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Today marks the 15th birthday of my LiveJournal.
On some wild impulse, I sat down a little while ago to write a Perl script that counts the number of words that appear in posts in files I've been downloading using ljdump. It is a patch of code so quick and dirty that I'd be ashamed to show the thing in public, but it did correctly calculate said words in my "test suite" of files.
Over the past 15 years, to two significant digits, I've posted 2.4 million words here. I will not try to ascertain a more accurate number, since (a) I performed no "preprocessing" of the text, say, to get rid of markup or other formatting "funnies," and (b) ljdump has only downloaded about 7600 posts, whereas LJ insists I've made over 8,000, and I'm not in the mood to investigate the difference... at least not now.
So it is what it is. I find it curious that on the one hand, I'm not too surprised by the result, while on the other, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. That, and not being able to shake the feeling that there must be a viable memoir lurking inside some of those posts (if Sturgeon was right and 90% of my posts are crap—a failing to which I will freely admit—that still leaves almost a quarter of a million words that might be usable. (Of course, going back and finding the wheat and separating it from the chaff might be a job in itself, but I digress...)
All this said, please don't anyone get the idea that I'm getting ready to draw things to a close.
I still have a bunch of things I want to say. The clock is still running.
Cheers...
On some wild impulse, I sat down a little while ago to write a Perl script that counts the number of words that appear in posts in files I've been downloading using ljdump. It is a patch of code so quick and dirty that I'd be ashamed to show the thing in public, but it did correctly calculate said words in my "test suite" of files.
Over the past 15 years, to two significant digits, I've posted 2.4 million words here. I will not try to ascertain a more accurate number, since (a) I performed no "preprocessing" of the text, say, to get rid of markup or other formatting "funnies," and (b) ljdump has only downloaded about 7600 posts, whereas LJ insists I've made over 8,000, and I'm not in the mood to investigate the difference... at least not now.
So it is what it is. I find it curious that on the one hand, I'm not too surprised by the result, while on the other, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. That, and not being able to shake the feeling that there must be a viable memoir lurking inside some of those posts (if Sturgeon was right and 90% of my posts are crap—a failing to which I will freely admit—that still leaves almost a quarter of a million words that might be usable. (Of course, going back and finding the wheat and separating it from the chaff might be a job in itself, but I digress...)
All this said, please don't anyone get the idea that I'm getting ready to draw things to a close.
I still have a bunch of things I want to say. The clock is still running.
Cheers...
