Return of The King

It's been a long time since I've blogged. I've had a good reason. My wife and I had our second child on November 17. We had lots of family come out for the birth of Raymond Howard Galpin, and then of course there were the holidays... So no time for blogging until tonight.
A lot has happened since then, too much to try to go back and write about everything. So I'll just hit a couple of big things:

• Yahoo! -- Yahoo has been doing some very interesting things. Their acquisition of del.icio.us is the most interesting. They were already trying to do something similar with their "My Web." I don't know if del.icio.us actually has more users (or even as many,) but it certainly had a lot more mindshare. Yahoo also did a couple of hosting deals with some of the popular blogging software. To me this along with their other acquisitions (Flickr and Konfabulator) indicate a clear strategy of trying to embrace disruptive technologies. Yeah they probably are just doing this because of their compettition with Google, but they still deserve credit for such smart acquisitions.
• Patriot Act -- The Patriot Act is one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed. I was very happy to see that the filibuster threat was going to keep it from being renewed. The President's attempt to turn public opinion was actually a little surprising. It seemed very Schwarzenegger-ish, which made it even more suprising given Arnold's lack of success in 2005. The news about illegal wiretaps being endorsed by GW definitely helped the Democrats' stance. Let's just hope they can keep this up in 2006.

Alright that's enough for now. I'll definitely have more "year in review" kind of stuff to write about as 2005 winds down and 2006 begins.