I've been on vacation this week, if that wasn't clear to you all. There's been a lot of "doing things," notably this website, a nifty lunch at a big tech company you've heard of, family stuff, bumming around New York City with R., and writing seemingly thousands of emails regarding projects, events, and possible meetings that I will probably not have time to commit to or maintain once I return to my regular routine. But it feels good to be able to pay attention to all sorts of work that I'm forced to neglect most of the time.

I really like this new wiki, and I really like the new publishig work flow, the way that people have interacted with the site and the ability to blog casually again. Here are some exciting links/thoughts:

  • Willie Taylor, an English/Irish folk song, sung in this version by a couple of friends at Bard College (Jeremy Carter-Gordon and Ben Bath). It's nice to know that I'm not the only person in my generation who's into this kind of music
  • pinboard.in, a delicious (rip) like, link-sharing/storing service. The thing I like most about Pinboard (I have an account, but I don't really use it.) is that they charge a nominal fee for creating an account. This supports the site and controls who gets an account. While I'm not sure I like a world where content/services on the web are all pay-to-play, I really don't like the world where no one is willing to pay for anything digital, because there's an expectation that things ought to be free.
  • I wrote about this more than a year ago, but I think that halvm (an implementation of Haskell that runs on bare Xen) is really cool, and probably an indicator of things to come, but it'll be a while before this (and other tools like it) are really ready for general use. Which is probably a good thing because engineers and IT people need some time to adapt to thinking about software in this way.

Keep warm!