how did yearbook bring out so much other stuff

Helena and Cinda are both having to fill out surveys for their yearbook. Doesn't that just hit home the fact that there's really not long at all until this stage of our lives are over? Looking at Cinda's answers, I remembered that she was in the same class as me in year 7 and 8. I don't really remember talking to you much during that time, Cinda. Do you? But I still talk to you while I'm not really talking to the people I was talking to in year 7 and 8. Is it a sign of my advanced years that I get so nostalgic at a drop of a hat or a sign that I'm just a person that always thinks too much? No matter which one it is, it's led to this long introspective piece of rambling after the cut that you are under no obligation to read.

Wordle and TagCrowd

I found a really cool web application - Wordle. It creates a tag cloud of words in a piece of writing, and the words that occur more frequently is bigger. This is one I did of George Orwell's novel 1984. (click on the image to see it full size)



Doesn't it look cool? You can use it to find the most important points in a piece of writing, or find which words are overused in your own writing. You can customise the font, colour and layout. You can even print them out and hang it on your wall. Here's another I made of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.



Another similar web app is TagCrowd. It doesn't make designs that are as pretty as Wordle, but it does have a few more practical options, like a stop list to exclude words you don't want, grouping similar words and showing the frequency of words.

Snowing outside the window

Since it's a new year, I thought, 'That's a good excuse to change the blogskin', and here we are. I went through a few templates and settled on this one. It's a lot simpler than my previous one, but I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

It took me ages to get the chatbox to co-operate though. I just couldn't get it to the right width to fit. And blogspot doesn't have the time stamp format of "MMM, DD", so that looks a bit messy.

Now please sit back and appreciate the pretty photographs I have in this post. It's the view outside the photographer's window when it snowed in Toronto today. All credits for the photo goes to Zhang Jigna (aka zemotion), an amazing photographer. I have her blog in my blog list, so you can go and look at the original post titled 'Snowing'.

Rain

It's raining. The sounds come in clearly through the window: the faint, even pita-pata of raindrops on pavement; the quiet low rumble of faraway thunder, reassuring rather than frightening; the rustling of the trees bending and shuffling in the wind; the occasional sound of cars driving past my window, tires flicking up water and making a "shaaaaaa" sound on the wet ground.

Once in a while the cool breeze sents the wet, clean smell of rain into the room. The cool tendrils of air caress my hands, or feet, or face, and disperse into nothing, leaving only the impression of a slight chill on my skin. The world is cleansed by the rain, and the memories of heavy, sweltering days are washed away. The air seems lighter, as if a cool hand had lifted a smothering veil of warm air.

No one strays outside, no sound of frolicking children down the street, all evidence of human presence is diminished. The clattering of mahjong next door that was heard several nights in a row is missing, insects that screamed in the heat are silent, even the streetlights seem dimmed and the lights from houses across the streets are absent all together.

The sky darkens into night, the rain peters off. But for the the steady dripping of water from the roof, all is quiet.

My English tutor says my writing is lacking in descriptions, has too many long sentences and too many commas. I'm trying to work the description bit first. And because I love rain, of course.

The Present

We stand at the sole meeting point of two diverging eternities, the past and the future. Before this instant is the unchangeable past, set in something stronger than stone and untouchable beyond the barrier of time. After this instant is the uncertain future, fickle and fragile like crepe paper butterflies. The only time we can act in is the moment of here and now.

Where did this come from? Constructive criticism?