Clean up some less-than-stellar python in this project

[thundergolfer]

There's some sloppy programming in here. Just before saw that I was calling len(something) around 5 times for the same something variable in one function.

Go through and clean up bad code like the above, and anything that's not idiomatic python.

[trevorgor289]

hi, is this still something I can work on?

[thundergolfer]

Sure! I'll accept PRs.