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Congress Twitters (Critters?)

H/T: Vivian and the Cotillion ladies, and Ari Herzog!

In following Friday’s debacle (read about it here, here, here, and here) I realized that there were quite a few tech-savvy House/Senate members who were fellow Twitterers. I have never seen a listing, so thought I’d start one here:

(Alphabetized by state, last name)

• George Miller (D, CA)
• Mark Udall (D, CO)
• Chris Dodd (D, CT)
• Christopher Shays (R, CT)
• Joe Biden (D, DE)
• Neil Abercrombie (D, HI)
• Chuck Grassley (R, IA)
• Dan Burton (R, IN)
• John Yarmuth (D, KY)
• Pete Hoekstra (R, MI)
• Thad McCotter (R, MI)
• Keith Ellison (DFL, MN)
• Roy Blunt (R, MO)
• John Boehner (R, OH)
• Bob Latta (R, OH)
• Tim Ryan (D, OH)
• Jim Inhofe (R, OK)
• Jim DeMint (R, SC)
• John Culberson (R, TX)
• Eric Cantor (R, VA)
• Rob Wittman (R, VA)

Feel free to submit the Twitter accounts of any elected officials who are not listed in the comments below — be sure to include their Twitter account name as well as the party and state!

Honorable Mention:

• House Floor
• Senate Floor
• NRCC
• NRSC
• RSC
• RNC
• The White House
• Public Laws
• GOP Conference
• Senate GOPs

Update: Ari Herzog has erected the US Congress on Twitter Wiki, so be sure to check there as well!

You say Goodbye, I say Hello

I’ve recently (and finally) abandoned a service I’d become very fond of … HelloTxt. The guys who run it have been great, always welcomed feedback, and were helpful when bugs were reported, but it did not have availability of posting to other services of which I’m a member, and to use their SMS gateway, I would’ve had to incur some international charges.

The final straw was when I discovered that my tweets from NOLA were never posted. Even worse, when I tried using their mobile site from my cell last weekend, Opera Mini would hang or crash, and at one point I received an error message. Put simply: I’d had enough.

Chrispian at Mobility Hacks (formerly Twitter Hacks) recommended Ping.fm to me. I had checked out this service before, but didn’t sign up (no beta key). Having been hooked up with a fresh beta key and several recommendations of their service, I registered at Ping and “tested their tools” … everything came through quickly.

So far, so good … I’m really pleased with them!

If’n any of you are interested in giving Ping.fm a try, here’s the latest beta code: pingadactyl

Enjoy!

Sewing, Angeling, and a car update

Things have been pretty quiet … or mostly quiet. Jessie’s mother is on vacation, so she’s spending the week with her. I miss her terribly, but I’ve had time to devote to a couple projects that I’ve been wanting to give attention to, so it works out for that.

Sew, sew, sew…

When I was younger, I loved to sew. I used to cross-stitch, make stuffed animals and various clothing items for myself and friends. I haven’t stitched anything in years, with the exception of a couple of costumes that Jessie needed for school about 3-4 years back. I had been wanting to start it up again, but wasn’t sure how or if I would have enough time.

A post on the Soldiers’ Angels blog yesterday has really kicked this need into high-gear. There are several sewing projects on the Soldiers’ Angels site, and several of them are various Blanket teams/projects — the newest being Blankets of Belief.

Now, I know I don’t have the time to commit to quilting or sewing blankets and such by hand, but there was a link on the Blankets of Belief page on how to make a “no-sew” blanket. These are basically fleece blankets that are constructed in such a way that no sewing is involved — if you can tie a knot, you can make one of these!

Sounds perfect!

As soon as I’m able, I’ll be stocking up on materials to make one of these. If it turns out well (read: pretty!), I’ll post pics on here. :mrgreen:

Bama Angeling

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Bama Angels site and have started expanding my “pimpage” to a few social networking sites. So far, it’s up on MySpace, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and FriendFeed. I’ve had a LOT of positive response from area Angels and now I need to work on finding information to post to Bama Angels.

I usually get announcements via word of mouth or The Birmingham News, but it would be nice to get all that other Alabama and military related news that gets missed!

If you know of anything, please feel free to send it my way!

Car Update

It’s in the body shop and I was told yesterday that they’ve ordered parts and will begin taking it apart and working on it hopefully today or tomorrow. Realistically speaking, I’ll be lucky if I get it back before the end of this month.

Not thrilled with that, but what can I do? ;P Have otherwise been going back and forth with the insurance company regarding other stuff that’s still unsettled and may need legal handling, but can’t really post about that yet. (will update when able)

I know I’m lucky that we don’t have to pay for all this stuff out of our own pockets (or rather, out of our savings accounts), but honestly, this whole process is enough to drive anyone bonkers!

South by Deep South dates/location set

Courtesy of Ike via Twitter, the dates and location have been set for the South by Deep South (SxDS) conference: September 26-28 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Not a whole lot up yet about it, but the blog does say that current tracts include:

• Social Media/PR/Marketing
• Web development
• WordCamp

Yep, that’s right — a full blown WordCamp, down here!

There will also be the 10th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival going on that weekend as well, so this should be fun!

Happy Buy A Gun Day!

Today’s my birthday. Even worse, it’s Tax Day. I’ve always hated that. As I tweeted just a little while ago, if one more person says to me, “Oh, you’re a tax baby!” I’m gonna slug ‘em!

Screw the IRS, this is *MY* day!

However, according to Beth, today is also known as Buy A Gun Day. I can dig that! :mrgreen:

“Democrats believe every day is April 15. Republicans believe that every day is July 4.” — Ronald Reagan

There … feelin’ happy. Now how ’bout we celebrate with a little song? :twisted:

Lyrics: (courtesy of Moron Pundit)

I want to keep my money
And give away absolutely nothing
To the government who moderates my spending
and obliterates depending on what time of the year
brutality is near

in the form of income tax
I’d rather take a fucking ax
to my face, blow up this place

with you all in it, I’d do it in a minute

If I could write off your murder
I’d save all of my receipts
because I’d rather you be dead
than lose a tiny shred of what I made this fiscal year

I’d rather you be dead than ponder parting with my second home
I’d rather you be dead than consider not opening a restaurant

I’d rather you be dead
I’d rather you be dead

Prepare the laser-beam
I’m gonna use it tonight

Engage the laser-beam
It’s gonna end your life

I’m gonna use it tonight

If I could write off your murder
I’d save all of my receipts
because I’d rather you be dead
than lose a tiny shred of what I made this fiscal year

I’d rather you be dead than ponder parting with my second home
I’d rather you be dead than consider not opening a restaurant.

Big thanks to Beth for the reminder. I love love *LOVE* Metalocalypse! :cool:

Share the wealth…

Someone told me last week, “You always find the neatest stuff!” Then I’m asked how I find these things. My response was something along the lines of a laugh and, “I have neat friends.”

Usually when I get something neat — a site, story, video, etc. — I bookmark it. Most often, I run across stuff by emails from friends or my feeds. Sometimes I surf and will just meander from one site to the next, bookmarking stuff as I go. Occasionally I will tweet something I find, or post it to my blog, but most often than not, it just sits in my bookmarks file. For a while I’ve thought about how to most effectively go about sharing the wealth. I’ve looked into a few things and have started sharing, little by little.

I’ve most recently started sharing items via Google Reader. I’ve also switched to a very awesome Twitter client, Twhirl, which makes make re-tweeting much easier. Something that I’ve seen done before, but haven’t attempted yet, perhaps start posting re-tweets on my blog.

Now, I’m left with the 500+ bookmarks I have right now. I may go the route of del.icio.us or something along those lines (Lord knows there are a million different franchises of bookmarking services out there), but I haven’t decided yet. I’m most familiar with del.icio.us, and if I’m able to seamlessly integrate it into one of my personal bookmarking services, I may start posting things there.

Time will tell … but for now, Google Reader and Twitter are my current carriers of goodies.

EDIT: Oh! I almost forgot about Friend Feed … this pretty much covers anything/anyone I’ve bookmarked, friended, shared, favorited, etc. recently. It rocks.

Resistance is futile, you will be widgetized

I have been messing with various parts of my theme over the last couple of days. Sadly, I have not yet widgetized this theme (shocking, I know) because I had so much custom code in it. I have been looking for a replacement to the Twitter swf and nothing I’ve run across so far has fit my liking (yet), but I did see a WP widget that looked promising.

Key word being ‘widget’ … OK, so I’m stubborn.

I know I could hack up the plugin code to make it work for a non-widgetized theme, but honestly, if I’m going to find new toys to play with, I need to clean up the playground — so to speak. Get on the ball, re-arrange my theme’s innards, banish those last handful of code gremlins back to the outer banks of Hades, and “get with the widgets.” *nyerk*

So, over the next few days, don’t be too surprised if I break something …

Hello, Text!

I’ve been playing on and off with a neat little web site/app called HelloTxt. I had stumbled across it a month or so back while looking for Twitter apps. (TwitBin is acting up again, so this comes in handy!) It’s pretty nifty. It allows you to update your Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Tumblr blog, and a handful of other social networks. Signup isn’t mandatory, but it does allow you to keep your login info’s saved. It’s pretty cool so far, and I’ll bet it can only get better.

That said … does anyone out there happen to have a coupon code for HelloTxt? *bats eyelashes*

Let’s hear it for the girls!

I’ve heard big announcements from a couple of my favorite girlie blogs lately, the first of which is C.A. Marks (of Alabama Improper fame) announcing the new She Blogs Blog Carnival on her newest blog, Sex and the South (which is pretty work safe, despite its deliciously spicy moniker, so be sure to stop by!). It looks pretty straight forward, to participate you have to: 1.) be female, 2.) have a blog.

Cool! I’m covered on both points!

The second came from the founders of Boobie-Thon — yep, it’s that time of year again! They are taking early submissions, so if you are interested in participating, please go check out their submission information/guidelines page.

By the way … this is not just limited to the ladies! Guys, pictures of your bare chests are welcome too! :mrgreen:

This is for a great cause, so please consider helping out in any way you can … so if you’re too shy to “share” consider perhaps a donation, or volunteering time or talent! :grin:

Also, you Twitterers out there – add Boobie-Thon to your list to follow their updates!

Red Cross puts social networking and online tools to good use

I’d like to introduce you guys to someone: Ike Pigott. He’s a local blogger that I ran across on Twitter some time ago. I’ve been following his blog, Occam’s RazR, for a while now. He works for Red Cross and has an extensive background in communications.

He’s recently set himself upon a personal quest to utilize the online tools and social media for disaster relief and aid. He’s created the Red Cross Online Disaster Portal and opened the Red Cross Twitter Channel.

The idea is that people in evacuation zones could “follow” the Red Cross Twitter feed from their cell phones, and find out about shelter locations and service delivery sites.

I think it’s a great idea, and I’m personally excited to be able to see first-hand the mediums that we have available to us today being put to use for such a great cause. This will be especially handy for us locally with hurricane season coming up, as well as tornado season!

If you are interested in helping out or would like more information, please contact Ike. I’m sure that he’d love to hear from you and could use any and all help sent his way! :grin:

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