Niall’s virtual diary archives – Sunday 26 January 2020

Sunday 26 January 2020: 22:21. Our first Christmas here in Ireland in two years went well. The kids seemed almost a bit surprised that we weren’t traipsing around North America in some form or other, but thanks to both me and Megan having heavy workloads upon us, we were tag teaming their childcare, which meant that they were out of the house every day whilst one of us adults invested in our future careers. So they were happy to get the high quality exclusive attention and day long trips away from our very small house, and they seemed fairly pleased, though there were occasional questions from Clara about Disneylandesque type experiences, specifically why we were not doing them ‘like we did before’.

Meanwhile, the other parent was at home, furiously working away: Megan was studying for her Accounting exams, me I spent the Christmas break generating these WG21 papers:

• P1028R3 SG14 status_code and standard error object
• P1029R3 move = bitcopies
• P1883R1 file_handle and mapped_file_handle
• P2052R0 Making modern C++ i/o a consistent API experience from bottom to top
• P2069R0 Stackable, thread local, signal guards

The R0 papers took the most work obviously, as R1 and later incorporate WG21 meeting feedback, and are just revisions of R0 papers. Most of my Christmas, indeed far more of my Christmas than I had expected, went on P2052R0 because the damn prototype took so long to make work competitively. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t fully invested in the Christmas holidays – whenever there was active family stuff, I did that. It was just that during passive family stuff like watching movies, I was banging away on the laptop.

Since Christmas holidays ended, it was back to the day job, apart from taking four days for a very brief honeymoon in Granada in Spain. This was the longest that we could organise childcare for, and my sister and her husband looked most exhausted when we returned, they not being used to childcare for more than a day. Granada was pleasant, quite touristy, but that’s no bad thing in mature Western Europe where gaudy bling tourism died out some years ago. It was all very refined, very Western European, similar prices to Ireland, reminded you a lot of California except vastly more ancient in terms of human artifacts. We passed by the Nerja Caves on the way home, humans have been busy painting in those for about forty-two thousand years or so, and the history of that region has been fairly unbroken since: you will find in abundance scattered remains from the Phoenicians, Romans, Moors and onwards. As much as Ireland contains lots of ancient stuff, a lot more of the very ancient and more recent ancient stuff remains in southern Spain and northern Africa – I suppose unsurprisingly, as said empires and civilisations only ever grazed Ireland, and there was only a comparatively small window between those and the retreat of the ice glaciers, unlike in southern Spain where it has always been warm and fertile since the beginning of humans as a species.

Looking forwards from now, I shall be attending the WG21 meeting in Prague in February, and I expect little other excitement before Easter, when we shall be in Belgium for a long weekend. Be happy!

#christmas #honeymoon