I drove around North Carolina visiting the offices of my state's two senators this Friday. The purpose was to encourage them to co-sponsor bill 761, the "Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013." A number of things were surprising about my visits, primarily how well everything seemed to go. Meeting with the republican Senator Burr's staffers arguably went even better than meeting with those of Kay Hagan, of the Democratic party.

This all seemed to boil down to the expectations we all had. For my part I was blown away every time Senator Burr's staffer mentioned a bill remotely related to doing anything to help human beings or the environment. Although they were few and limited in scope, these bills nonetheless convinced me that conversation with conservative politicians need not always be fruitless.

Our conversation with Hagan's staffers seemed more colored by their expectations than my own. They figured we already liked them and they were the good guys, and indeed they rattled off a number of bills that we were very happy to see them supporting. However, the conversation became more contentious when it turned to the issue of the Keystone XL Pipeline. After some back and forth about the pros and cons of the pipeline, Hagan's environmental staffer decided to fall back on what he evidently thought was a reliable argument-winner. "Well, certainly," he began with a chuckle as if to make clear he was just explicitly stating a fact obvious to both sides, "you wouldn't suggest that President Obama and Secretary of states Clinton and Kerry are weak on carbon?" With no pause for discussion, our twelve-or-so group responded with nods of our heads and numerous variations of "Yes, we do think they're weak on carbon." This surprised the staffer, who candidly admitted that that was not the answer he had expected.

In general, I thought things went surprisingly well, but later I realized I had been talking with politicians, whose job it is to make me think things went well. I will need more experience with politicians before I can really know what effect a visit like ours will have on policy if I can ever know.

So, I'm going to talk about something I do know, and that is software. Released to the Apple and Android app stores fairly recently was an app known as "Buycott" Buycott allows a user to point his or her phone at a product's barcode and learn to whom the money goes when this product is bought. What's more, the user can sign up for various causes and get instant feedback on what causes a given product supports and opposes. It's very early right now, and there are a number of bugs, the worst being that for no immediately apparent reason it says it's incompatible with my phone, so I have to use it on my iPad, where it won't have Internet access to actually tell me anything useful when I'm out in the grocery store deciding what to buy.

Nevertheless, I can use it here in my apartment, where it is actually pretty addictive finding and pointing my iPad camera at barcodes and finding out the corporate "family tree" for each product. So far I've learned that by buying Cheez-Its, I'm supporting a unionized organization and that Dole, known for its fruit cups, (I don't buy from Dole anyway, I just found an old can in my apartment) donated $171,261 against labelling of genetically modified foods in California. Food Lion brand products support, not surprisingly, Food Lion, which is a subsidiary of "Delhaize Group" not listed as for or against any of the causes for which I'm registered, but interesting because it has a weird name.

Thanks in no small part to my loving and attentive parents, my room has quite suddenly changed from a junk heap into a lovely place in which I would be glad to have company! My rickety aluminum table has been replaced with one of bamboo wood with matching chairs. More importantly my sofa, recognizable by the growing hole in its base, has been replaced with a seemingly immortal couch from my parents' place. That couch might be as old as I am, but darned if it doesn't serve every need that a couch possibly could, it even has a fold-out bed.

For my part, I've tidied up my old room in my parents' place. Particularly I went through my stuff up there and figured out what I do and don't need to keep. I found a ridiculous number of books written in Japanese, mostly comic books, my old Sea Scout manual, which I've kept in the interest of potentially teaching myself some actual knots that I did not know when tying down the couch to make the trip to Raleigh. I found a bunch of old sci-fi books and yearbooks that seem to suggest a Sam with many more friends than I remember having in middle and high school. I also found Greg's old sketchbook, which carries both of the two most celebrated issues of Barrett Comics, "Born in the USA," and "The Death of Greg." In my old posts you can read the entry entitled "The Death of Greg," where I state how excited I am to be writing the issue with the eponymous Greg Euchner himself. It's fun to remember these old posts, it's like reading a novel that jumps around in time and you're like, "hey, I know what happens next!"

I was playing with an analytics system the other day called JMP (pronounced "jump"). I was supposed to be doing it for my work, but toying with the different representations of the data was so fun that I lost track of time and got home late.

This inspired me to start a spreadsheet of things that I do in my day-to-day life. I keep track of what I eat, how much I exercise, strength and aerobic, and how I feel during the day. I expect to add more columns as I think of them. Once I get enough data I can start to mine correlations and figure out if I can analyze my way to a better life.

Another day, another datapoint.

Classes are finally over. No more required coursework for me. Now all I have to work on are my research and my assistantship. For many of my peers the two are the same, but in return for my extra work I get to be part of one of the most well-funded research groups in the university, relieving me of financial stress, which is something I'm happy never to have had to deal with.

I've started work on the constructed response analysis system that will be my written qualifier. I intend to have it done by August, so that gives me four months. That's not a lot of time considering all the other things that will be happening over the Summer. Now that I have a clear sense of what I should be doing for my qualifier, though, it should be easier to keep moving forward on it.

I would have to say that Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves is easily the most novel novel I have ever read. When I describe it to greg he compares it to Infinite Jest . When I first heard of it, it was from my friend, who was a little drunk. Clutching it to her chest, she told me repeatedly that she would know if it did not get back to her and I would never hear the end of it. No amount of assurance would convince her she didn't need to worry. Then she told me to make sure to read every "f***ing footnote." I asked her if I should read only the "f***ing" ones, and she said I would know them when I saw them.

The next day I cracked open this book and read through for a while until suddenly the "editor" of the book interrupted the story of a freaky supernatural house with a footnote three pages long about his broken water heater and how annoying it was. I texted my friend immediatey. "I believe I've found a f***ing footnote."

House of Leaves contains, not including the appendices, four stories. The main text discusses Navidson's story, wherein he discovers that his house is larger on the inside than the outside. The story is told like a documentary and includes discussions of what the outside world has made of the story, so it is a story and then a story about a story, so two stories in one. In the footnotes, Truant discusses what he's learned about the author, Zampano, an old dead man whose writings Truant picked up from his house (story three), and regularly divulges his own trials and tribulations and slow descent into madness, also in the footnotes, making story four.

I recommend this book to anyone who thinks reading shouldn't be a passive experience. When you suddenly realize that Truant has descended into incomprehensible babble and try to figure out where he starts making sense again, for example, or when Truant casually mentions that he changed part of Zampano's text for no reason, and you have to go back four or five pages to understand what he's talking about. Most recently I was invited by Danielewski himself to read the appendix with Truant's mother's letters to him. He specifically told me that I didn't have to read them if I wanted to figure out Truant myself, but otherwise they could provide valuable insight. Of course I read them, but having a book encourage me to choose how I wanted to read it was an unusual experience.