Soldier Ant 

Found Dog - Please Retweet, originally uploaded by soldierant.

Well, not really, but it sure feels like I did. I surely had my part in it. This beautiful, sweet terrier was young and healthy on Thursday of last week when I found her wandering in an alley near our home.

She's dead tonight, Monday, put out of existence by an overly efficient and overtaxed animal control system, by an owner who failed to step forward and save her, by pitbull regulations that seem deeply flawed, and by… me. Someone who was trying to do the right thing, but ended up failing her like everyone else. I'll never know her name, but I'll never forget her.

I was going to write much more about this, but I don't know that there's much more to say. The wife and I are rather upset, but we're glad this girl will never be hurt again.

Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of Typefaces, originally uploaded by soldierant.

This is a brilliant piece of motivational design on Typedia, a wiki-esque encyclopedia of typefaces. Right on the top of the site, they greet you with 3 things you can do to make Typedia a better site. These are generally related to building out the completeness of a typeface's page (providing examples, or gussying up the page's presentation.)

There is obviously some primary value here (if visitors actually do these things, then the site benefits!) But there's a sneakily-awesome secondary benefit as well: just by virtue of seeing these suggestions, it's already imprinted upon your mind that this is a community effort site. This is a site where you're being asked to contribute in a positive way. The corollary may also be: jerks need not apply.

Even if you don't ever take up one of these Good Deeds, their presence helps set the tone for your engagement with the site. If you want to be a helpful person, this may be the place for you.

(The language helps too. It's friendly and approachable.)

I saw an amusing bumper sticker today... plain black text on a white background.

Very cute, and like most good bumper stickers, it made me pause to consider it (for slightly more than the 2.3 seconds it took me to get the joke.) Strangely enough, my first question was "what exactly is a 'handbasket' anyway?" It sounds kinda metrosexual.

This of course, led me to question the origins of the phrase "going to hell in a handbasket." This page cites an early 20th century origin for the phrase, but points out at least one earlier (18th century) citation of a similar alliterative turn of phrase, 'head in a handbasket.'

Another source points out that going to heaven in a handbasket was perhaps the earlier iteration of the phrase. And going to heaven in a wheelbarrow perhaps trumps all!

Which, like saying Texas is just South of heaven is actually just a clever misdirection of the 'going to hell' meme—you can't get to heaven in a wheelbarrow, so you must be goin' someplace else!

So, I've been bloviating about coworking on this blog for… um… damn. A while now. Since September of last year, I guess. (Tho' as I mentioned then, it's been on my mind for longer than that yet.) I wanted to post some current thoughts, and give some history about progress of the past year.

Continue reading "Coworking in Columbus. An Update." »

I've been horribly remiss in mentioning that an interview I conducted with an old friend and colleague has been up over at Boxes & Arrows for some time now. (The second part just went live a day or so ago.)

Colm Nelson was my colleague when we worked together at AOL in Mountain View, CA. We never worked in the same group during those years, but—even then—Colm stood out as a super-talented and capable designer. For the longest time, he was the UI lead for AOL's Screen Name Service. SNS was a type of 'federated login, single-sign on' solution for AOL's corporate-owned brands—Netscape, Compuserve, AOL—as well as third-party partner sites. It was a lot like today's vision for OpenID (only using your AOL/AIM screen name, therefore 'closed') and—from my comfortable observational distance—it looked like a gnarly, nasty project: a buncha different stakeholders to please; a buncha interdependent schedules to account for; a million oddball technical details to track, edgecases to account for; 3d party partners to handhold; AND taking design direction from 'the AOL mothership' in Dulles. Colm, to his everlasting credit, handled it all with aplomb.

It didn't surprise me in the least to learn—a couple years later, only after I'd moved away from CA—that Bungie Studios hired Colm away from AOL to handle the interaction design for their (as yet unannounced and still-super-secret) Halo 3 title.

Colm became my friend later, during our regular Thursday-night Halo 2 fragfests for, oh, most of 2005 I guess. Some weird amalgamation of AOL people from the Bay Area, and LAN-party friends of the same formed the nucleus of Colm's TLC (Thursday Live Crew.) You really haven't taken the measure of a man until you've watched your wife hurl a sticky grenade into his face from the passenger seat of a racing Warthog, you know. (Yes, my wife was a regular participant in the mayhem—motherhood's mellowed her out a bit, though.)

Anyhow, I really wanted a chance to get some more of Colm's story out there. He's a 'classically trained' UX/interaction designer who spent some time in the consumer web world, and he's gracefully made the transition to the gaming world. He's got a unique perspective on how those skills translate, and how the game industry can best utilize folks like us. So, please do read and enjoy: Flowmaps & Frag-grenades, Part 1 and Part 2.

This is exciting. And it feels like it warrants more than this simple, dashed-off blog entry. But, unfortunately, it's late and I want to get up early tomorrow to hit the gym. (I've fallen off the fitness wagon lately and I'm really starting to feel it.) So… dashed-off it is…

I am very proud to announce that Randy Farmer and I are thisclose (close enough that I feel perfectly comfortable writing about it, and not worried in the least that things won't go through) to signing a contract to author a new book in the Yahoo! Press line (published in partnership with O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

The book is entitled Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems and there's a companion site, buildingreputation.com that went live today! The subject, of course, is an extension of work at Yahoo! in building a cross-company platform for modeling reputation on social media properties. (And I've posted several related entries here on Soldier Ant as well.)

Obviously, I couldn't be more pleased about the book. It's going to be a lot of work over the next 4 or 5 months, but I'm ready to rise to the challenge.

I've known this was coming for some time now, but just spotted it 'in the wild' today. I worked on elements of the UI for attribute exchange between sites with Open ID (the SREG extension.) I tag-teamed on the interaction design with the (awesome) Rob Metzgar, then the (equally awesome) Marc Perry brought the visual love.

If you're visiting San Francisco soon, or live there now, heed the dining advice of my homeboy Bradley. The guy's a native (well, Sunnyvale—close enough when you're from Ohio) and he's got a talent for sniffing out delightful experiences that are off the beaten trails. Regard, Bradley's recommendations...

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Man, I bet this cartoon was crap.