Tracking my reps with RSS

GovTrack.us provides RSS feeds of your house and senate representatives. All told you can track People, Subjects and Bills. They also have a General tab that lets you mark other events for tracking that don’t fit under the other three headings. GovTrack also uses the Technorati API to tell you what bloggers are saying about bills as they snake through Congress.

I realize that all this information has been out there before but it’s spread out across so many resources. I’ve just setup a feed for my reps.

I (heart) (Apple)

Okay, all my non-Mac owning friends you have no excuses. The new Mac Mini starts at $499 and you can use your old Windows monitor, keyboard and mouse on them. Oh and quit yer bitchin’ ‘bout how much Word sucks and start using Pages. Apple’s forward thinking is a stark contrast to the siege mentality at Microsoft that Bill Gates alluded to by declaring Internet users are communists.

Peculiar fainting problem

As a friend told me about his back surgery over sushi last night I almost passed out. I got extremely light-headed, blurred vision, pale, and weak. I retreated to the bathroom trying my best not to fall over on the other patrons. Once I got to the bathroom I was extremely pleased to see the stall was open. However, my vision was too blurred at this point for me to see the lock and I had to feel it shut. I collapsed on the toilet and tried to clear my mind. Soon I started to feel better and began sweating profusely.

Rushing for Jesus

He said some Christians found his study of Hebrew objectionable and his searching attitude heretical. Some ministers, he said, warned other Christians to stay away from him. From a Salon piece on Reggie White’s uses of the NFL to promote Christianity. Thoughtful piece on how sports can be used to productize Christianity into soundbites and sometimes the deeper meaning is lost.

Deserts past and future

Excerpts from journal entries while in the Sahara:

2-19-04 (large tent of nomad family) 4:21pm …Currently I’m excited by the sand storm raging outside. It built up slowly at first and then all at once it kicked off. I keep having to wipe sand off these pages. I’m in a nice, large, camel fur tent. It keeps the wind out but the not sand. Too much sand, write later. 2-20-04 (large tent in nomad house) 8:41am …The sand storm was “very strong” according to Ahmed. The wind was hard and fast by any standard I know. Sand coated everything. It was in our food, our clothes and the crevices of our skin. When I woke up I had to wipe a layer off my eyes and face. I had many dreams through the night.

The big and small of the desert

As my guide, Ahmed, and I trekked through the Sahara along the Algerian border I was really taken in by the beauty. I love the clean, mathematical lines that trail into noise where animals have tread on them. The wind, rain and gravity effect the sand in very specific ways. The math behind them is so enormous that we have problems modeling their behavior with supercomputers, and yet you can see that mathematical precision in the sand. No matter how elegant those macro forces are the animals come plodding through leaving a noisy wake in the sand.

Amazon's a red company?

Buy Blue and save the world. Buyblue.org keeps track of where corporate money goes in politics. I never would have guessed 92% of Yahoo goes to Red politicos. [via Leia]

NMH enters Plastic hall of fame

Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies while you and your mother were a- sleep in the trailer park thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadium the music and medicine you needed for comfort Neutral Milk Hotel welcome to the Plastic Classic Album hall of fame.

The first rule of splitting up. Stay split up.

So things with DF reached a point some months ago where I realized that I’m just never going to have the relationship with her that I wanted and it was an impediment to building other relationships.

It had been pushed in different directions. At times close and intimate, and at other times light friendly contact. None of them worked out quite right despite some amazing peaks. This is something that involved years of investigation. Tired of the anger, and heartache I said “That’s it. No more communication.” DF was not pleased. Neither was I but I saw no other way.

The Purple House

Moved into the new place and took pictures.