As it were...

The other day we got a hamster for the girls, and they named her Violet. Here's what my eldest said to me this morning when she came down from bed.

"Can I tell you something cute I just saw, dad?"

"Sure", I replied.

"This morning when I checked on Violet she was curled up sleeping at the bottom of her ramp! It was so cute! Either that or she's dead."

So gruesome. Happy Halloween!

One of the things that's always frustrated me about Twitter is that it's very very hard to find your own tweets from more than about a month ago. I've always wanted something that would save my tweets, and tell me things about them.

There are lots of services that will do this for me, but then I'm paying a monthly fee and I still don't really own the data, it's stored someplace I can't really get at it.

This is where ThinkUp comes in. It's an open source social media analyzation tool that you can install on your own server. Just like all the services you need to let it access your twitter account, but unlike the services it's your own piece of software doing it, you're not giving them unfettered access to your data.

I've been running it for several days now and I'm very impressed. It does a good job saving my data and telling me good things about it. They made it really easy to make it run at intervals; you can do old fashioned cron, run it manually, or make your favorite rss reader ping a url every so often to do it.

It's in active development, has good documentation, and there's an irc channel for live support.

I highly recommend it.

The other day my wife and Sophi were joking around. Sophi was standing by the stairs and my wife was on the couch, holding some scissors. Sophi pretending to talk incessantly, and my wife said "hush child!". Sophi said "Make me!". My wife said "I'll cut your tongue out!", to which Sophi replied "No you can't, I can run, and you can't!" Because you can't run with scissors or course.

Our neighbor across the street gave the girls a magic set, and they were discussing the stage names they wanted to take. Sophi said "I don't care, as long as I get to be the beautiful assistent."

This morning Sophi was washing her face with some special face soap, and yelled from the bathroom "HA! Face soap is like shampoo for your eyebrows!"

Apparently Taylor Swift was in town last night for a concert and I didn't know until yesterday afternoon. I was chatting with Garrick Pohl from Zipments and we got talking about kids, and I told him I have girls 9 and 11.

"You have girls that age and you didn't know Taylor Swift was in town?" He said. "Man, my girls have been in a tizzy for weeks!"

I was relating this to my wife and she laughed and asked him if I told him that our girls sing Lynryd Skynyrd.

It was then that I realized once again what cool kids I have.

This morning my wife greeted my youngest as she arose from bed:

"Ah, here's my other princess."

"Mom, I'm not a princess, I'm a geek."

"Can't you be both?"

"Nope."

"Which would you rather be a princess or a geek?"

"A geek."

Rock on.

Dear Lazyweb,

I have a CSV file, fields surrounded by double quotes, comma separated. There are a bit more than 230K rows.

Some of the fields have hard returns in them, so it breaks my rows, and my importer (phpMyAdmin) chokes.

What's the easiest way to remove only those hard returns? I'm thinking something like a fancy regex in vim to remove hard returns from the ends of lines that don't end in double quotes, but my regex-fu isn't that awesome.

Anyone know how to do that, or have a better idea?