Gaige's Pages

An enterprising web author has put up an very cool dynamic web site that contains tag clouds of US presidential speeches from 1776 to the State of the Union this spring. For those unfamiliar with tag clouds, they're basically lists of words that vary in size and color based on frequency or popularity. It gives some idea what the main themes and pushes of each speaker were. Scroll the slider back and forth to see back in time. Interesting to note the increase in use of the word "Terrorists" (as a proportion of words used) from the 2002 State of the Union to subsequent years.

The first pictures from our trip to China are up on the new Gallery 2-based website, Fong's China. The Fong refers to Irene Fong, our tour director with Pacific Delights Tours who ran our trip in China.

WIth less than a week before the mid-term elections here in the US, it seems reasonable to reread and think about George Orwell's excellent essay, Politics and the English Language. If you've only read 1984 and/or Animal Farm, it's worth noting that Orwell wrote prolifically as a journalist, commentator, and literary critic.

Reading the reponses of one of my sitting Senators, George Allen, to a local newspaper's candidate survey, I found the following comment by the Senator: "I voted for the Internet Consumer Bill of Rights Act, which addresses the issue of Net Neutrality in a way that promotes Internet freedom by keeping government regulation at a minimum and protecting the rights of unfettered Internet access by consumers." The interesting part is that, although as a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee of the Senate, he's had the opportunity to be present at multiple readings of the bill (S.2686), the Committee has not made a move on it since June of 2006.

Carol, my folks, and I are all back from China, after over three weeks traveling from Tibet to Hong Kong. Many great stories to tell, and Carol & I managed to shoot nearly 4000 photos, so we'll be trimming that down and putting some up relatively soon. For now, we're just trying to dig out from underneath a great amount of piled up work here.

Researchers at Princeton have released findings from their study of the Diebold AccuVote-DS (which the EFF claims is Diebold's most widely used voting product) and have concluded that there were major flaws in the system that they tested.

This is very good news for those of us in the Mac community that have been pining after some of the high-performance RAID systems available on other platforms. For a long time, 3ware has been a vendor of choice for hardware RAID in both the SATA and ATA arenas due to their reliability, reasonable pricing, and wide OS support. In particular, support for FreeBSD has made these folks the belle of the ball for many UNIX installations. But, the Mac was left out.

Well, Microsoft has announced Zune, it's answer to Apple's venerable iPod franchise. Let's see what it has to offer.

An article from PC Pro talks about a Xerox effort to create paper that automatically erases itself 16 hours after it has been printed upon. The process, called "transient documents", was demonstrated at a product unveiling in the UK. Not a lot of details, except some comments about the process requiring ultraviolet light, but sounds very intriguing.

Yesterday, the Paulsen household had one of those annoying, all-day, computer problems. On Wednesday, I'd upgraded the RAM in Carol's PowerBook from 768MB to 1.25GB in order to increase performance. The change was supposed to have no negative effects... unfortunately, a disk drive fault left Carol without a functional computer all day yesterday. The culprit: bad blocks.