IT LIVES!

This is a follow-up to my last post - if you haven't already read that, you should go check it out otherwise this won't make a great deal of sense!

As you will probably have realised by now, my little Twitter experiment has worked - I am now the proud owner of a Twitter bot of my very own!  I solemnly swear that I will use it for good instead of evil, and for amusement instead of spam.  Incidentally, have you heard this one simple secret that a <<INSERT_LOCALE>> housewife discovered to look 20 years younger?  Dermatologists hate her!  Also, I recently came into possession of five iPads 2, follow and RT for your chance to win!  Nike Air Justin Bieber Steve Jobs Viagra Dominos #sixseasonsandamovie

SRSLY though, www.twitter.com/trexlyrics is now capable of tweeting a randomly-chosen new (i.e. not-yet-posted) lyric on command, and (more excitingly, IMO) replying to any mention, question, or profession of love, with a carefully chosen, semantically-matched, and prophetically apt lyrical reply (caution: replies may or may not be entirely randomised).  I'll probably relax the "new" criterion on tweets soon, unless I spend a good hour or so entering lyrics to fill the database (I'm open to suggestions!), but it should stay fresh for a while.

The next step is clearly to automate this bad boy so that it will post and reply without me having to activate it, and so that I can submit lyrics remotely (possibly via email monitoring, or something more snazzy).  The obvious solution is to run a process on my computer that does its thang at regular intervals, but that would necessitate leaving my computer on overnight, lest I deny anyone's nocturnal urge to have a bot talk to them in song lyrics.  The nerdgasmically awesome solution would be to get the whole app hosted on Amazon EC2 - yes, that is like weeding your lawn with a flamethrower, what's your point?  Unfortunately, a quick glance at the doc pages was a little intimidating - I'll either need to put in some reading time over the weekend, or have a chat with my coworker James (who I'm sure, given his cyberstalking skills, is already reading this blog - hi James!) about setting it up.  Fun times!

Right, back to the coding grindstone.  On a completely unrelated note (I swear), I have an incredibly painful blood blister on the tip of my right index finger.  If you have any proficiency with touch typing at all, try typing without your dominant index finger for the next ten minutes - and then marvel at the fact that I am still reasonably calm and in good spirits.  Must be the beer from Friday Night Mashup :)

[Footnote: I just realised that this wasn't terribly obvious from the above, but, although trex has the capacity to reply to mentions, at the moment it won't do so until prompted to do so by me, so if you send him a message (as I heartily recommend you to do!), he might not reply immediately.  Don't worry, he will!]

[Footnote 2: yeah, I gave up curbing my impulse to anthropomorphize the program about halfway through the above footnote.  GEB, mother-fuckers]