• Pali Canon Summary (PDF, 2013)

• Consanguinity Table (PDF, 2018)

• Celsius to Fahrenheit Cheat Sheet (PDF, 2024)

This is a simple tool that generates five paragraphs of random “pseudo-English” text having structure and letter frequency similar to that of English language. The current implementation returns five paragraphs of random text with these characteristics:

<?php echo 'hello'; ?>

• Each paragraph has between 8 and 12 sentences.
• Each sentence has between 5 and 15 words.
• Each word has between 3 and 7 letters.

What is this good for? I suppose it’s good for Greeking, sort of like what Lorem Ipsum does, but in fake English rather than fake Latin.

Technical Details

The back-end code is loosely based on a Perl script I wrote years ago. That script was more of a multi-purpose command-line tool for generating (potentially large volumes of) test data. For this tiny project, I really just wanted to test creating an AWS Lambda function exposed as a simple ReST API.

You are welcome to download and use my buttons to link back to any of my blogs!

Film Simulation Recipes

Other FujiFilm Stuff

• 2026 Print-ready ISO Week Calendar
  • Past Years: 2022, 2023, 2024 2025

• TPS Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese

• Eating the Dragon, a three-book Chinese character frequency reference guide

• More Chinese Language Resources

• Demystyfying Generative Artificial Intelligence, slides to accompany a presentation I delivered at a meeting of IT architects (PDF, 2024)

• Assessing Classification Model Performance Using the Confusion Matrix, a quick reference for Data Mining students (PDF, upd. 2024)

• Choosing a Hypothesis Test (aka “The Burkhardt Chart”), a quick reference for Statistics students (PDF, upd. 2025)

😬 I’ve spent six of the last seven weeks in Arizona. There were a couple of tense weeks because there’s only so much togetherness with one’s mother one can take. But she returned home at the end of February and the sailing has been much smoother since then.

✍️ It’s interesting that a change of location can so profoundly change my routine. I haven’t been reading or posting to my Mastodon account as much. I haven’t been keeping my daily journal regularly. I haven’t been watching as much television. On the other hand, I’ve spent more time outdoors and have been more physically active these weeks. So I guess that’s good?

💻 Part of the “problem” is that I’m still working every day—on Eastern time no less! My work day starts at 5:00 AM and ends at 2:00 PM. I’m an early bird anyway so I mostly don’t mind.

🥵 If you’ve been following the news you’ll know that we’re experiencing unseasonably high temperatures. In the last few days we’ve topped 100ºF two or three days in a row. Believe it or not, It’s not uncomfortable to be outside—as long as you’re in the shade. You don’t want to be in the sun for very long at the hottest part of the day, and with my work schedule that makes getting out on the bike a little harder.

🚲 Speaking of biking, I did get out early on Saturday for a nice long ride. It’s so lovely to see the mountains in almost every direction. We saw a lot of the usual wildlife—prairie dogs, roadrunners, and even a bobcat—along the trail.

🐍 Oh and on the topic of wildlife... My eldest daughter came to visit and we went for several really nice hikes. On one of them I had my first snake encounter. It scared the bejeezus out of me, but it was just a harmless little gopher snake.

🍹 Our new neighbors get together every day for “circle time” (happy hour) at 3:30 PM—one of the perks of living in a 55+ community. I’m really grateful because it’s given us a chance to meet a lot of people very quickly and we already feel quite at home.

📮 I sent a post card to some friends on the other side of the country today. I hope they enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Would you like to get a post card from me? I’d be happy to send one if you share your address with me.

That’s probably enough rambling for now. Talk to you soon.