I’ve been seeing a lot on the Web about this guy named Ron Paul. He’s running for president in 2008, but first he has to get the Republican nomination. He has many supporters already, and I only see that growing over the next several months. Ron Paul is the only politician I’ve read about who truly fights for individual rights and follows the constitution. He’s restored my hope for the country and for the Republican party.

I just realized I’ve now had this blog for one year. While its postings have been sporadic at times, I’m happy to look back on what I’ve done tech-wise over the last year. FYI: Anyone who reads this blog may be interested to know that I can be found posting useless things all over teh Interwebs (not just here), many of which you can find at timmorgan.org or on my brand new Jaiku account (timmorgan.jaiku.com).

Zooomr is a little photo sharing site that has a wee bit of potential I think. While I wouldn’t exactly call it “reliable” at the moment (its recent upgrade took it down for weeks and it’s service has been sketchy ever since), I could see it amassing a cult following among geeks like myself. I’m still waiting on an API key so I can test my Flickr migration script. I wrote a bit of Ruby to download each of my Flickr photos, along with their tags, geotags, description, title, etc. and upload them one by one to Zooomr. I’m anxious to see if it works.

Have you ever been downloading something very large for a long time, and something happens to interrupt it? Firefox crashes, you lose power, you accidentally close your laptop lid, etc.? Here’s a trick to start your download where you left off: On Linux, you can skip this step. On Mac, download wget here, unzip it, and put “wget” in /usr/bin. For Windows, looks like you can download wget here (I haven’t tried this on Windows, but it shouldn’t be much different). In a terminal window, run wget -c http://url/to/download.The -c tells wget to “continue” the download. Even if you started your download in some other program, wget starts again where you left off. Pretty sweet, huh?

Update: I’ve been using this for awhile now, and I still have to manually check my watchlist every day because my reader only gets updates every few days. I’m not sure, but it seems to be a caching issue on the WP API and not so much the script’s fault.Update 2: The load on my server was too much, so I removed the hosted script from my server. You can still download the source and host it yourself.Update 3: Turns out it’s better to just subscribe to each page’s feed rather than to use a script like this.Back before Wikipedia had an API, I created a script that scraped the HTML and generated a plain RSS feed of my watchlist. Now, it’s even easier as the new API does most of the work for you, provided you correctly authenticate with it. So, version 2 of the script is much simpler, and simply acts to authenticate a user and grab the feed as-is and hand it to the browser/aggregator/etc.

It occured to me that my gems of wisdom on my Snippets page likely go unnoticed by you faithful blog readers, so you might want to subscribe to my snippets feed as well so you don’t miss beauties like this (yes, I know this will seem lame to some, but I think it’s clever): class Object def in?(object) object.include? self end end 1.in? 2..3 #=> false 1.in? 1..3 #=> true

My guess is Lost has lost many of its viewers in the last year due to a crawling storyline and endless questions without answers. I say this because, after watching tonight’s episode, the direction of the show has definitely changed. I think those writers finally figured out they don’t have blind followers – they have to get off their butts and actually move the story along. And that’s what they finally did tonight. Thank you. Now I can look forward to Wednesday nights again.

Dvorak is spot on about the music industry: During the heyday of Napster and open free music sharing and trading, when million of people swapped songs, the CD business was booming. Once Napster was shut down, and along with it the social network of music discovery, sales began to plummet. They are still falling.

This is my reason for getting one:You're addicted to signing up to account-requiring websites the moment they're released just so no one else takes your usual username.

Greg Pittman, the preaching minister at my church, now has a blog. I got him set up this weekend, and he’s started it off with a great post about our recent prayer week. He also said something interesting to me that really got me thinking about how the Web has affected us the last few years:I’m not looking to be trendy. It [blogging] just seems to be an effective way to communicate with an ever-ambiguous, mobile congregation, and in a more interactive fashion.For Cedar Ridge, 2007 seems so far to be the year of connectedness, at least in the electronic sense (and hopefully/consequently in the community sense as well). This year, we launched our new website, we launched a Facebook-clone site for members (I won’t bother providing a link since you can’t sign in anyway – but trust me, it’s cool), we just finished revamping and reorganizing our podcast section, and now our staff is starting to blog.