Soldier Ant 

"Superbaby" is an original illustration by Dean Trippe, commissioned by us to commemorate the first year of our son Edison's life.

Within minutes of Edison's birth, one of the delivery-room nurses pointed out his 'Superman curl' to us: a floppy long curl planted smack-dab in the middle of his forehead, peeking out from under his little post-op knit cap.

I don't know what became of that curl—it was quickly overwhelmed by the abundant fuzz of his early-babyhood hair. Lost its prominence. But the idea definitely stuck. Edison is, of course, our Superbaby.

I first learned of Dean Trippe through his work on Project Rooftop (credz to Caleb Mozzocco) and was immediately taken with his character designs. I especially like his treatment of kids and, in fact, his anatomical choices in general.

Browse around Dean's portfolio a bit, and you'll see something wholly refreshing in today's comics climate: human-looking heroes. Kids with tummies. Dudes with ever-so-slight paunches and—perhaps most refreshing of all—women with modest... ahem, attributes.

I just knew that Dean would treat this piece—my beloved son— with the respect and craft that he seems to imbue all his work with. I look at this Superbaby and see Edison's pointy little chin, his shock of brown hair and—perhaps most pleasing of all—what his mama calls his 'heart-shaped face.' (I love the footy-jammies costume, too.)

Dean did a wonderful job of paying homage to Edison, capturing his essence but not hewing so close to the photos I shared with him that it wandered anywhere near caricature. (Tho' Dean also does wonderful caricatures—check out the My Name is Earle lineup on his site.)

I love it. I hope you do, too.

To anyone who's made the joke... you know the one. About how 'it's 2000-and-whatever and I was promised a hovercar' (or a jetpack.) 'WHERE's my HOVERCAR?!'

Well… Go get it suckah. Only one of its kind.

And all the people you meet, down in the streets, may be good, but they don't want to know. / So they cover their eyes — for who wants to be sad? / Life is sweet at the bottom of the sea.

Just about the saddest passage from an album that's been in daily rotation for me since November. I feel like this every day. (But don't worry, I feel good too every day.)

Fellow Yahoo Kathleen Watkins pinged me last week to let me know that she'd spotted my Flickr piece in a very nice DataViz and Infographics roundup on Smashing Magazine's blog. (I'd wondered where that minor influx of new favorite-ers and commenters on Flickr had come from.) It's still very gratifying to see the continuing reception that diagram has garnered. So… Thanks Smashing! And my thanks to Kathleen as well.

No... really. For real this time! (You may recall that I've boasted, erroneously, about this before.) My talk was accepted earlier this month, and now the final conference schedule is up.

My topic? Designing your reputation system in 15 easy steps. I'm super-excited to be giving this particular talk, as it will put a nice capstone on some work that I've done over the past year at Yahoo! on a Reputation Platform. I'm no longer working day-to-day on the platform, but continue to peck away at documenting some of these patterns and best-practices, and it'll be great to finally give them a public airing.

You'll start to see some of this work emerge as part of our Design Pattern Library in coming weeks as well.

And... speaking of last year's presentation on Complexity, the one that I didn't ever get around to giving... I hope to have some news on that front, too, soon. I (finally ) had an old VHS transcript of an earlier version of that talk converted to digital format and will be posting it here soon.

I love the smell of progress in the morning.