Soldier Ant 

Here's something cool I discovered, purely by chance. In the message-compose pane of an Adium conversation, you can 'page back' through your composition history with (on a Mac) 'option-up arrow.' I would assume that the Windows equivalent is Alt-UpArrow.

I guess a good question would be 'Why would I want to do this?' (After all, how often do you repeat statements made on IM that you've already made within the same session?) It's a nice little easter-egg interaction, but it seems like a carry-over from a command-line-interface mentality.

Actually, I just thought of one scenario in which this functionality would be very handy: if you interact with any AIM (or YIM, or MSNM, etc.) bots on a regular basis, it might be nice to repeat commands, varying them by an search-query, or an attribute or the like.

Fall Back, originally uploaded by Ejaz.

Flickr member Ejaz commented on one of my diagrams recently, which led me wander his photo stream. He lives in Karachi, Pakistan, and I just think there's something wonderful about getting a window into his daily life there. Neighbor kids playing cricket, a colorful fruitstand. Of course, some of the most moving images are from work that Ejaz is apparently doing with quake survivors.

This is a pleasant surprise. My Flickr User Model is the latest feature on visualcomplexity.com, a great resource for information visualizations of all kinds. I've noticed an influx of new visitors to the diagrams on Flickr, and I'd been wondering what was driving folks my way.

Note that Manuel (Lima, vis/comp's creator) chose to feature the first version of the diagram. This is getting to be a recurring theme: more and more people tell me that it's that version they prefer. This lesson learned, and others, will be discussed in an upcoming interview on Boxes and Arrows. (Dan Brown interviews me about the diagram, which is featured in his upcoming book, Communicating Design.)

Wow. I saw a legend perform tonight. And I discovered that I really like sauerkraut balls.

This is pattern that seems to surface with surprising regularity in the long sordid Bush family history. The loose affiliation with an evil-seed brother (I'm actually not counting Jeb here):

"I don't even know the brother. From what I know and I've heard, they (the Hinckleys) are a very nice family and have given a lot of money to the Bush campaign. I understand he was just the renegade brother in the family. They must feel awful."

What a wonderful dog:

[Hachiko] was born in Akita in 1923 and was first brought to Tokyo in 1924. He and his owner, Mr. Eisaburo Uyeno, were inseparable friends right from the start. Each day "Hachi" would accompany Eisaburo, a professor at the Imperial University, to the train station when he left for work. Upon returning, the professor would find the dog patiently waiting, tail wagging. This happy routine continued until one fateful day in 1925, when the professor was taken ill on the job and unfortunately died before he could return home.

Despite the fact that Hachiko was less than two years old at the time, the bond between dog and owner was strong. Hachiko continued to wait each day at Shibuya station for a friend who was never coming back. At times, he wouldn't return home for days at a stretch.

The Akita became a familiar sight to commuters as he kept his vigil for over ten years. On March 8, 1935, Hachiko finally went to meet his master. He died on the very same spot he last saw his friend alive.