"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!

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.

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!"

"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.

"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.

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?

Making a cd costs money. Sometimes a lot of money. If a musician wants to make a living from his or her music, they need to sell a lot of cds, or if all the cd money goes to the label (which it typically does) they need to run some pretty successful concerts.

A by-product of this is that buying music can often cost a fair amount. This can often keep that music out of the heads of people who can't afford it.

I don't have a huge problem with this until we start talking about music that is intended to communication the message of the Gospel to people. Why would we ever want to limit the number of people that message can reach?

On the other hand, someone has to pay for that music to be created properly and sent out.

But what if a person or group of people paid for the music before it was created? It used to happen all the time, it was called patronage. It still happens in other arenas, missionaries have been doing it for hundreds of years.

This is why I love what my friend Rick is doing. He's a good musician, has two albums out already with moderate success, some local airplay, etc. Now he wants to make another one, and he wants it to be available to everyone for free. How can this be done?

If you release the music in digital form then the only real costs are the production and server and bandwidth. Rick estimated that it will cost about $5000 to create his next album, but he doesn't have that. Who does? God, and he stores it in the pockets of His people.

Rick set up a project at Kickstarter, a web site that lets people raise seed money for any given project. He's looking for people to come together and raise $5000 so he can pay the people who have previously volunteered their time on other projects.

I think what Rick is doing has an importance independent of his music. I think the Gospel could be spread much further if it weren't encumbered by the need for money to change hands before you can hear it. Every time I think about that I think of Jesus in the temple with a whip.

So I'd like to ask you to support Rick's album venture, even if you're not necessarily a fan of his music. I think this model is important and valuable, and I think the spreading of the Gospel is important.

I did.

Click here to contribute to Rick Hopkins' 3rd Full Length Album

It's a robo call, so we've just been hanging up. Today I got tired of it, and listened to the end for the "press something to end this madness". It said "Press 9 now to speak with someone about lowering your interest rates".

I pressed 9 and immediately a guy came on and said "Did you press 9 to lower your interest rate?"

I said "Actually we closed our account years ago and would prefer not to be contacted again".

I expected a hard sell, but he simply said in a rushed voice "All right enjoy your high rates goodbye" and hung up.

I appreciate the lack of a hard sell, but I think it's pretty crazy for them to be deliberately snarky like that.