A troll carrying a club

A while back I created the Daily Patent. A Twitter bot that gets a random patent and tweets it out periodically. I started by hosting this on a Google Cloud virtual machine but eventually decided to look for something more suited to this kind of task.

Here’s my review of several places you can run a simple Twitter bot.

A while ago I received this voicemail on my personal cell phone:

Executed by the US treasury - Intending[ed?] your serious attention. Ignoring this will be an intentional second attempt to avoid initial appearance before a magistrate, judge or a grand jury for a federal criminal offence. This is the final attempt to reach you. To resolve this issue immediately and to speak to a federal agent call back number 7162269750. I repeat 7162269750. Thank you.

Rather than call back immediately (the feds can wait a few hours right?) I did a little digging.

Redshift Epochs from Dates

I’ve noticed that I end up looking for the same small subset of Redshift time-related conversion operations when I need to do things like change epochs to timestamps, deal with timezones or manage time ranges. To save myself some time I decided to throw them all into one post that I can reference later - I’m also hoping these will be useful to others who find themseleves interacting with Redshift.