Letters to our congressmen -- one reply so far

A few weeks ago I wrote a couple letters to each of my congressmen. Both letters are posted here. Yesterday I got a nice reply from Jeff Miller (R), our member of the House of Representatives for Florida's first district. Thank you, Jeff!

I have not heard a word yet from either Senator Nelson (D) or Senator Martinez (R).

Click here to read Jeff Miller's reply to my letter.

Take Destin, please.

Today the Pensacola News Journal printed a wonderful letter to the editor from Mary Brockett. She responded to an article from earlier this month that asked why Pensacola can't be more like Destin -- sleek, trendy, congested...

She closed with, "The only thing Destin hasn't been stupid enough to do is spend millions putting a baseball field next door to a sewage treatment plant in a floodplain."

As much as I want to see the Community Maritime Park built, and soon, I have to agree. The sewer treatment plant is a much more urgent matter. A new one is vital to the survival of Pensacola. We need the new plant built now, on the new site, even if we have to pay for it.

You can read the whole letter by clicking here. When you get there you will have to scroll down five or six letters but it is worth it.

Downtown Pensacola Dining Guide 2006

The new dining guide is available now online. It's on the Downtown Improvement Board's site.

The DIB site has a variety of useful information. And promises to have more, someday -- a lot of pages say "coming in August." Do they mean August 2005 or August 2006?

And on the subject of Downtown Pensacola, here's a site that's sure to help you keep on top of the positive news about the Community Maritime Park.

Remember this?

Remember when the Pensacola Beach sign was intact and looked like this postcard shot?

A few weeks ago there was a note in the Pensacola News Journal that some company has been hired to restore the sign. When? As of yesterday the wreck of a sign has not been touched.

Why doesn't the City of Gulf Breeze get the mess torn down? The eyesore is in their town after all. Are they waiting for the next hurricane to blow the sign away?

It is time to take it down. It is a disgrace. And it says way too much about local pride, or the lack thereof.

The voters speak -- several of them

Version 1. Yesterday Pensacola voted to continue the one cent local option sales tax. It passed by a huge 64 percent of the voters.

Version 2. Yesterday a tiny percentage of registered voters, less than 13 percent, passed a tax that everybody has to pay.

Strangely both versions are true. That huge 64 percent came from the 20 percent of registered voters who bothered to vote this time.

So, that's about one in eight -- 12.8 percent of the registered voters. I would like those who did not vote and yet gripe about the tax to pay double.

You can now subscribe to this blog

My study of RSS in a Dummies book has worked for me. Today I created my first Web feeds, also called news feeds.

If you blog much at all you have seen the little orange or blue stickers that say RSS or XML or ATOM. Both Atom and RSS are syndication formats and are XML files. Actually I ended up using Atom instead of RSS. Mostly because that's what Blogger.com wants. And it works. Had enough techno babble already?

What all this means is...now you can easily check to see if I have added any new posts. And you won't need to log on to this blog to find out. All you need is an aggregator, that's a Web feed collector and reader. Don't worry they are easy and free.

A good one to start with is NewsGator. (News + aggregator, get it?)

You will need to register and create a password.

Then click on 'add feeds' and just type in or cut and paste this -- http://kenyopensacola2.blogspot.com/atom.xml -- and follow the screen prompts.

While you are at it go ahead and add feeds to other favorite blogs from NewsGator's huge directory.

If this works for you, or if you have any problems, leave a comment and I will get back to you.

Pensacola's Blogosphere

I've added a new category in the links section -- Pensacola blogs. Look in the sidebar to the right and scroll down.

The first blog post

Among the first web logs was probably the one started by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. He's the founder/inventor of the World Wide Web (sorry, Al Gore). Berners-Lee posted regular updates on the early development of the Internet.

But it wasn't until January 10, 1996 when Justin Hall began a personal daily web log at www.links.net. You can read his first post. It was still a web log until Jorn Barger coined the term 'blog' in 1997.

This information comes from Ellen Finkelstein in her book Syndicating Web Sites with RSS Feeds, for Dummies. Yes, I am learning RSS from a 'Dummies' book.

Another letter to my Congressmen

Here's the text of a letter I just sent to my U.S. Representative (R) and my Senators (D) and (R). If I get any answers I will post them.

Dear Congressperson:

Please don't let any foreign government control our ports, especially a government that is currently an active enemy of Israel.

There is a US law that bars firms from complying with or cooperating with the boycott of Israel by Arab governments. The Dubai government is one of the participants in the boycott.

The Dubai Customs Department enforces the boycott. Its staff members are paid employees of the Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation (PCZC). This is the same Dubai government-owned entity that runs Dubai Ports World.

In the recent past the U.S. government has fined companies millions of dollars for participating in the boycott. Is our law now meaningless? What will happen to Israel? And to us?

Please help prevent this sale. I follow the news closely every day and want to see that you are taking a stand against this.

RSS -- SFSG (so far so good)

I am plugging along with my RSS tutorial and managed to get something working. I am now subscribed to three feeds on two different readers -- NewsGator and My Yahoo. I like both OK but the NewsGator screen is so ugly to look at.

Just two more chapters and I will have to try making my own feeds for the world to see. Turns out this isn't as hard as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was.

Will Atom be next for me?