Back

It’s been a year. I’m back. I don’t have much new to say, but I’ve been starting to write blog entries in my head, so I might as well write them here. I’ll be aiming for three posts a week for now.

I’ll start with a few quick comments that came to mind as I skimmed my blog posts from November 2007 to November 2008.

• Obviously, Obama did win, and he did increase spending on infrastructure, and it does seem to have helped end the recession. Open questions are how long unemployment will stay high (employment historically lags economic recovery) and whether there will be any structural reforms to prevent the same sort of thing from happening again in a few years.
• We were able to trap the feral mother cat several months later and had her neutered as well. No new feral kittens have been seen on our street for some time.
• Everything continues to get more complicated.
• Iraq is doing much better than I ever thought it would, and Moktada al-Sadr seems to have disappeared. Was the U.S. right to invade? Was it worth the cost? I haven’t seen much discussion of these questions recently.
• On the other hand lots of people are discussing whether it’s worth it for the U.S. to keep pushing that Sisyphean stone in Afghanistan. How long should the U.S. continue? What does success even look like?
• What’s up with Israel and settlements? Just stop building new ones, already.
• The Watchmen movie. It was better than I thought it would be. I’m not sure it was actually good, but I did enjoy it. The credit sequence was really interesting–in fact, I just saw the same idea in Zombieland.
• The gcc in C++ work is now available as a configure option in gcc mainline. I’m letting is rest before I make the next push toward making it the default.
• The gold linker seems to be getting a fair amount of use, judging by the bug reports. The most contentious issue is different handling of linking against shared libraries which themselves refer to other shared libraries not mentioned in the link.
• Robert Zemeckis is making yet another movie using technology that fails the uncanny valley test. I won’t be seeing it.