Contacting Congress

Let's say Alan, a regular citizen with no income (at least, that's who I was a few months ago) has a website. Let's say I'm agitated about some issue of national concern, and I want to get my readers to contact their Congresscritter. Let's say those readers don't even know who they elected. How do they do it? That person is missing two crucial pieces of information:

• Who the Senator or Representative is, and
• how to contact that person.

Shouldn't the information of which parts of the country are represented by be information anyone can use to promote democratic engatement?

Okay, so the Senator name is easy - those are two per state, easy to look up. And f you look at the House of Representatives website, they let you put in your ZIP code and tell you who represents you. If house.gov needs more information, it will ask.

But that only tells you who, not how. Different Congress-people want to be contacted in different ways - phone, web form, or email. It would be nice to have a publicly-available database of that. But who will do the hard work to maintain it? And if it's a web form, then those are different on a per-representatve basis. And when Bob uses Alan's website to contact his member of Congress, Alan would prefer to that Bob always see Alan's page templates, advice for what to put in the fields, and so on. So this information should be not only available, it should be machine-usable.

A proposal

So here's a proposal for how to maintain this information:

First of all, a technical note: All the data extraction described below can either be done by a central server that is asked every time someone wants to know, or client-side code that runs on Bob's computer/browser that does the extraction. The advantage of the latter is that it's much harder to block as well as more impressive in the server logs at house.gov.

Who's my Rep or Senator?

It is always going to be easy (in a technical sense) to determine which field on house.gov is the ZIP code entry field. (If Bob doesn't know his ZIP, you can just look it up with e.g. the USPS website.) The responses will be easy to parse, too; just see, of the results returned, which ones actually are a known possible choice according to e.g. Wikipedia.

How do I contact him/her?

All Senators and Representatives do provide web forms. In general they have a common set of fields, and then some have more advanced ones. The central component is just listing which form fields are required; Bob's computer/web browser can just dynamically create a form that matches, all within the look of Bob's site.

If you want to store the results for performance reasons, you don't have to worry about storing it for every possible location or representative. Just cache it once a client requests for about a day, I'd say.

What about reliability?

What to do if the House of Representatives website (or its form handling) is not online at the moment? Recall there are two ways to architect the form submission: Either Bob's computer could directly submit to the form on his representative's web site, or he could submit to a central computer that would do all the submissions. The advantage of the latter is that the central computer can enqueue form submissions that were problematic just like mail servers queue email.

In fact, the same strategy could be used for the form itself! Imagine that Bob wants to submit to his rep's web form but house.gov is unavailable. If the central server doesn't have the form cached, then at least

Why go through all this trouble?

Well, as a public service. It would be nice if anyone could run their own Action Alert site without having to pay or otherwise submit to the will of third parties.

Exactly how much trouble is it?

As I've described it, the whole system is automated. Optionally, a human can call representatives and see how they like to be contacted. If each conversation takes about five minutes, and there are fewer than 600 Senators and Representatives, it takes only 3,000 minutes or 50 man-hours tops to contact everyone and ask their preferred means of contact. This can be done in one shot, or it could be done by volunteers spread across the country.

Now, it would be really interesting to apply this on a state level. Cheap and widely-used action alerts to state senators would make for much more interest from state legislatures in what their constituents think....

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Mon, 27 Aug 2007

Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero suggests keeping my INBOX to having zero items in it. Recently I received an email that was informative rather than had information I needed to act on, and it struck me: Why do I use my INBOX as an archive?

So I'm going to try this idea out. (I first heard of it while surfing Planet Debian.) I've been using IMAP labels in (al)pine in a similar fashion to the way Merlin Mann suggests using email, but the big difference is that when an email is dealt with, I don't make it visually go away. So sometimes I dig through INBOX to see what I forgot to deal with.

I actually found the Inbox Zero web site very hard to use. Here are the lessons I've extracted so far:

INBOX is a place emails go before you act on them

The available action space is:

• delete (Okay, I'm not going to do that)
• archive (>90% of my mail is informative rather than actionable)
• defer (save to reply-to-me for later sprints)
• generate an action from it (save to act-on-me for later sprints)
• reply right now (if it'll take <2 minutes)

Disable auto-check

"Are you checking the email, Yakov, or is it checking you?"

This means both disabling my instinct to auto-check as well as the technology that auto-checks every minute. Every 30m or 60m is okay. I'm not quite sure what to do about the system monitoring alerts, though.

Do email in dashes

Defragment the day; see the Yakov link above.

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THIS LICENCE MAY CONTAINS TRACES OF NUT.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2000/12/msg00058.html (via Christph Berg via Planet Debian.)

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Backporting with apt-src

Let's say you run Ubuntu but want the freshest package of something from Debian Unstable. Or you run Debian Stable and you want some crazy multimedia package that only Ubuntu packages.

For many packages, it is pretty easy to "backport" them between distributions or between releases. Let's say you run Ubuntu or Debian stable and you want the latest version of my alpine package. Here's what you do:

Step 1: Make sure you have an appropriate deb-src line

Backporting is the process of taking source packages and compiling them on your Debian(-like) system. The easiest way to find Debian "source packages" is the same way you find Debian "binary packages": apt-get and its configuration.

Make sure you have this line in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main

Step 2: apt-get update

Step 3: install "apt-src"

Just do 'sudo aptitude install apt-src'. apt-src is a helper program that makes compiling source packages easy. It's not necessary, but it prevents you from having to type too many commands.

Step 4: apt-src -bi install $package

If you wanted to install 'alpine', just do:

apt-src -bi install alpine

The "b" stands for "build", the "i" stands for "install the resulting package", and the word "install" means "download the source for alpine as found in a Debian source line from sources.list". apt-src will "install" the source into the current directory, make sure you have all the required packages to build the package (a process called "satisfying the build dependencies"), build it, and install the resulting .debs.

Step 5: Run the new program

You should be done now!

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Sat, 25 Aug 2007

Go go gadget hyperlink.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/12/copy-editor

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Today

This is like a new year's resolution: Starting today, I'll chronicle how much money of my money I give to oil companies, monpolists in the entertainment industry, and other groups whose activities I think are bad for humans. I'll also tally the money I give to people doing work that I think is good that hopefully offsets that.

See the note about it for details. In the future, hopefully some smart application will put a tally of these stats on the right side.

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Money meets mouth

Mark Pilgrim wrote a lot a year or so ago about his switching from Mac OS X to GNU/Linux. One small bit says:

if I bought a new Mac, I would be subsidizing the development of an operating system that contains code whose sole purpose is to lock me into a specific hardware platform. I realize that most people don’t look at it that way, but there it is.

This is as good a start as any to the MMM section of asheesh.org. I currently have a full-time job, and in this world, when you fund something, you are voting with your dollars for that thing's continued existence. That's as true for Apple's lock-in technology as it is for AT&T's illegal wiretapping program.

I claim to think that consumer freedom is important, that software freedoms are important, and that the environment is worth saving rather than trashing. In that case, if I'm ethical or at least not a hypocrite, I should put my money where my mouth is.

I read a few years ago about some remarks by some guy at some open source software conference. A young-looking dude wearing a suit and a weird expression and holding his arm asked:

How many people have given to EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service? See? Four. How many people have given more money to EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side?

(For context, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit whose sole focus is legal and lobbying action to protect digital rights.)

For years, I had been thinking in terms of this challenge, but I knew I didn't have the kind of income and spending money where my actions would be substantial. In fact, I was in a tough spot like lots of people with very litle money: You have needs, and then wants, then somewhere hazy after that there's a planet to think of.

Well, now I'm a rich man - I have a job that pays me thousands of dollars every year. Those thousands of dollars get to go somewhere, and I get to pick. (Later on I would learn that this guy Lessig who raised this issue was an interesting guy in other ways.)

When you vote with your dollars that a movie industry that sues its customers should continue existing, or when you vote with your dollars to Microsoft that their illegal tactics are okay, your dollars will turn around and be used (quite literally) to oppress others. I say, not in my name.

As Mark Pilgrim noted: "[M]ost people don’t look at it that way, but there it is." I'm creating this section to make sure there's a record in public that I started down this path so, if I ever want to abandon it, I can see how far I've come.

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Fri, 24 Aug 2007

Using an incorrect tag is not the solution

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/qtag

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Hydrocodone

I just read Hydrocodone Abuse on Rise in Appalachia. Some selections:

Dotson has been off drugs since a religious experience in 2001.

Maybe God is just a chemical fiction.

"When I started in this field, the primary client was involved with alcohol," says David Bailey, a community resource specialist with the West Virginia Prevention Resource Center. "I wish it were still alcohol."

Dr. Peter Cohen, medical director of the Maryland Alcohol and Drug Abuse Administration. . . pointed out that while hydrocodone abuse has grown slightly in Maryland since 2002, it is still far less commonly abused than street drugs like heroin.

"You've got three choices," [Dotson] said. "You either die, go to prison or get saved. Mostly, people around here are dying."

Those quotes speak for themselves.

The most commonly prescribed product combines hydrocodone and acetaminophen, which is marketed under brand names like Vicodin and Lortab.

All that Vicodin-selling spam is suddenly so much sadder now.

The DEA is considering moving drugs containing hydrocodone from being classified as so-called Schedule III drugs to being Schedule II drugs.

What's your drug schedule?

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Sat, 04 Aug 2007

About me

I'm Asheesh Laroia. I want as many people as possible to have as much information as possible and be able to be as free as possible to act on that information. I use "information" broadly to include, for example, the current weather, the math necessary to predict future weather, and computer software that does such calculations. I once thought that this "information" should include information about people, but now I'm more confused about that.

Lately I've had to pay bills, so I did what I always do when I have a problem: I thought about computers. Right now, I work at Creative Commons doing just that. Creative Commons is a non-profit in San Francisco that I love because it works to make culture more available.

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Wed, 01 Aug 2007

bbq

In the same vein as "Barbie in a Blender", I like the phrase "barbie queue". It serves as a convenient alternative to the word "barbecue" without sacrificing the hilarity of ubiquitous bbq.

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This is my first post

This is my first post with PyBlosxom.

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Copyright © Asheesh Laroia. This work is licensed under a by-sa. Open Hatch is my current project. You should enjoy my parents' Indian restaurant in Rochester!