Trying To Find Myself
In an effort to be a better citizen, I'm trying to find out what state and federal districts I'm in, so I can research the candidates I am able to vote for. It's kind of tricky, since Oklahoma was completely redistricted this year. Some of the maps are better than others.
Let's see... I appear to be in State House District 43... And just barely in State Senate District 23. The map of U.S. Congressional Districts isn't detailed enough to be sure -- I'm probably in 4, but possibly 3. All the political web sites still have the old districting information, so this PDF is the only source. Guess I'll have to wait till everything gets up-to-date to find out for sure.
Anyway, I know this isn't interesting to anyone but myself (like everything else on this site), but I want to check out the candidates I can vote for. For one thing, I'm interested in their web sites. I'd love to design a candidate's web site. I think if a candidate were willing to have the right kind of site -- something more than the "brochure" sites they all have -- that it could actually win them the election. A blog, for example. How refreshing would it be to read exactly what the person thinks, before it's been homogenized by 50 speech writers? Or to follow exactly what they go through on the campaign trail? The national publicity alone could be enough to put someone in office.
Notice Anything Different?
I sure hope not. :-) As mentioned, I've changed News Goat to use the perl module HTML::Template. It seems to be working fine. I had a little trouble, but that had nothing to do with the module, and everything to do with my lack of understanding perl subroutines. I don't think there's any real difference as far as processing time or bandwidth, but I think it will be useful to me. I can create an HTML file, then throw some variables into it to make it dynamic, rather than using a thousand print statements in perl.
If you're curious, you can take a look at the template, or at the really ugly perl code.
