Stumble...

I found this crazy web site, service...not quite sure what to call it. It's called STUMBLE and it helps link you to web sites you might be interested in. They put a bar at the top of your internet web browser, as well as send you emails with links you might like. Now, I'm not into the service so far, EXCEPT...

On the "stumble bar", there is a button you can push that takes you RANDOMLY to any .gov website. Every time you push the button you go to another .gov page! So cool. Yesterday I tried this for the first time. I pushed the button, went to the NOAA ship tracker website. They track every ship they have and you can look at where it was in the past, present, or where it is going!

Pushed the button again, got a local government webpage for Seattle.gov. Nothing interesting there.

Pushed the button a third time (thinking, THIS is my limit for wasting my time on stumbling around random government pages) and was sent to...drum roll please...Recovery.gov. Yep, that's right, the recovery stimulus bill Accountability and Transparency page. Well...now we're getting somewhere!

While the House and Senate were deciding on this bill, I perused it just a bit. In fact, I wrote about it in an earlier post. I have NOT looked over the final bill that was signed by our President, so I thought I'd look it over since I was randomly sent to its webpage. Well, I tried. I went to the link. Chose to open it. Waited. Waited. NOTHING. Tried again. Waited. Waited. Looked at my downloads...it was there. Still, nothing. Oh well, it MUST be close to what I read intially, RIGHT? (wink, wink!) And of course, there are NO earmarks in this bill so it is completely straightforward and I would have no problems with it. RIGHT?

My question is, if I can't open it and read it (and although I'm no computer genius, I am fairly computer capable)...what about those people who are less computer literate than me? Oh well, let's leave it to those people we voted on to represent us. Oh wait! I didn't vote for THEM. Hopefully they'll still try to represent ME and not just a limited portion of their constituents.