Matthew Bass

As a Christian who is socially conservative, fiscally libertarian, and non-interventionist, I’m having a very difficult time imagining myself actually voting for any of the current Republican Presidential candidates. I’m just hearing the same old thing from all of them. All except one, who happens to be the only guy up there actually willing to tick off a few people while articulating his principals. That guy is Ron Paul.

I agree with the premise of this article, namely, that Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate who has a chance of beating Hillary in 2008.

What’s really cool is how Ron Paul is taking advantage of the Internet to promote his message. As of today, he has over 44,000 Meetup members. There are literally dozens of Ron Paul-related video clips on YouTube. And why shouldn’t there be? The mainstream media is only giving coverage to the perceived frontrunners of both parties, who spout the same drivel day after day.

The Internet levels the playing field and de-monopolizes the television networks and newspapers. Even Google has hosted a one-hour Q&A session with Ron Paul. The Internet makes free speech free again. That’s why the efforts of many in our government to regulate the Internet should be aggresively opposed.

Whether you’re liberal or conservative, you have to admit that Ron Paul speaks his mind and has a solid track record of constitutionlist voting. He’s a statesman in a political environment that harbors far too few.

The Rails Rumble took place this past weekend, and together with fellow raleigh.rb‘ers Mark Bennett and Nathaniel Talbott we formed a team. 48 hours, one go-cart race, and several Wii games later we finished our creation and dubbed it Link Tipping.

Link Tipping is very similar to digg, except instead of voting on links you “tipp” them with real money. We integrated with Amazon’s new Flexible Payment Service to support micropayments: you can tipp in $0.25 increments. Once a link has received a tipp, the individual who created the resource at that link can log in, “claim” the tipps, and have the money transferred to his Amazon account.

(No, I’m not misspelling “tip.” We intentionally spelled it “tipp” in the app.)

The wonderful thing about Link Tipping is that, since real money is being used, the links that move to the top of the list are much more likely to be useful and remarkable.

There were 90+ apps entered in the Rails Rumble and voting started yesterday. Check out the full list. Could these many apps have been built in this short an amount of time using a Java or .NET stack? I have my doubts. Rails isn’t a silver bullet, but it sure is fun to rumble with.

Raleigh, the city that I live in, recently implemented stage one water restrictions. This means I can water with a sprinkler once a week, and by hand with a hose twice a week.

This simplifies my life. Whereas I once had to be concerned about watering every other day, now I only need to be concerned about watering once a week.

Better yet, once my plants and grass die from lack of water, I won’t have to water at all. Thank you, City of Raleigh, for helping me simplify my schedule this way.

sar-casm [sahr-kaz-uh-m] –noun “harsh or bitter derision or irony”