So, according to Snopes, it is indeed true that the Canadian postal code for Santa is "H0H 0H0"... See, those whacky letter-number combinations come in handy at the Holidays.

An article from Zatz Not Funny! covers a trend in the selling of the new PS3 and Wii consoles that may be as old as sales itself. It turns out that ebay requires PS3 and Wii listings be accompanied by photographic (photoshopic?) proof of ownership (receipts, photos of boxes, etc …

I'm pleased to announce that after nearly three months of sitting in the upstairs library in "test mode", my Mac Pro has finally graduated to the number one spot in the house. The venerable G5 Quad (all of one year old) is, even as we speak, headed to California to …

Alan Odgaard, the author of TextMate (a very cool text/code editor for OS X), has mostly decided that version 2.0 of TextMate will require Leopard. I cannot say that I'm surprised, as Leopard contains many features that will lure developers to it. More interesting is that this program …

Let your fingers do the clicking and get yourself over to The Eggcorn Database where you can see details about this and other eggcorns, such as fullproof and other greats. Some of these are from non-native speakers, but many are just misinterpretations of words never seen by the user in …

Reading on the net today about a blog entry from a Microsoft employee about the importance of backward compatibility, I was struck by how absurd the assertion was. The premise was that an IT department had showed up in Redmond and had indicated they had over 9000 install scripts for …

Apparently Apple Japan thinks that what's good for the US is good for Japan. Check out the "Get a Mac" ads. You probably won't be able to understand exactly what they're saying, but you'll get the drift. Does anyone else feel a "1.1" aspect to these with the PC …

CNet has published an article rating senators and representatives based on how they voted for and against technology issues. It leads to some interesting conclusions, including high marks for George Allen (R-VA)--whose stance on net neutrality is up for grabs, but who's definitely in the camp of not calling …

Lawrence Lessig comments on the Value of the Public Domain (a paper from the Institute for Public Policy Research) reminding people that Copyright is intended to encourage authors, not to discourage new work. Some good points in both his summary and the paper on which he's commenting.

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 …

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. The experience was amazing. We traveled from Tibet to Beijing, Xi'an (home …

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 …

Reading the responses 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 …

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 …

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. Diebold, for their part, answered with a press release, accusing the researchers …

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 …

Well, Microsoft has announced Zune, it's answer to Apple's venerable iPod franchise. Let's see what it has to offer. The "killer feature" of Zune is the Zune Marketplace that supports Zune-to- Zune sharing of "full-length sample tracks" of songs, pictures, or playlists. According to the press release, you'll be able …

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 …

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 …

A very interesting article appeared on Aaron Swartz's blog (thanks to Daring Fireball for a pointer) where he talks about the breakdown of those creating content on Wikipedia and about how (contrary to comments by Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales) the site appears to be constructed by a very large number …