The feeling I experienced when I saw my twitter bot come to life took me by surprise.  After working on it for close to two hours (a little on and off), I was invested in the process but never expected to feel such satisfaction when it worked for the first time.  I imagine the feeling is similar to what an artist or musician must feel when they create or compose an original piece.  A feeling of great power came over me (in spite of the fact that I did no real coding of my own).  This was, by far, the most exciting moment of the semester for me.

screenshot laurus

Thanks to Zach Whalen’s handy dandy guide, the process was pretty straightforward (and fun!).   I experienced a few minor hiccups in the process (pasting codes in the wrong box, adding an extra space here and there, etc.), but overall it went smoothly.  I did, however, make it a little more complicated by deciding to add the contents of one of my fav. sci-fi books into the spreadsheet.  It took me about half an hour of googling variations of “how to paste the contents of a google doc into one column in google sheets.”  (This was after taking the pdf of the book I found online and converting it to a google doc.)  So, I learned that there needs to be a “newline” (like a line break) recognized for where to start a new cell in the column.  Once I figured that out, I searched for a way to do that without hitting enter at the end of each line (I just going to email you, Alan, next time).   In the end, I just hit enter at the end of each line and stopped after about 5 pages of text, which worked out to about 150 or cells of text.  Good enough for me!  I set ti to post every six hours.

Life,_the_Universe_and_Everything

So, periodically, my alchemical avatar will be tweeting random lines from Life, the Universe, and Everything for you reading please (and possible confusion).  (But I didn’t really do any of this, of course, it was all Laurus Vagus Ambigo—she’s busier than “I” am these days.)

http://gph.is/2pnvCAP