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Haven't had time to blog in months ...

• Have been working on litl during nearly all available hours... it took some time (doesn't it always?) but we have a great team assembled and it's a ton of fun to focus on writing the code rather than hiring, and see the rapid progress a complete team is able to make. (If you want to pile on, we aren't urgently hiring, but we probably will be at some point especially for the right person, so we'd love to see your resume.)
• There is nothing better than getting high-quality work done with a high-quality group of people.
• Clutter is rapidly approaching 1.0 ... spent some time this weekend patching the remaining issue that was driving me crazy, hoping to get it in under the wire. Emmanuele may be owed beers.
• It's gratifying that the new default home screen of Facebook looks a lot like Mugshot.org, a site some of us came up with at Red Hat. We coded Mugshot's personal-lifestream-thingy before Facebook's news feed came out and before FriendFeed came out. Not saying either site copied us, but it's still nice to know at least our idea was good (even though there were lots of reasons we weren't the ones to get anywhere with it).
• It used to be that the cool kids claimed to have listened to R.E.M. before Document (these are cool kids 20 years ago, I guess). I was listening to mutual fund manager John Hussman before he showed up on fivethirtyeight.com and in the Wall Street Journal. Am I a cool kid? Ha.
• New York Times tries to explain why people get distracted by small(er) things like millions in AIG bonuses, while missing large things, like billions to bail out AIG's bondholders. Possible Occam's razor answer: most people don't know what a bond is, but they know what a bonus is.
• Some spammer selling Hewlett-Packard products took over my Twitter account "hp", and now Twitter seems to have deleted it - and allowed someone else to grab the account. I emailed Twitter a while back asking them to fix it but all I got was an autoresponse saying "we've taken two weeks and still haven't gotten back to you, let us know if you still need help." I rarely twittered anything anyway, but ... lame.
• Funniest thing today was a random snark on Ayn Rand that Miguel reposted.
• Why is it reasonable to pretend that socialist or libertarian principles can guide a decision between 35% and 39.6% tax rates? Sure, 5% vs. 80% is an ideological debate. But 35% vs. 39.6% is a pragmatic debate. The vast majority of American voters agree on the main government spending items - social security, medicare, defense - that eat up most of our tax revenues. Controversial spending items are too small to affect the tax rate much. And the vast majority of Americans are opposed to 50-60% tax rates. We're going to stay right about where we are because big tax hikes and big spending cuts are both third rails. Here's some historical perspective; tax rates are much more stable over the last few decades than they have been over the last century.
• Amy discovered Cake Wrecks (scroll past Sunday, they have non-wrecks on Sunday). Awesome.