This one line in this post at Jesus' General make the entire blog worthwhile

His Clear Skies initiative allows us to see the air we breath and his Healthy forests Initiative will finally gives us a clear view of the forests once he removes all of the trees.

Hopefully you can guess who he's referring to.

Salon interviews Neal Stephenson, which is interesting. However, I just wanted to preserve this specific answer for future reference myself, as it pretty much mirrors how I've tried to describe programming to my wife:

One of things you like to do on the side is dabble in programming. Do you see similarities between writing code and writing fiction?

I think there are common threads between writing and programming. That's a really easy statement for people to misunderstand and twist around so I'm a little leery of making it. All I'm saying is that the thing you're making -- the novel or the computer program -- has got a very complicated and finely wrought hierarchical structure to it. The structure has to work right or the whole thing fails. But the only way you can work on it is by hitting one character at a time. You're building this thing one character at a time while having to maintain the whole structure in your head. That description applies equally well to programming and novel writing even though they're very different activities.