So, a month ago my record KwH for a month was 151. My bill for this past month? 114!

I attribute the difference to the fact that the previous month only had me unplugging things like an OCD sufferer for part of the month. So this past bill reflects a full month of that.

One other trick I forgot to mention in my last post on the subject; I do not use "budget billing". Budget billing is where the energy company figures out what your average annual energy usage is and charges a monthly fee based on that. So, you're paying less than you normally would in the winter, and more than you normally would in the summer. The idea is that your bills won't skyrocket in the winter and you can count on a predictable bill from month to month regardless of the weather.

However, budget billing is, IMHO, an energy waster because it significantly reduces the motivation to save energy. If I do something stupid that starts drawing a lot of energy, with budget billing I may not notice right away. I want to be immediately slapped with a higher than expected energy bill, so that I can immediately evaluate what changes I made around the house or in my lifestyle that prompted such a sudden fluctuation. At the same time, if I start doing something that saves a ton of energy (like unplugging my cable modem when I'm not using the Interwebs), I want to be rewarded with a surprising low bill, so that I keep doing that.

Granted this means that in past winters I've had to deal with some pretty big energy bills. But those big bills motivated me to do things to save energy, like install programmable thermostats, turn the heat down, and wear sweaters around the house more often. It also eventually lead me to have a pellet stove installed. I kinda doubt I would have done most, if any, of all that if doing so meant I had to wait months to see a noticeable decline in my monthly energy bill.

I do realize that budget billing is a very useful tool for some people in certain financial situations. But, I honestly think a LOT of people on budget billing would greatly benefit from the strong energy saving motivation that comes with big winter energy bills, and the relatively immediate feedback that comes with lifestyle changes that effect their energy usage.

Somehow I just recently managed to stumble on OpenCongress.org. It seems to have more info and better organized than VoteSmart.org (which is still a good site, don't get me wrong).

OC appears to have tons of RSS/Atom feeds available (which is how it should be), and I mean TONS!!!

For instance, there are 4178 'issue areas' defined by the 'Congressional Research Service' that get assigned to bills. Basically, they're 'tags'. Yes, that's right, the US Government is using tags. Who says politicians aren't hip? You can subscribe to the feed for any one of the tags, errr, issue areas. So, if "Gerrymandering" is a particularly important political issue to you, then it's absurdly easy to keep track of what congress is doing about it.

There are even feeds to alert you when a particular bill or congress person you're interested in gets mentioned in the news, or somebody's blog.

So, keep track of your representativs, and don't forget to let them know how they're doing.

I've been using TurboTax Online to manage my taxes since 2000. Usually I've been very pleased with their service. When you've got a few small investments a run a small home based business, using TurbotTax Online makes the whole process of filling out all those stupid forms (not to mention figuring out WHICH stupid forms you actually need to fill out and which don't apply to you) exponentially easier the more complex your situation gets.

However, this year when I went to do the dirty deed, I instead got redirected to a page telling me that TurboTax online "only supports IE6 or better, or Firefox 1.7 or better" (but I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.1?!?!?).... "on Microsoft Windos XP or better, or Mac OS X".

So I ask myself "What the #*&! does the operating system I'm running have to do with the price of tea in China?" As it happens, I managed to finally wean myself from Redmond and purged all Microsoft products from my home about 9 months ago. I run Fedora Core 6 and have been very happy with my decision.

Software that physically resides on a computer is dependent on the underlying OS to be able to function, but the whole point of Web Applications (such as TurboTax Online) is that you don't need to worry about the underlying OS at all, as long as the user is running a standards compliant browser.

Already knowing it was a futile waste of time, I called TurboTax customer support to complain. To her credit, the girl who answered the phone was very kind and friendly and did everything in her limited power to solve my problem. My purpose wasn't really to get anything fixed, since I knew that wasn't going to happen, but instead to get my complete dissatisfaction with their decision to discriminate against me and other Linux users on record. The support girl put me on hold several times to talk to her support people and after about 15 minutes on the phone, their final answer was that the "scripting is different on different operating systems." I told her that her support people were feeding her a line of bull, decided I'd done my civic duty on behalf of the Linux community and let her move on to help other customers.

After doing a little searching online, I found several forum threads that indicate people have used TurboTax Online in past years on a wide variety of operating systems, including Sun OS. So, it would appear that this is the first year TurboTax decided to outright block everyone using an alternative OS.

All was not lost though, Firefox has this nice feature that allows users to install add-ons, one of which is called User-Agent Switcher that changes the "User-Agent' header that gets sent to the server on every page load. The User-Agent header identifies what browser your running as well as what operating system. I installed that and set it to indicate to the TurboTax server that I was running Firefox on Windows XP. Bingo! That got me past the 'compatibility check' screen and on to doing my taxes.

Just for fun I played with a few different settings. In the end as long as the User-Agent header reported that I was running Firefox, it didn't matter which OS or version I chose, as long as it was on their supported list. (Note to those having trouble following along; I'm not actually changing the OS my computer is running. I'm just changing what OS TurboTax THINKS I'm running.) Everything about the software worked fine. There were absolutely NO problems due to me being on Linux. The only time I had any issues was when I set the header to report that I was running IE6. I agree and can confirm from experience that there are differences between how Firefox and IE handle javascript and it's not surprising that a script written for IE wouldn't function in Firefox... but note that that has abolutely nothing to do with the underlying OS.

What I found most amusing though, was that I only needed to change the User-Agent string to get past the 'compatibility check' screen at the very beginning. After that, I could change it back to tell the truth and everything kept humming right along, happy as a clam. So, it's not like the server was delivering different code depending on your OS. Firefox users on Windows and OS X were getting the same scripts.. the same scripts that would (in fact, did) work just as well in Firefox running on Linux. The only thing preventing Linux users from using the software was a guard posted at the front door telling them they weren't allowed in to the party. But a simple disguise to get past the guard was all that was necessary to fix the 'bug'.

So, despite an otherwise great software product that (even still) makes my life much easier than it otherwise would be every spring, SHAME on you TurboTax! You only got my money this year because I was in a crunch for time. Next year, I'll be looking elsewhere.

It's a fact though that there are tons of different browsers out there on tons of different OSs, and it would be completely unreasonable to expect TurboTax, or any Web Application developer, to test their software on all possible configurations. The solution though isn't to block anyone using something different than what you did test on. The solution is to warn those of us running something you haven't tested, and give us the option to proceed at our own risk. Those of us who run alternative OSs are usually quite at home in uncharted waters, as long as we're not being arbitrarily denied access.