Don’t forget the exclusions in your pattern search
Last night, my good friend Larry Clarkin invited me along to witness his beloved Milwaukee Brewers take on the Washington Nationals. Me, being the Cubs fan that I am, had to work in a few “Cubs are in first place” ribbings now and again (although that didn’t last long as their now a 1/2 game back). I also felt compelled to share my Brewers game experience with the world of Twitter with the following post:
Unbeknownst to me, the Milwaukee Brewers also have a Twitter account. Also unknown to me (until now) is they have (what I’m assuming is) an automated bot trolling the streams of Twitter searching for the keywords ‘Brewers’ and ‘Milwaukee’ and retweeting them. Here’s what popped up on my Twitter stream a few moments later…
After I picked myself up off the floor from laughing so hard, Larry and I had a nice technical discussion (yes…we’re geeks talking tech at a ball game) in what the MIL_Brewers bot forgot to do. It’s one thing to look for patterns and act on them, but you also want to be sure to apply exclusions in your pattern searches as well. I’m sure the MIL_Brewers bot is scanning for foul language. In this case they might want to determine if ‘Cubs’ is a 4-letter word or not. As a Cubs fan, I was happy to see this posted to all of the MIL_Brewers Twitter followers out there.
The Brewers ended up losing to the Nationals 8-3. Maybe my Tweet sent a little bad mojo to the Brew Crew. :)
GO CUBS!


