Horrific but entirely accurate

A well-meaning friend introduced me to Wordle yesterday by showing me the word-cloud it creates from my blog feed. Essentially it goes through all the text and then picks out the most common words, attributing greater size to those used more frequently.

Take a look at the result:


How horrifying is that? Look how big the 'Mum' is! It's MASSIVE! And you can hardly even see Chris on there, he's tiny and under Mum.

I was absolutely appalled. I'm so sorry to have bored you all by going on and on and on about my mother. Although I don't feel like she dominates that much of my life, she clearly dominates a fair bit of what I think about and a lot of what I write about. It's not healthy really; I'd much rather my word cloud featured a few more positive words like 'fun' and 'enjoyed'. But no, they're not even in there I don't think. How sad.

I resolve therefore to try to write a bit less about my mother, to think about her perhaps a bit less (fat chance, she rang me twice yesterday and she's already texted me this morning), and to allocate more of my attention to pleasant and enjoyable activities. I shall then review my Wordle in a few weeks and see if it looks a bit more positive.

I'll fail of course. It's in my nature to be negative, but I can try.

UPDATE: Oo oo, 'enjoyed' is on there actually! It's very small and on the far left. Let's see if we can't nurture it to a more decent size.

New blog design

I've been working on a new design for my blog for the last few days, and I've finally uploaded it. So that means you all now have to comment and say how nice it is, and those of you who read this via RSS (yes Lee, I'm talking to you) have to actually click through to the web version for once.

Bear with me while I sort out any little teething problems with it, like bits I've forgotten to style or whatever. Blogger has a complicated proprietary scripting system for spitting out the blog data and it's taken me a while to unpick it all.

Right, better get on with some work now, this has already taken up far too much of my time!

Blog redesign

I'm very disappointed that I spent ages redesigning my blog and not one person has commented on it. Tsk.

I'm not sure I like it anyway, it wasn't quite how I imagined it in my head. I might do another design, maybe something bluer. God knows I need something to occupy my time at the moment.

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In the cold light of day

I'm not sure drunken blog posts at 1am show me in a particularly good light, so maybe setting up blogging from my phone wasn't as good an idea as I thought. I'm either going to come across as Angry Drunk (see 'Sometimes I just get so annoyed') or Horny Drunk (see post immediately after), or Wildly Erratic Drunk (see time difference between posts).

Or maybe I just need to learn some self-restraint. That might not be a bad idea in general actually.

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Blogging

I'm enjoying blogging at the moment, I seem to have had a few things that I want to write about. I've also found some other people's blogs that have been fun to read, and I quite like that (after much MUCH stress and it not working properly) I can now send little blog posts straight from my phone. That means I'll be able to write little bits over the weekend, rather than having to save up things and then remember to do them when I'm at work. I do, of course, have internet access at home, but I've hardly ever written on my blog from there. Why would I want to when I can do it in work time?

Lots of people don't write as much as me in their blog posts though, I'm wondering if I go on a bit. Often they seem to write just a few sentences, but perhaps more frequently than I post. Does that make me verbose and boring?? Hmm, we'll see. If I post more often I'll write less, so maybe I'll try doing that.

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Four weeks later...

God, SO much time has passed and so much has happened since I last wrote on here that it's almost too daunting to want to start doing it again! But, having blogged the whole of the run-up to the wedding, I can hardly not blog the actual event, now can I? I think I'll have to try and be fairly frugal though, or we'll be here all day...

So I shall try to catch up by doing posts summarising all the wonderful and exhausting things that have happened since 25 July, namely:

• the wedding
• New York
• San Francisco
• Stuart and Helen's wedding in Wiltshire
• The epic adventure to get from Wiltshire to darkest Sweden in 16 hours (while also finding some time in there to sleep) for Rob and Emma's wedding

I think that amount of detail is about the most I can manage! And that'll more or less bring me back up to date. Phew! So let's start with post number 1...

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To bitch or not to bitch

I just spent a little while clicking on the 'Next Blog' link that you get at the top of this page, just to see what sort of thing other people post on their blogs. My god there is some random rubbish on here! Some people just post photos, which is fine, but one person posts a daily picture of their tigger doll. What the hell is that?? There are lots of made-up blogs that try to get you to go to porn sites, some random ones that are just gibberish, and one lady who has posted her entire shopping list including how much she saved with her coupons.

All in all, there were actually very few blogs from people just posting about what they've been doing, what interests them, and those sorts of normal things.

It started me thinking about what I write on here, and what I'd like to write on here. Sometimes I would really like to have a good bitch about people who have annoyed me, but then I encounter a problem. Because I've syndicated my blog with my facebook profile, I'm linked to practically everyone I know on facebook and so they can find their way to my blog. I don't actually want to upset anyone, even if I bitch about someone it doesn't mean I don't like them, it just means I'm annoyed. So then it means I end up not writing about anyone I know on here, in case they read it...

So either: I bite the bullet and just write what I think, on the assumption they'll never see it and if they do, tough luck. Or I keep my blog abstract and about people I don't really know or work with. Hmm, what to do what to do...

New blog

I have decided to ditch the LiveBlog application in facebook because no-one could actually read it very easily. So I'm now trying out Blogger, and using a nifty little application called Flog Blog to feed my posts into my facebook profile. I guess I could feed it into lots of other places as well, and saturate the whole world with my opinion, that'd be nice for you all wouldn't it?