Yes, it is definitely time to get back into the world of output. I don't know why I shut down the way I do sometimes. I felt really inspired on my way back from Mississippi, which is the mood in which I wrote my last post on the iPad, but that faded away pretty soon. Rather than an essay, here's a few things that have been keeping me busy these last few months.

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I've been going through training as a 2010 Fellow with the New Leaders Council which is a "progressive leadership" organization. I'm pretty sure I'm not a leader of men, but it has been fun. NLC brings in some pretty amazing trainers to impart their experience and wisdom on campaign organization, national security policy, fundraising, and the like.

It's a very different scene than what I'm used to. As you can guess, it's the sort of thing that could be very awesome, or very douchey, based entirely on the people within. I was happy to find that the people are super cool, genuine, and smart, and I'm honored to be making the friends I am there. My class'll be throwing a fundraiser with Van Jones on Wednesday to raise money to give another class the same opportunity next year that we had.

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Something else: somehow, Ohnomymoney got the attention of the NY Times, and my site and I will be making an appearance in the Sunday Magazine's May issue about money. I went through a photo shoot in my apartment on Friday for the piece, so I feel reasonably confident that I'll make the final cut (I'm one of 3 subjects). This is certainly the biggest media exposure I've ever had, for one of the most small-time projects I've ever done (it gets about 2 hits a day). So I'm worried that I'm going to come off as pretentious - a vulnerability of mine, which any reader of my blog is already aware of (see?).

I'm more just excited though, and it only makes me feel more strongly that every kid in the world needs to be given the skills to build a website on a whim at any time. If something that I cooked up in a week with rudimentary logic, minimal display, and chintzy graphs can get attention, imagine what kind of an Internet we'd have if the people building it weren't so heavily slanted towards white male yuppies (which also seemed to exclusively comprise the audience of the Hot Chip show I attended Saturday).

Anyway, you can see just how rudimentary it is if you want, as I took this as motivation to rewrite the code for Ohnomymoney entirely, and open sourced it That was all under-the-hood work, though. I'd like to expand the site before the end of May to have better graphs, with annotations and user comments and the like, but...we'll see.

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I spent a ton of time over the winter adding information about bills to my Congress app for Android which took a lot of work and was hugely satisfying to accomplish. This also resulted in the creation of a community service for the same data, friendly to mobile devices. It was enough work that I burnt out a bit and took a complete break in April, but I'm ready to start pushing again, to get full bill text and voting records out there.

I'll also be fortunate to have help on it this summer, through Google's awesome Summer of Code program, where students are paid to work on open source community projects. Google announced the final list of accepted students today. Evelina Vrabie, who is getting her bachelor's in Computer Science in Romania, will be helping me make the app all kinds of awesome this summer. She submitted a great proposal, and now I'm doubly motivated to make a great app.

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Also, I played a lot of Final Fantasy XIII

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So I've kept busy, but I still need to write more. I want to redesign this blog from scratch like I do every couple years, and I want another blog so I can put down my thoughts on politics - I even registered captiveslog.com for that one. I guess we'll see how my ever-fickle output pans out this summer.