Hero We Deserve, But the Hero We Need

The Dark Knight is the best film I’ve seen in years. Not just the best “superhero” film, but the best film of any type. It’s not perfect, not quite a masterpiece, but it’s flaws are, to me, tiny and overwhelmed by the time the film ends. While relatively bloodless, it is consistently brutal, not just in what it depicts but in the themes that drive it. TDK is a film for adults, please leave the kids at home. Let’s deal with those “flaws” first, the largest being the character Rachel Dawes . In Batman Begins , I blamed Katie Holmes . Her acting was weak, to say the least, which is regrettable in that who she is and what she says and does are important to the film. Critics agreed and either for that or other reasons, Katie was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal , who is a better actress. Yet here she’s weak, real weak. Maybe it’s the character, not the actress, which is frustrating because Rachel is a pivotal character. The film,...

DVD: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Awful. The film is an environmentalist wacko wet dream. No one else could like this thing. I’m trying to think of something positive and all I can come up with is how positively awful it is. The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a science fiction masterpiece. In it, Klaatu comes to Earth with a simple message: Do what you want among yourselves and on your planet. But if you attempt to export your violent way to the stars, Gort and his friends will hit you with so many lefts you’ll beg for a right. (Gort being the cosmic version of Chuck Norris, you see.) The ultimate warning was that we needed to change our violent ways if we expected to be accepted among the stars. In this remake, the aliens are environmental busy-bodies who have bought into the entire notion that we puny little humans are capable of destroying the planet. Therefore, we must be eliminated so that the planet, for God knows what reason, can try again. To count the ways in which this film makes no sense ...

I (Briefly) Try a Mac

 I Bought a Mac. My first computer was an Atari 800, fully loaded with 48k of RAM. And I mean the original, beige model, not its low-slung, fancy successor. My friend went for an Apple IIe, which cost a relative fortune. Eventually, I’d step up to an Atari 1040ST, while he’d get a IIgs. And even more eventually, we both ended up with IBM PC compatibles. MSDOS was my friend, Unix an ally. It was with great reluctance that I transition from a command-line interface (CLI) to a Graphic User Interface (GUI), always on a PC platform and never a Mac. I never bought into the hype and never experienced all the horrid things that allegedly befell anyone using a PC. For me, they just worked. Yet here I am, these many decades later, typing this on a brand-new MacBook Air M4. How things change... Initially, there was little regret but a mounting list of frustrations. Adjusting to the keyboard isn’t too hard, it’s just a matter of experimentation. Learning how to scale the display wasn’t awful, ...