A little while ago I decided to exploit Foursquare's API in order to obtain the mayorship of a favorite Columbia hang: 1020 Bar on Amsterdam and 110th st. The most transparent means to this end for me was to write a script to check me into 1020 once a night, no matter where I was or what I was doing. This wound up being vastly simpler than I ever would have imagined, thanks to a very elegant Python library written by John Wiseman for interacting with Foursquare's REST API. Ultimately, all that was necessary to unseat Mr. R (the prior Foursquare mayor of 1020) was to write a little five-line Python script, and set it up to run once a night as a cron job on a shared server that I keep at Dreamhost for casual projects. 24 long days later: Mayorship secured.