Greetings from Hualien, Taiwan, where I’m teaching English to kids! I hadn’t been to Taiwan in eleven years or so.

It’s been pretty good so far. I’ve made some good friends as well as seen an old friend. And, actually, it could be a little better, but it’s still awesome nonetheless.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Whooo classical liberalism! Every man deserves “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” indeed. Cheers to the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson. Happy Independence Day.

Here’s something really cool.

Many of us are familiar with tag clouds, in which larger text indicates higher frequency of that string in some list. A “Web 2.0 thing,” this is often used on del.icio.us and has become popular on blogs using tags. Someone created a service called Wordle, that can generate fancy, customizable text clouds of this sort based on any input. Also, another “Web 2.0” thing that many of you are familiar with is Last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler, back in the day), a service that collects the music you play on your computer and/or iPod to create statistics, using ID3 tags or the equivalent for non-MP3 formats.

Now, someone got the bright idea to take your last.fm profile and turn it into a Wordle image. Follow the instructions, and you’ll be set to create something like this.

Above was a Wordle thing I made with the last six months’ worth of artist frequency from my last.fm account. Below is one with my overall top artists, since June 2003… kinda. You may also click on these two images for bigger versions.