Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments it is apt to emerge again and again independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

The demise of Google Reader if logical is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

If I designed a computer with 200 chips I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

Patrick Henry did not say 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.

Death is inevitable but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.

For 'The Haunting Hour ' I thought it would be a lot of fun. It was great to play this cool kid role. My episode is called 'The Intruders' and my character is this mean angry teenager because her younger brother was just born and he gets all of the attention. She's always playing tricks on her family and there are some cool twists.

So when I got to be about 13 or 14 I started listening - even though my parents music was way cool - to contemporary hard rock at that time which was Aerosmith Cheap Trick Black Sabbath AC/DC Ted Nugent and all that and that's just where I came from.

If the choice is between doing something supercool and having no one hear it and doing something equally cool and tricking people into putting it on the radio I don't think the second option is some big sellout.

Growing up politics never trickled down to the areas we come from. But people from Obama's camp and Obama himself reached out to me and asked for my help on the campaign. We've sat and had dinner and we've spoken on the phone. He's a very sharp guy. Very charming. Very cool.

What drives me now is the fact that I feel like I still have so many tricks that I want to learn and so many things that I can still do. And so many cool things outside of sports that I have been doing.