If you want the result of some real coding to do what I am doing,
TweetyPy was released today by Muffin Research Labs. They created a TextMate
bundle for Twitter that allows you to post from TM. TweetyPy allows you to post to Twitter and to get your friends timeline or the public timeline from the command line. This util is written in python to format all of the text into clean columns. Works wonderfully with GeekTool and is much cleaner than my solution.