True Dat

Definitely.

Winter Geese

Dumpr.net lets you set your Flickr photos in a faux-museum setting and in other formats. I like this one; it appeals to my pathetic pretensions toward art.

Winter Geese
Originally uploaded by Tassava.

The Visualize Thing

My job entails doing a lot of writing, an activity which often now shifts to figuring out how to condense a page of prose to a short paragraph and some sort of graphic. I regularly pray to Tufte, of course. But yesterday I was excited to see (on Boing Boing) the "Periodic Table of Visualization Methods," an excellent and useful summary of the wide variety of means to graphically depict information. The table categorizes the methods in three ways (whether they represent process or structure, whether they provide details or overviews, and whether they permit convergent or divergent thinking), but also includes an example of each method in use. If you use or want to use graphics more effectively, check out the table and the hosting site, Visual-Literacy.org.

Why is it spelled s-o-l-d-e-r when it's pronounced "sauder?"

I used to love watching my dad soldering stuff. I don't even remember exactly what it was he'd use it on - broken toys and electrical equipment, I expect - but it just seemed like a cool thing to be able to do. I don't own a soldering iron myself, but after reading this post I'm thinking maybe I should get one. The illustrations alone are worth a look. (via boingboing)

Victory!

Well, partial victory. Hacked the template into three columns, and haloscan comments and trackback are now enabled!! Woot! If anyone else out there is interested, the three column hack came from Hackosphere, and the haloscan hack came from the Logical Philosopher. Both are well worth bookmarking. Now if I could just figure out how to get a space between the left sidebar and the main section ...