I’ve had a few people ask me how I did the #FollowFriday flood on Twitter the other day. I was continually spitting out #FF recommendations on people to follow at the rate of 4 per hour, for nearly 24 hours. Obviously, I wasn’t at my computer keyboard grinding these things out. I’d had the list pre-prepared, and I replaced myself with a small shell script and a rather large Perl program to get this done.
Now, I’ve got to preface this by saying there’s a lot of services out there on the web that can automatically schedule tweets via a webform for you. I didn’t necessarily want to do that — not only did manually scheduling a time for each tweet sound tedious, but I didn’t want to give OAuth rights to yet another entity on the internet.
Enter the Linux command line here, and the Perl program known as TTYtter. I’ve been using TTYtter for a while now as a Twitter client when I don’t want to context-switch to a GUI (I’ve been head-down in a bash shell for weeks now), and I knew that TTYtter could be called via a one-shot command line.
So, what I did was write a very tiny shell script wrapper around TTYtter that simply calls TTYtter in a loop every so often, reading in one line from a file as a tweet each time it runs. This let me prepare a text file that had a tweet per line, and that was rather easy to put together when I sat down and knocked it out.
Then all I had to do was a little after midnight on Friday was fire up a screen session, run my shell script, and detach. I ran this from an Amazon cloud VM so I didn’t have to worry about it not finishing. I also put the whole thing in my Dropbox directory so I could edit it or work on it from anywhere.
It worked great. 
Here’s the shell script around TTYtter, in the event one of you wants to do the same thing.
#!/bin/bash
# Let’s set a sleep time between tweets (in seconds)
SLEEP_TIME=900
# Set our OAuth Key
OAUTH=~/Dropbox/ttytter/wildbill.key
# Set our path to TTYtter
TTY_BIN=~/bin/ttytter
# Set our FollowFriday tweet file
FF_FILE=~/Dropbox/followfriday/ff-wildbill.txt
# Now do some stuffs!
while read line; do $TTY_BIN -ssl -keyf=$OAUTH -status=”$line”; sleep $SLEEP_TIME; done < $FF_FILE
Remember to use your powers for good, not evil, kiddos.
So… yesterday was my last day at Dash Navigation / Research in Motion. Changing jobs is always bittersweet for me, but yesterday was unusually difficult because I’d made some truly great friends there. I’ve been lucky to be on some high-performing teams, but I’d never had a job where every member of the team was just uncommonly awesome. I’m proud of working with those folks, and proud of what we all achieved as a team.
When my new opportunity came up, I struggled with it on the basis that I’d be leaving a bunch of incredible folks and moving on to things unknown. However, I realized that Dash Navigation isn’t the same plucky little company it used to be… since the Research in Motion acquisition, things have slowly been inching inexorably toward being “RIM-ized”. I know how I am, and I tend to love being in an environment where I can jump in and do anything that’s needed, rather than having to jump from silo to silo with requests for firewall changes, switch port provisioning, and other things.
I figured it was time to find a startup-y place that could use me, and I landed a position with some friends and old Dash coworkers at a place that’s literally blocks from the old office. So while one chapter draws to a close, a new one starts. I’ll miss the folks I worked with daily at Dash, and I made some great contacts at RIM corporate. I certainly wish all of them well and hope they have lots of future success.
Tags: Life
Check, check one… sibilance…. sibilance… check, check two, sibilance, sibilance….
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This gives with something Matt and I were talking about…
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Must go back and read this im detail, then do my own testing.
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Great TED Talk on how leaders lead.
So, here I am again. Staring numbly at a blank text editor. I’ve got a couple articles to write, a deadline staring me in the face, and I can’t seem to get started. I’ll write a sentence, erase it, write it again, stare at it, get pissed at it, edit the crap out of it until it’s unintelligible, and then nuke that and stare at the blinking cursor like I’ve been smoking something highly illegal.
The really messed up thing is I have the skeleton of both articles laid out. I just can’t seem to string two words together in a way that makes any kind of sense. So, I turn to you, humble reader, in an attempt to get a can of compressed air and blow the cobwebs out of my brain-case. (You may laugh at that, but that’s something I’ve considered trying.)
Heinlein wasn’t kidding when he said writing is a sickness. It’s particularly evil when you actually HAVE to do it. It’s not for lack of wanting to do this… but I’ve been wrestling with this off and on for a couple of weeks now. I’ve been pretty good about not having bright shiny things distract me (too much, anyway) but this is absolutely ridiculous.
I know a couple of you out there write as well… what’re your favorite tips for breaking through the block? I need a metaphorical bulldozer or wrecking ball or… something.
Thanks for listening, Internet.
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I have absolutely no words for this. I… just… wow. This auditor really IS an idiot.
June 22, 2011
Today’s Sponsor: USS Midway
Start/End: San Diego, CA
Miles driven: about 30 (yeah, big estimating on the mileage again)
After another awesome in-room breakfast cooked by wifey, we set out on the town again. Today’s plan was to hit the USS Midway museum, and then perhaps rent a boat and ride around San Diego harbor. The Midway, turns out, is pretty darn big. We didn’t have enough time to see it and rent the boat in one day, but I’m not complaining – the Midway was pretty damn cool in just about every respect.
Conner found his way to the brig. No big surprise there…
Midway was a steam-powered carrier, so there was a bunch of knobs, dials, switches, and all kinds of neat shiny brass things all about the ship. If you have a shiny thing fixation, try to avoid the tour – you’ll never wind up leaving the ship.
They had a bunch of airplanes on the hangar deck. Most of them seemed to be older propeller-driven fighters…
Conner insisted on test-driving an ejection seat. He wanted to tug on the ejector handles, but he couldn’t reach them. 
We made our way to the flight deck after that, and that’s where Conner completely lost his brain. There are a LOT of aircraft on display up there, including F-4 Phantoms, F-14 Tomcats, and an F/A-18 Hornet. Conner’s favorite plane right now is the F/A-18 Hornet – no real surprise there since we saw it in action at the Salinas Air Show two years running.
Conner and Gillie got to spend some time in the Combat Information Center on the ship, and they fooled around with a simulated radar display in there…
Again, there sure are lots of knobs on this ship. Lots and lots and lots of knobs…
We got a rare treat when we were up on the ship’s bridge. A destroyer was making her way into the harbor, and we got to watch her go by right in front of us, from the incredible vantage point up high on the island.
I snuck a picture of a chart of San Diego Harbor, since we’re staying ’round the other side of the harbor on Shelter Island. It’s neat to see the spatial relationship between the Midway, where we’re at, and where other military areas are at.
After the Midway, we decided to take a run over the bridge to Coronado Island and check out the Hotel Del Coronado. Gorgeous place, right on one of the best beaches around. It was overcast, but still great weather.
We then made our way back to the hotel, and the kids played in the pool, but I avoided it — too cold for my blood tonight. No videos as a result, but I don’t think y’all will mind.
Tags: Trip Logs
June 21, 2011
Today’s Sponsor: San Diego County Fair
Start/End: San Diego, CA
Miles Driven: 30 or so
We realized that the San Diego County Fair was going on while we were in town, and the kids haven’t ever been to a fair, so we figured we’d take a day and do the fair thing. The weather was good for it, it was about 75 and overcast until early afternoon.
We toured the art exhibits a bit, and I found my favorite one…
The kids saw one of those reverse bungee jump things, so we got them strapped into one and watched them bounce around a lot.
There was a rock wall nearby, so each kid took a stab at that, then they went and rode one of those giant plastic slide things.
The kids and I rode a roller coaster, and I video’d our reactions as we rode it. That’s embedded in the video linked below. Then stumbled upon what is either a culinary miracle or abomination: a chocolate dipped pickle. Of course I had to have one. It wasn’t bad, believe it or not. It wasn’t good, either — not like chocolate covered bacon. The brine of the pickle totally overpowered the chocolate.
The theme of the fair was “Race to the Fair”, and as such there were quite a few car exhibits. There was a beautiful 57 Chevy that reminded me a lot of one my friend had in high school. Spent a lot of time under the hood of that car…
We finished off the day with dinner at In-N-Out, and then we played video games on the iPad with it hooked to the flat panel TV in the room. Another great day!
