Oct 10, 2007: Wil is on bOINGbOING TV talking about his new book, "The Happiest Days of Our Lives".

bOINGbOING TV is a web-based short "tv-like" show, so there are three different segments in this episode, only one of which is Wil. His stuff is the middle three and half minutes or so. The interview starts at about the three minute mark.

According to Wil, he's going to be on an upcoming episode of Family Guy. Being a guest voice on Family Guy is a dream come true for Wil.

He can't say much about the episode for a couple of reasons. One is that he hasn't recorded it yet, and the other of course is that until the episode airs, no-one involved is supposed to publicly talk about it.

What I'm looking forward to most is that Wil says of the script that he has a lot of scenes with Stewie.

UPDATE! Wil just posted some more information on 21 September. He says that he plays himself, that the episode will be a tribute to ST:TNG, and that much of the crew is in on the deal. He also said that the episode wouldn't be aired for a year! Wah!

It's so last year, but here's Wil's blog entry about his role on NUMB3RS, "as Miles Sklar, comic book creator and world-class douche," in Wil's own words.

I'm not as rabid about NUMB3RS as I am about CSI, but I do try to watch it fairly regularly. Alas, this episode was on during Thanksgiving weekend, and I had indulged a bit too much to really appreciate the fullness of the role.

It was January of 2005. Wil was going to be speaking at MacWorld, and I was going to be wandering the floor advertising some software made by the start-up that I'd been with for the previous four years.

Wil wrote in his blog the week before the show about writing the talk he was going to give. This excerpt from his blog entry still building and burning written on 11 January 2005 totally made my spine tingle:

This is my favorite way to write: I can see the entire thing in my mind, like I'm looking down on a huge map. Because I know how the general landscape looks, I can zoom in on some areas and discover really interesting and unexpected details, then pull back to see the whole thing.

That's exactly what the software I had was all about! MojoWorld Focus is a virtual planet, a digital landscape that you fly over, zooming in here, zooming out there, until you find the dramatic scene that you want to capture in photo-realistic beauty.

When I read that entry in Wil's blog, I knew I was destined to meet him. I'd be at MacWorld for most of the show. I didn't have a pass that would let me get in to see Wil's talk, but that didn't deter me. I figured I'd run into him on the show floor and I'd be able to hand him a copy of MojoWorld Focus. I'd tell him how what he'd written in his blog about flying over landscapes was exactly what this software was about.

My best friend and I made up our Focus tee-shirts, and then went to the show. We wandered the floor for hours and hours. I gave away a few copies of the software to some press people and a few curious folks who had at least heard of MojoWorld before. But no sign of Wil. That was OK, it was just the first day.

MacWorld went by in a blur. By the end, I still hadn't met Wil. I was crushed. I had been so sure of it.

My pal and I met up with another friend and we went off to a late lunch at the Chevy's restaurant near Moscone Center. We had just ordered our food when my friend says, "Don't look now, but Wil Wheaton just came in and is sitting at that booth over there."

Her pal said, "No way!" Then I looked over to the booth. It was Wil!

I got up and went over to him and said, "I hate to bother you, but I really wanted to give you this software..." Wil was very nice about it. He wrote down his mailing address so that I could send him the full version.

When I got home from MacWorld, I put together a package containing the Pro version of MojoWorld, and a copy of the original glow-in-the-dark manual, along with a long fan-girl letter. I sent it to the mailing address Wil had given me at the Chevy's. I heard no reply, but I didn't expect one.

In December of 2005, Wil posted an episode of Radio Free Burrito that included a composition he'd created in GarageBand. A few days later, he posted a separate blog entry with a link to an mp3 of just the Lakeside Shadow tune.

Lakeside Shadow is a beautiful and haunting piece of music. I loved it. Because Wil had released the song under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share-Alike license, I had this idea where I could create an animation using MojoWorld and set it to the music.

The animation capabilities of MojoWorld are somewhat lacking, and the world file I'd built to fit my vision of the Lakeside Shadow song was very complex and slow, so I ended up rendering only a set of still images, and then sat on the project for over a year.

In June of 2006, I sent an email to Wil. I said he probably wouldn't remember me, and I was sad that he never said that the package had arrived, or maybe it never got there, and that the Lakeside Shadow song had inspired me, along with some links to the images I had rendered.

Wil replied. He remembered me! He said the package indeed had never arrived. And he said that the images were awesome! He also said that I'd totally win if I ever finished the movie, but that's still in limbo... for now.

Wil has had a picture of himself in an ugly clown sweater on his blog for ages: undone (the sweater post)

Somewhere along the line, someone uploaded that picture to Glamour Magazine's "Don'tspotting" which is a variety of random snapshots of people which Glamour readers vote on, as either a fashion "do" or a fashion "don't."

On July 6th, 2008, someone at the website FARK.com discovered this and started a thread about it. The thread went to FARK's main page and within hours, Wil in his clown sweater had been voted up to Glamour Mag's number one fashion DO!

Check out the full FARK thread: The Clown Sweater makes an appearance on Glamour Magazine's "Do's and Don'ts" page