Basic method:

1. Export tweets
2. Process into words
3. Count word frequency
4. Upload to Wordle

Wordle accepts data input in the form:

word1:55
word2:23
...

First output was:

This was a little skewed towards the various travel and weather related feeds I follow (@SEtrafficnews, @nationalrailenq, @NRE_SEastern, @SEplaying, @KentWeatherObs) so I then excluded them…

And finally… a Wordle of my TwitteringsRamblings:

Actual method:

sqlite3 save.db "
  select text
  from tweets
  where substr(created_at, 27, 4) = '2011'
      and user_screen_name not in
         ('SEtrafficnews', 'nationalrailenq',
          'NRE_SEastern', 'SEplaying', 'KentWeatherObs')
" |
perl -e '
my %d;
while (<>) {
    chomp;
    s/http:\S+//g; # exclude links
    my  = split(/\W+/);
    for () {
        $d{ lc $_ }++;
    }
}
for ( sort { $d{$a} <=> $d{$b} } keys %d ) {
    print "$_:$d{$_}\n" if $d{$_} > 250 and $_ ne "";
}
'

It then occurred to me earlier that I didn’t actually know how many tweets I read in two months… the answer appears to be over 40,000.

Posting this fact on twitter, the first reply I got was “how many are about sandwiches?” to which the answer is 39. Wow. What wonders

I thought about the only useful thing I could probably do in the short term was make a pretty graph of the rate of tweet flying past my friends timeline per day… so here it is:

Raw data

Other interesting facts:

• @TelegraphNews accounts for 6% of the throughput
• 62 tweets contain the word “argh”
• 350 mentioned “facebook”

I may get around to thinking up new and more interesting stuff to do with this data later… maybe

UPDATE:

Sent to my MP today:

Dear Julian Brazier,

My apologies for taking up yet more of your time, however our
Government seem to be leaving me little choice but to do so. I wish to
draw your attention to a story breaking in the Daily Telegraph today
(Saturday 14th March, 2009) regarding so called “e-borders”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4987415/All-travel-plans-to-be-tracked-by-Government.html

This would seem to be, if accurate (and I can find no cited references
to active or pending legislation), a HUGE step into the surveillance
culture which campaigns such as NO2ID are opposing and trying to publicise.

I don’t know if it is “too late” to do anything about this but, even if
it is, I would ask why this is necessary (to fight international
terrorism?!) and how it will help… surely the checking of persons on
“watch lists” can be done without the need for such a tracking database
of the general public at point of entry/exit.

What will be next? Will travelling outside your county (or perhaps into
London on a “sensitive” day) require written permission from a
bureaucrat before you’re allowed on a train?

This yet another appalling regime being apparently pushed in sideways
hoping law abiding citizens will roll-over and take it without any
question. I don’t have anything to hide about my whereabouts, but I
find the whole idea of registering my movements with an agency and
having that retained for a decade disgusting.

Once again, I’m sorry to have taken up your time but this is an issue
which is often overlooked and needs more attention.

Yours sincerely,
Me

He’s usually quite good about replying to emails so I will await the response…

Ingredients:

• 3 Lamb’s Hearts
• ~1 glass of White Wine
• 2 cloves of Garlic (chopped)
• Olive Oil (infused with garlic?)
• 1 Lamb Stock Cube made up with 8fl oz of water
• Rosemary to taste
• Black Pepper to taste
• 1 tsp Lemon Juice

I started by trimming off the top of the hearts as they tend to be quite fatty and the arteries/veins are quite chewy, then diced the remainder.

Warm the oil in a frying pan (medium heat) with the garlic until the garlic starts to turn brown then drop in the heart and allow that to brown for 5-10 minutes.

Add the wine and lamb stock and allow to reduce for about 15 minutes — the juice should start to thicken slightly. About 5 minutes before serving, add the lemon juice.

Serve with mashed potato and vegetables.

The week went, more or less, thus:

1. Friday night: Drive from the Deep South to Inverness via Tebey and Stirling — the A9 is a fantastic road at 2am
2. Arrive at Inverness at about 0700 Saturday after a nap near Dalwhinney and catch a train to the Kyle of Lochalsh (because we can).
3. Conclude drive to cottage and unpack
4. Go for an extremely soggy walk around Inverewe Gardens (nearby National Trust for Scotland property with lovely trees etc).
5. Sarah and her Dad went to attempt a walk over the hills behind our cottage to Rubha Reidh lighthouse … but were forced to abandon this due to encountering a 4″ deep river which the buggy was thwarted by… so, instead, we drove Once there, we found the old supply jetty for the lighthouse complete with former railway for whinching the supplies up the steep incline (with kart and whinch in the gorge below).
6. A trip out to the other side of Loch Ewe to see a tiny distillery and while going there found a small NATO navy base… which initially dates from when the loch was using extensively during WW2 by the Navy with a lot of the old emplacements still evident.
7. We left after lunch on Friday having seen the surrounding hills covered in snow overnight to drive back during the day to see the landscape.

On the Sunday, we received a phone call to say that Mum had been taken into hospital suffering with what turned out to be a stroke hense leaving a bit earlier than we would otherwise have done.

She’s doing really well, having been transferred to Addenbrookes (Cambridge) a few days after it happend near Enfield. Having intially been unable to move her left side or talk at all, she’s now making reasonable sentences (while still struggling with remembering some words) and, although having issues with sensation, able to mostly move but is still quite weak and gets very tired easlily.

We’re taking Benji in to see her as much as possible

See xkcd for more time wastings

I may be in a minority, but although my screen may be 1024×768, that
is not the resolution at which my applications run. I often (nee all
the time) have many applications open at once and the most efficient
way to know what’s going on in all of them is to have them layered and
*not* filling the whole screen.

The old 600 wide layout was perfect for this and was a design concept
I would reccomend to others too. The new design, however, doesn’t
actually provide any more space for actual content but, instead, makes
the navigation bars around the edge much “bigger” (that is wider and
fatter). This means I need to scroll off the side to see some of the
sidebar content (which annoys me greatly on any page — sideways
scrolling should never be required).

Furthermore, what were considered headings further down the page under
“AROUND THE UK NOW”, the section headings used to be bold and are no
longer. This makes it much harder to skim down for what you’re looking
for.

I am aware that people far cleverer than I have had a hand in creating
this new design, however it is, in my opinion, a step too far into the
“Web 2.0″ idiom. The site was, previously, clean, concise and easy to
navigate for all. That is no longer the case, I fear.

Thumpers are (up to) 48 Terabytes of storage in 4u… that’s pretty amazing really.

This has had the slightly annoying side-effect that the .snapshot directory has disappeared meaning user-driven restores aren’t possible on some of their servers (the functionality is there on Thumper, but called .zfs and appears to be hidden further up the tree, or maybe disabled at the moment).

Go Go Dreamhost!

Having recently moved into an area where the nearest supermarket is a
Morrisons, I have been using the store more frequently than before and
have noticed the following “niggles” with the way the store is
managed.

The store feels “cluttered”. At the ends of most of the aisles, there
are extra shelves which constrict the ends of each aisle by about 40%
making the apertures less than one trolley width. Also, in the same
area, the main central thoroughfare is considerably thinner than it
could be because of a vast array of extra product locations (products
that are, often, otherwise available in other parts of the store)
again, constricting the available space by 20-40%.

Secondly, the small (3′ square) metal containers strewn throughout the
store, as if by random, containing products often not in the slightest
related to the aisle in which they are found just get in the way.

Many thanks for your time in reading this. Please let me know if you
have any comments on the above.

This is the bounce:

MailMarshal has stopped the following message:

Message: B475052fc0000.000000000001.0001.mml
From: foo@mafoo.org.uk
To: postmaster@morrisonsplc.co.uk
Subject: My point of view

because the email address – postmaster@morrisonsplc.co.uk – does not exist.

What were they doing out and in a position to do something like that without parental guidance/observation?

The age of criminal responsibility should be at such an age as to when children are out and about apparently with enough nouse to know right from wrong. This may be different from child to child, but it should be up to the parents to decide if their child is ready to face the big wide world and is responsible enough a young-adult to do so. If they are not up to this yet, then maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to get in to such a situation.

I note how the BBC article makes absolutely no reference to the parents and the children’s upbringing — did they miss out on some vital moral lessons? Were they just being kids and playing around without realising that throwing stones at other people is wrong? If so, why did they think this?

It makes me quite sad, actually

If we do raise the age of criminal responsibility, on whom would fall the responsibility for the father who was killed by these boys? No one? The parents? I don’t know.