On Saturday, March 20, my friend Jay Wilson and I were guests of Bell Micro at the famous 12 hour sports-car race. As always, this was an event that combined world-class endurance racing (it is probably second only to the 24 Hours of Le Mans in significance), with the following sideshows:

• Car-show-type exhibits from some of the most interesting auto manufacturers
• A broad range of individually-owned vintage sports and race cars in various states of repair and respectability
• An absurd redneck carnival decorated by what can charitably be called 'folk art' and fueled by a biblical deluge of beer and tequila

Despite the absence of Audi this year, Peugeot deserves all respect for their flawless one-two victory in the LMP1 class and in the race overall, which makes them the first French manufacturer to ever win at Sebring — that Tricolor on the grandstands will certainly stand out at the end of a long line of German and Italian flags! Congratulations (and enthusiastic thanks for inviting us!) are also due to Bell Micro for once again finishing on the the podium, this time in third place in the GT2 class with the Rahal-Letterman BMW M3.

This building at 1515 Flagler Drive has been a bit of an eyesore since it took hurricane damage in 2004. It was brought down with explosives on Sunday, the third tallest building to ever be demolished so in the United States. And I was lucky enough to be there!

I set up my Canon G6 on multiple-shot mode for this—it did pretty well, especially given that I was just holding it above my head in the tightly-packed crowd.

First, let me preface this tale of User-Interface Woe with a disclaimer: I am far from an Adobe fanboy. I love open-source software. And of course, like everyone else, I really hate Adobe's prices. But I've learned to use Illustrator and Photoshop pretty well, so now, of course, switching to anything else causes work not-so-much to grind to a halt as to slam into a brick wall while I figure out all of the different metaphors, keyboard shortcuts, and little tricks I need to approach anything like my former productivity.

Trust me, I yearn to cast aside all Adobe products! Which brings me to Inkscape, the open-source vector illustration program. I really, really want to like it as a replacement for Adobe Illustrator. It's one of those open-source apps I install every couple of years to see if it's There Yet. And, yet again, I'm starting to think that it's not. Which brings me to the first problem I encountered on my most recent attempt at mastering Inkscape.

Picture it with me: an MMO based in the Italian Renaissance. Races could correspond to the various city-states of Italy, or to foreign nations, perhaps. Play as:

• Merchants (sea voyages out of Venice, perhaps?)
• Unscrupulous churchmen
• Stiletto-armed assassins
• Scheming Medicis
• Your typical painter-sculptor-scientist-architect renaissance genius (should be an epic roll, this!)

Imagine riding into battle atop some Leonardo-designed war machine! Fencing with rapiers! Imagine going on quests:

• Steal the head of John the Baptist for the glory of Florence
• Dissect executed prisoners to level up in Anatomy
• Bring back exotic goods from around the Mediterranean
• Earn yourself an equestrian statue in your city-state's palazzo with military exploits

There's something very appealing about this, at least to me. It would be just the thing to finally get me to play an MMO.

is Neal Stephenson. Without a doubt! I've read all of his books save one (haven't gotten around to Zodiac yet). I devoured all three weighty volumes of his Baroque Cycle, and bought Anathem the very day it came out, which I almost never bother with for any other kind of new release—artistic, technological, or otherwise. I didn't read the Harry Potter books until years after they were published, and I own no Apple computer products at all!

So there is some empirical evidence that Neal Stephenson is my favorite author. But lately I've been dwelling on why that might be, and I think I have part of an answer. Reading his books I am constantly running into ideas and observations, clearly and artfully developed, that I've thought of before, only vaguely. I've spoken with a friend of mine, also a Neal Stephenson fan, about this, and he confirms it is so for him also. It's a thrill to see someone with real talent flesh out the sketchier, dimly-lit parts of your own mind.

This is an intellectual pleasure, of course, but there is a more primitive reason as well. It hits that "someone gets it" part of the brain, provides the sense that you are not alone, that there are other people like yourself.

This is a feeling that all humans crave, but that unusual humans experience only rarely.