Soldier Ant 

This is nice. Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon chew the fat, with Time's Lev Grossman riding shotgun:

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven's sake. They're creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. 'No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!' We like it here in the gutter!

JW: We've been co-opted by the man.

NG: Last time I was at Comicom, there were like 5,000 people there, and the audience was going to try and cut me off with stuff to sign. They had to figure out how to get me off the stage. All of a sudden, I'm getting to the end of the conversation. Dave McKean and I were doing a Mirrormask thing and we're ready to leave the stage. I look up and they have a bodyguard line of 30 Klingons. They're six-foot six and four-feet wide and they have the foreheads and they had linked arms. We were being lead off behind a human wall —a Klingon wall—of Klingon warriors. And I thought, how good does it get?

For my friend Gary, I present Rules for Drunk Bastards, which includes the following pearl:

For the sake of the children, leave the pistol at home.

While you're at it, leave the children at home, too.

I love reading John's blog - slightly geeky, global in outlook and casually comfortable in it's erudition. It's alot like talking with John face-to-face, in fact.

Did I mention that -- when I was courting my wife -- John suggested that I impress her with the virtual gorillas at Tech's GVU. Damn -- all them smarts, and the guy's a romantic too. (Thus endeth this man-crush interlude.)

God bless the English, who are still finding new and innovative ways to enjoy soft-boiled eggs. "Toast soldiers" are thin-sliced sections of toast, perfect for dipping through the cracked neck of an upright egg. And some guy has invented a device to make perfect toast soldiers:

"There has always been a danger of cutting your soldiers too fat or too thin. If they are too fat then obviously they can't fit into the opened neck of the egg which is infuriating.

"But if the soldiers are too small then there's the risk of a catastrophic failure after they're dunked into the yolk. The simple act of withdrawing the soldier may cause it to break in half, forcing the person who is eating the egg to resort to a teaspoon."

Bryce and the spoiled one, originally uploaded by briankeithglass.

My brother Brian is staying over tonight, and he captured the bratty one and I in a (rare) embrace.

Worth mentioning is this brief but insightful article from Time: What Triggered the Toledo Riots? in which big-city tensions arrive in small-city Ohio, carried by 14 bigots from Virginia. WTF.

It looks odd, but if it performs as advertised (Stand-up Bass Sound with No Hassle) then the bass box might just be worth a look. From watching these videos, I am liking the sound that thing puts out.

My old friend (okay, actually he's not old, the kid's like still only 30) Ben Fry has a new website up and running! Kickass. Browse around and check out some of Ben's award-winning info visualizations. (Particularly cool is isometric blocks although I have to admit I have almost no idea what I'm looking at here.)

Flickr User Model, originally uploaded by soldierant.

I've been doing some concept diagramming for work lately, and I've found myself enjoying it immensely. I'm really having fun with the design aspects of the diagrams and enjoying the way that little touches (type size, color highlights, icons) can enhance the readability of the resulting document. However, since it's for work (and a set of products that may not see light for 12-18 months) I can't share much of it. I did post some sanitized versions, with all the object-names obsfucated, but that just didn't seem wholly satisfying.)

So over the weekend I invested some time in a diagram that I can share with the internets: a simple Flickr user model (regrettably incomplete -- but I realized that if I tried to include the whole Flickr-verse that this diagram would go beyond labor of love and straight into excercise in folly.) Click on the image above to get to larger versions + comments.

Or download the diagram as a high-res PDF file (374Kb)