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I love cool Internet toys!

And okay, the online test I took a few weeks ago did declare me a uber-geek, but still. This Gender Genie online toy is freaking cool!

What you do is paste 500 or more words into the box and it looks at the words and decides if the author is male or female. So, I took a 644 word section out of the middle of my last blog entry and pasted it in. The result: male. Female score was 1004 and the male score was 1054. I’m a boy?

Then I tried a section out of my chick lit story and guess what? I’m a girl! Okay, Allie is a girl. Out of 1082 words, the female score was 1287 and the male score was 1105. This was a section with both male and female dialogue but from a female point of view.

On a more female note, I tried putting in 613 words of dialogue between the two girl friends chatting about guys and ta-da. They are still girls with a female score of 839 and a male score of 680.

Even more interesting, I pulled a quick 96 words of dialogue belonging to a stiff-as-a-board-I-have-no-famale-sensitivity male character out of that same story and put it into the Gender Genie form. And guess what? He’s a boy! (Yes!) Male score was 175 and the female score was 4. It is hard to say if the score would be that slanted if I used 500 words, but either way, it is good to hear that I am making my males sound like males–although maybe a bit too much?

If you are curious about how they come up with male or female, here is some background from BookBlog’s site (which also contains a useful tip for writers):
“In the most basic terms, the computational linguists behind the algorithm, Koppel and Argamon, took a bunch of fiction and looked for trends based on gender. Using complicated formulas, they determined that male writers tended to write more about specific things like an apple, a book, or the car. In contrast, female writers wrote about connections to things like my apple, your book, or our car. The nouns themselves (apple, book, car) didn’t matter much but the preceding qualifier, whether an article (a, an, the) or possessive (my, your, our), did.”

 Try it out, it’s Fun with a capital ‘f’.

Tags: Internet, blogs, character development, just goofing, writing by Jean
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Oh man, moving from one computer to another is a pain in the A-double dollar sign.

Don’t get me started on why it is a ‘bother’. You don’t realise how many different software programs you use until they aren’t there and you have to download them. Or even better, until you discover that they don’t work on Vista. And you have Vista. Of course. Or the ‘new and improved’ version is different enough that you can’t find the effin print button or do the things the manual says it should. Not that printing is a possibility since our network is in various states of disarray and I’d have to download drivers anyway…

So I went out for coffee with a friend today and since we went to this really cool little cafe that I like, I did my adventure in coffee land thing that I usually do. Today, I forked over $3.25 for a Green Tea Latte. I looooove their Chai Tea Latte, so why not green tea? I go through enough of it at home. So how was it? Well, let’s put it this way…I drank it because I paid $3.25 for it. So what did it taste like you ask? Well, seaweed actually. I know! Seaweed! “Hello? Yes, my green tea latte tastes like seaweed. Um, I know you don’t have to be a mermaid to like seaweed, but um, well, I don’t really care for seaweed in hot milk.” Oh well. Those are the risks you take in coffee adventure land.

Over in blog adventure land, there is this one IP address that keep spamming my blog. At first, I’d get the email saying there was a comment awaiting moderation and my stomach would do that little excited hiccup–you know what I’m talking about, right?–anyway, then I’d open the email and find it was this annoying site again. I’ve gone through the menus trying to see if I can block a URL or IP address. So far, no luck. But there has to be a way! There has to. And I will find a way. Oh yes, I will. I mean, I got spammed 9 times in the past 12 hours. 9! Yes, NINE! By the same site. Honestly, I’d like to march over there and tell them to ‘f**k right off.’ That is if they were within marching distance, which I am pretty sure they are not. So, I will get to the bottom of this even if I have to march electronically. My inner geek has some wicked inner resolve. (It’s the whole ‘inner’ thing twice, which means you’ve gone one ‘inner’ too deep and you’d better seatbelt up honey, cause you’ve gone too deep.)

Tags: blogs, life by Jean
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Cool news!

“Blogger Christian Lander’s STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE, a ’study’ of
upper-middle-class white people, satirically exposing a culture that
prides itself on individuality and diversity, yet manages to express
these beliefs in exactly the same way (white people: Whole Foods, Wes
Anderson, Starbucks, graduate school, kitchen gadgets, Barack Obama,
Apple products, the movie Juno, expensive sandwiches, etc.), promising
two-thirds new material, to Jane von Mehren at Random House Trade
Paperbacks, with Jill Schwartzman editing, by Erin Malone at the William
Morris Agency (NA).” From Publishers Lunch (Publishers Marketplace)
March 24, 2008.

I thought this was a witty site and guess others have as well. Some of the comments on the site indicate that some people just may take themselves a tad too seriously.

Then again, the idea of someone’s website content being published in book form isn’t that new. For example, The Darwin Awards.

I am also curious about this deal:

“Marie Claire editor Sarah Wexler’s LIVING LARGE, weaving together
first-person reporting and original research to examine America’s
obsession with supersizing — whether its our cars, TVs, meals,
churches, or homes — and the real-world impact of our hunger for all
things big, to Yaniv Soha at St. Martin’s, by Emmanuelle Alspaugh at
Wendy Sherman Associates (NA).” From Publishers Lunch (Publishers
Marketplace) March 24, 2008.

This is something I will want to check out. I wonder if she will talk about how six foot fences are a slow, persistent removal from our neighbours and those that we will need to lean on for help if the economy really does take a nice little (HUGE) nose dive. Right now, we have the wealth to go it alone, but when we no longer have that, our separation is going to hit us hard. Who will we turn to? We are disconnected and turning away from our humanness and filling the void with consumer products and that only makes the hole bigger–thus the need for bigger products to fill that bigger hole.

On a lighter note, here is something fun for the writer inside: shirts! Check it out by clicking here.

As well, for a few hoots and giggles, check out Nathan Bransford’s March 31st blog entry on Mad Lib queries. If you don’t laugh, go get checked out, there is something broken. 

Tags: blogs, books, just goofing by Jean
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Hey there.

I am playing with the blog’s theme again. Slowly, things will shape up and change, so if you see some strange things, fear not. So things will shape up or I will discard the whole thing and start over. (Again.) I wanted to pull my banner into the blog, but I’m having trouble finding a suitable theme to bastardize. My hacking skills when it comes to code is very limited.

 Hang in there and let me know what you think of the new theme/look.

Tags: blogs, website development by Jean
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So now that I have my site all revamped and this blog software down pat, I want to change it all. I have new ideas in mind. Ideas which, of course, will require me to learn all sorts of new stuff. That means that I likely won’t actually do it. Not yet, anyway. I think I will change the ‘theme’ of my blog page’s style though. I have decided that there are much nicer ones out there.

 There was an interesting post in the Ask Daphne section on KT Literary’s website which has got my stomach doing little flips. Here is a link: http://www.ktliterary.com/daphne.html. It is the posting on ‘what is published’. There is a growing debate in the comments section on whether to post writing samples or not on your website. I have posted mine and I think it is a good idea. At the same time, my stomach squeezes like a dishrag full of water at the thought of someone plagiarizing me or me doing something ‘wrong’ and wrecking my chances of getting published. Eeek!

I went blog hopping this morning and ended up on a blog that was really good. And it made me feel inferior. Which is silly because we all have our own style. I think fighting this cold has got me a bit down. Maybe I shouldn’t edit my own work this morning–I might slash and burn everything!

In the end, I think today is a day to hole up at home. Well, except that I have to go wrestle 20 4-year-olds wielding paint brushes this afternoon. That should be entertaining. I think I had better take some cold medication before I go. I will not succumb to this cold, I will not!

Tags: blogs, life, website development, writing by Jean
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