A New Job

Aloha from the Ohana! Let me translate that into mainland speak. Hello, from my new work family: Salesforce. I now work at Salesforce as a Senior Solution Engineer. Obviously going from working in the Microsoft space to Salesforce is a major change, but I see it as a healthy change and a hearty challenge.

Because I’m heads down learning both the product and the company, the frequency of posts here might come to a trickle for the time being – especially the FOIA posts. I have a small queue of other posts, but the FOIA ones require a fair amount of time to analyze and write about. Also, I switched hosting providers recently, so some links in old posts may be broken. If you find one, contact me and I’ll fix it.

Best and Mahalo,

Erik

The Public Does Not Like Metra’s Proposed BNSF Schedule

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Years in the making, Metra is about to implement positive train control (PTC) and its first installation will be on its busiest line – the BNSF. Doing so will require changes to the train schedule. A public records request for the comments reveals that the train riders of the BNSF are generally not happy about the proposed changes.

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Governor Rauner, SPJ’s Black Hole Awards, and Me

As I was reading Edgar County Watchdogs today, I came across an article that mentioned Illinois Governor Rauner being nominated for a“Black Hole Award.” There in the body of the article is my name and nomination for the Office of the Governor submitted to the Society of Professional Journalists. Awesome!

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Is the slogan for the movie a metaphor for FOIA requests?

In honor of this nomination, here are the Office of the Governor’s FOIA logs from 2014-2017 that I originally sought and prompted my submission to SPJ’s Black Hole Awards.

I was only able to obtain these through an appeal to the Illinois Attorney General. The process took about three months from request to records produced. Three months isn’t as bad as some horror stories I’ve heard, but I believe the only reason I have the records now is because of my appeal. I encourage any readers out there to do the same: don’t hesitate – appeal.