The Gender Genie

Here's a bizarre web site - they reckon that they can tell the gender of the author of a passage of text simply by analysing the distribution of certain key words. Clearly a fun thing to paste in people's blog entries to see how they turn out (two out of three of mine, excluding this one, seem to show I'm female which doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the method - although to be fair it says it really requires 500 or more words to be effective).

http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html

China Update

So how are things going? Well, I had my vaccinations done last week - two injections for 5 diseases, not bad :) Couldn't move either of my arms for a few days but I'm OK now!

I decided to send off for my Chinese visa in the end rather than queueing at the embassy in person - the travel agents recommended "China Visa Services" who apparently do this. Should get it back soon, with any luck.

6 working days to go at the office, including today!

Highs and Lows

Y.A.W.S. 1 (detail)
Originally uploaded by Keith Marshall.

I've had a few weird and challenging days. On Thursday I passed my driving theory test at the first attempt, which was a huge boost to my confidence - I was convinced I was going to fail the hazard perception part, but in the end I got 84% so perhaps I needn't have been quite so stressed about it! That's the first step on my grand plan completed.

But before I can have my new beginning there is the little matter of a few endings to occur first - Friday saw the first wave of departures from the office as the redundancies kick in. Firm handshakes turned to hugs, sad faces shed a few tears before the day was out, and at the end only a handful of us were left in a quiet, empty office. There are still a couple of weeks to go for the few of us who remain. The breakup of the team was such a sad occasion - the core have been together for 7-9 years now, some people even longer than that. I hope we all stay in touch - you were all fantastic people to work with.