Hal - Deliberately Basic

About ten years ago I was looking for a program that would analyze a text document, and do a statistical analysis far beyond the simplicity of word processors. At that time I was writing technical documentation, and designing and building computer programs. With the exception of a couple of highly sophisticated software applications, built for highly sophisticated computer systems, and far beyond my reach, I could find nothing. So I built one.

I called it Wurdz. Wurdz did pretty much what I wanted it to do. It will look at every word in a document and return information such as, word count, character count, unique words, percentage of unique words in the document, and a facility to find a particular word in a long document. The output from Wurdz can be saved and imported into a spreadsheet application such as Excel® for extreme analysis.

For about a year I sold Wurdz, and although I never made a lot of money from these sales, I was amazed at how many people were willing to pay $10.00 (I think that was correct) for it. Like most people who use a computer, I used a lot of free software, and still do. I decided it was time to give something back, so I began to give Wurdz to anyone who wanted it, for no cost.

As my IT business model changed, so did my web sites. Wurdz followed that site change, and has been listed on several sites over the years. It is still listed in certain writers sites, with now defunct links to it. But the most amazing thing about this whole story is, Wurdz will not die a natural death. Somehow, people trace it down, and I get mail asking about Wurdz.

Wurdz has a few bugs. I discontinued development of Wurdz years ago, and there will never be any further development. Wurdz has no spyware, and as far as I can tell, will not harm your computer. If you decide to you use Wurdz, you do so at your own risk. I accept no responsibility for any loss of data, or any other malfunction of your computer system.

Here is an excerpt from a site where I once sold Wurdz.

This program is primarily directed toward writers or those interested in dissecting and analyzing text documents. But even if you only write letters or similar small documents, you may find it helpful to look at the way you’re putting sentences together, or word frequency in your text. Besides that, it’s fun to analyze books that someone else has written. For example, a classic novel. You can ascertain the vocabulary, at least in the current document, of an author by seeing the percentage of unique words used.

One of the more fun things to do is compare contrasting words in a document. How many times did you use me as compared to you, or love and hate? After you compare a number of words, you begin to see patterns emerge that go beyond mere words. If you’re writing an essay about your parents, how many times did you use male gender words compared to the female gender words?

Wurdz will run on Windows 95 through Windows XP. I have no idea if it will run on Windows Vista, so don’t ask. My primary system(s) are Mac OS X or Linux.

Want a copy of Wurdz? Download it HERE. To repeat, use this program at your own risk. Do not ask for help; there is no support. It is what it is, and will not be further developed.

As back in the days of giving Wurdz away free, I am interested to know who is using this program. I ask that you send me a message from the CONTACT page and let me know if you think it is worth turning over to someone else to be fully developed, and brought up to date.

Hal

Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
Clay is moulded into a vessel;
Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.

From “Tools” in the Tao Te Ching

Once upon a time, I worked in the same office with a man who would find something good in Nazi death camps or torturing puppies if these subjects happened to come up. I don’t know if this rose-colored attitude is developed, or innate. I suspect a little of both is involved. Either way, a pollyanna can drive me to the brink of insanity with that seeming inability to see anything except idealistic notions.

A positive, realistic outlook on life in general is a good thing, as long as you are not blind to a very basic fact of life. There can be no good without evil. Life is about positive and negative, yin and yang. Positive and negative balance each other. Therefore, negative is not necessarily a bad thing, it simply is.

Back to the fellow in the office who could see no evil. Regardless of what was going on, he walked into the office every morning and said, “Good morning everyone! What a beautiful day it is today.” On one particular morning, there was what some deemed to be the worst thunderstorm in the history of the state, perhaps even the world. And he entered with his usual smile and sunshine salutation.

Now, imagine a group of people who are not quite awake, sipping coffee, groggy, shuffling paper, trying to get oriented with the tasks of the day. His greeting invariably drew negative response, usually in the form of expletives even I wouldn’t repeat. On occasion, he was hit with something, or several things at once. Paper weights make excellent projectiles.

For years I have cursed and damned Norman Vincent Peale for embedding in the American psyche this dogma of positive thinking. Failing to see both sides of a situation can lead to wishful thinking, and in some cases disaster. An absolute positive thinker is, in my mind, not much different than an absolute negative thinker. Absolutism is radical, and radical thinking can lead to false premises. In other words, you may think something to be true, but that doesn’t make it so any more than thinking something is false. But, what about attitude?

Would that we all could maintain a good, positive attitude, even in the most dire circumstances. I have never met anyone who could do that. An example: Your mother dies. Will you walk in the door of the funeral home with a sunny smile and talk about how great it is she is gone? Of course not, unless you are a nut-case, or hated your mother. How will you react to the awful things in life such as this?

If you are like most people you will go through the various stages of grief, anger, a little depression, and finally acceptance. Even a die-hard pollyanna can see that not all this is positive. It is, however, balanced. You have made the journey through a valley to reach higher ground. What is the best lesson to be learned from this?

Tolerance. If you have a friend or relative who is having a hard time of it, do you bombard him or her with the positive thoughts and solutions about the situation? Do you point out “…remember the good times you had…” or some such drivel? Or, do you have the common sense to commiserate with him, show that you understand, and acknowledge his reality? Sometimes the best way to help someone is a simple, “Wow, that sucks.”

Whether you are blind to the negative pole, or blind to the positive pole, you are blind.

As a final thought, when I was growing up, it was alright to talk about negative things at home. A bad day at school, the dog died, my mother hated the woman next door, my father had a hard day at work, were all subjects that could be openly discussed at the dinner table. Looking back, I now realize that releasing all that negative energy out in the open, dispersed into the ether, minimized it, and there was not much left except the positive energy. I always felt a little better after dinner.

I am always amazed at people who think they know me, when in fact they either don’t know anything about me, very little about me, or simply don’t care. Those who I consider friends assume I hold the same religious, political and moral values as they do. The three most sensitive issues in our public lives are taken for granted by those who make assumptions about our character.

So far, much to my amazement, I have received little political spam for the upcoming presidential election. In years past I have filtered email from certain people I know into the trash, (the mail, not the people) knowing nearly everything I get will be anti-somebody. If these people think, and I wonder if they have ever heard of fact-checking or critical thinking, what do they think of me?

Much has been written about passing on junk email of any sort. Lack of discretion, ignorance and plain bad manners has run rampant, passing time-worn, fabricated shit around and around the Internet. PTPS, Pal-to-pal spam, is fast becoming the latest addiction.

Last year I posted an article about addiction and oil. Note to self: Consider a political spam addiction post. But do it soon, they are dropping like flies in the primaries.

I love to get jokes, links to funny videos, or in most cases pictures. I love to laugh. I love to start the day with a laugh, and if I think something is funny, I may pass it to a select few who I think will enjoy it as much as I have. What I hate to see is, someone open their address book and pass on a message to their 5000 plus contacts, that has been passed on by 1234 others before them. These I don’t bother trying to see what the hell the message is, after being mucked up with greater-than signs.

Some observations I have made about political email missives and those who propagate political propaganda:

• They are usually ultra-right wing conservatives. It is rare for me to get a message from the more liberal side of the political spectrum. I find this remarkable, not because liberals have nothing to say, but because they are not in my face with whatever their agenda might be.

• There is a plethora of anti-Clinton messages. I think these must be written by men who are scared of women. I always tend to think they have a deep-rooted psychological problem with their mother and their penis.

• The messages often are reactionary, supposedly from a celebrities. Robin Williams and Red Skelton are frequent players for this made-up gluck.

• They attempt to play on the emotions of recipients. Bill Clinton got a blow-job, so it stands to reason he is evil. For Christ-sake, he defiled the Whitehouse. Somehow, I cannot compare a blow-job to dividing the country, making most of the world hate us, or ruining the economy.

• These messages, if nothing else, are self-serving and almost never have a grain of truth to them. It is apparent to me they are written by some terrified right-wing puritanical putz, with his dick in one hand and keyboard in the other.

Thank God for spam filters.

A new bill in Mississippi would make it illegal for restaurants to serve obese people. Three members of the state’s House of Representatives introduced the legislation. If the law is passed, and that is not going to happen, it would “allow health inspectors to revoke the license of any restaurant that repeatedly feeds extremely overweight people.”
I love this quote: J Justin Wilson, an analyst for the Centre for Consumer Freedom, a restaurant industry lobby group, said: “I’ve seen a lot of crazy laws but this one takes the cake. Literally.”

Apparently, the law was never expected to pass, but intended to draw attention to the fact the Mississippi has more fat people than other states. This worries me to death, and I’m glad someone had the foresight to inform me.

Every time I see a do-gooder trying to make more laws to save me from myself, I get more and more frightened - scared shitless would better describe how I feel. We have serous problems: the economy is going to hell, illegal immigration, religious fundamentalists nuts (Not to mention some Muslim groups too), internal attacks on the very foundation of our constitution, an ever-widening class devision, and… fat people.

What we actually have is WMD - more and more weapons of mass distraction.

If I gave this serious thought, and I did for a moment, because of my “mind your own fucking business” attitude I have, it raises certain questions. The primary concern is, who defines what obese means in real terms? For example:

• Weight is arbitrary. Is a 250 pound body-builder bulked with muscle, fat? By accepted standards, he is not.
• Body-mass index, or BMI? This is fraught with argument and exceptions the same as weight.
• A simple eye-ball exam, such as “No doubt about it, this ol’ boy is a fat-ass.” In fact, this may be the best method. If he ain’t muscle-bound, and BMI is not accurate, but you can see that he needs a chair for each cheek, he just may be a fat-ass.
• The medical definition of obese is generally taken as being 20% over ideal weight. Talk about loose, what is ideal weight? Insurance charts would have us all looking anorexic, and for many this is the case.

As for me, yes I could lose a few pounds and I know it. I do not, however, think of myself as obese. If I lost more than 20/25 pounds I would be too thin for good health. I don’t smoke, but don’t care if you do. The same applies to drinking, drugs, or whatever you choose to do with your body. And please, don’t tell me that self-abusive people will drive up insurance rates. Most of them probably don’t have health insurance, and corporate greed is what makes your rates high.

H