Random bits

I thought this line from a recent New Yorker article was phenomenal:

"[The Founding Fathers] approached religion in more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it."

Isn't that fantastic? You could teach a seminar on that sentence.

Other news:

After a depressing series of flat tires, I've switched over to a new model called Armadillo. They seem to be working really well so far... it's only been a few days so I can't generalize yet, but I've been pleased with their performance. Impressively, they don't seem to noticeably slow me down either, so it's an improvement all around.

I recently started playing Oblivion. I expect to become even more solitary as I spend the next few months obsessing over the amazing breadth of stuff to do in this game. One bright side: If I'm lucky, this obsession will allow me to resist the siren song of GTA IV, dropping at the end of the month. I want this game very badly. But getting GTA IV means getting a PS3. Getting a PS3 will strongly tempt me to upgrade to HDTV. Maybe it's worth geeking out on an RPG if it means another grand or two staying in my wallet.

Google just announced that they received 1788 submissions to the ADC. Very crudely speaking, if they were to pick the 50 winners at random, each entry would have a 2.8% chance of winning, or about 1 in 36. I'd love to see a graph of the scores they give to the entries. I get the feeling it will be a hard-core bell curve. I know some people entered calculator applications or similar things that are unlikely to make a splash; on the other extreme, you have some companies putting in really original and high-quality apps with man-months of work in them. I suspect that the massive middle will consist of independent developers submitting innovative but unpolished apps.

Man, the weather has been gorgeous out here lately. I know, it's always beautiful in northern California, but spring is a special kind of beautiful. Last weekend I went hiking in Santa Teresa Park and saw more flowers than I have on any previous Bay Area hike.

That's it for now. Peace out!