A quick note – if you’re observant, or bother to click on some of the links I sprinkle in my posts, you’ll see that I’ve begun using wikipedia links. It’s kind of funny that I’ve waited until now to do so, given how much content they have, and especially given my minor obession with all thinks wiki. Wikipedia is really one of the unsung success stories on the net, and it’s extremely convenient to simply be able to type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_phrase_or_another and have a fairly high degree of confidence that ‘Some_phrase_or_another’ already has a node on wikipedia and folks who click on the link will get a definition and a wealth of other materials for the phrase. And if they don’t they’ll have an opportunity to be the first one to define it.
Further hints of a strange new world
I’ve written now and then about the selling of virtual goods in the real world – in fact way back when Everquest first launched I experimented with making money at it myself. The idea is you ‘work’ in the virtual world at acquiring objects that are of high value in the game environment, then sell them off in the real world for real cash. In my own case I calculated that I was making less than the minimum wage and it was just unbelievably boring, a great tragedy, really, given my love of gaming.
Despite my own failed experiments, others have been making a living at this for years now. It fascinates me that one of the most successful models is to outsource the labor to low wage countries, where folks making substantially less than $1 an hour sit in front of machines worth several times their annual earnings, working as virtual peasants in a virtual world by ‘harvesting’ items in gameworlds that citizens of first world countries pay ~$10-15 a month to play in.
Anyway, check out spacethinkdream.com to see these concepts brought to a whole new level. At first glance, their site seems like a typical company website – they’re selling stuff, and they have attractively designed pages for their products with illustrations and clever copy. Except none of this stuff exists anywhere outside of cyberspace – it’s the metaverse of Stephenson’s Snow Crash, for real. These folks code and do design for objects you might care to possess in a virtual world, and will even custom design objects for you for the right price.
In this case they’re designing for one particular game engine (the exceedingly cool Second Life – available for mac and PC) but you will increasingly see this kind of stuff in mainstream gaming environments. I’m really curious to know if the folks at spacethinkdream.com are managing to make a sustainable living at this, and if not, at what point do we reach the tipping point and find folks who spend the majority of their time working and living inside virtual environments like Second Life.
I also desperately wish I could introduce this kind of thing to college campuses. I’ve been working on a couple of instructors at Skidmore, carefully trying to bring them along to the point where I can talk specifically about this stuff without getting mocked out of the room. The potential is vast, and while educators have experimented with VR environments since the 1970’s (with MOO’s and MUCKs and so on) it’s only now that they seem likely to really be able to break into the mainstream.
I’m rambling I guess, but it’s my place, so I’m entitled. Anyway one thing in the real world is happening on the basis of me happening across the spacethinkdream.com site – I’m buying a copy of Second Life and checking it out. They have a very clever licensing scheme – only $9.95 gets you the client and unlimited privileges on the server, with the exception that you cannot own land – where they make their money is in the leasing of land to folks who then build content for others to come see and hopefully spend money on. I’ll post some impressions after I’ve dinked around in it for a while.
It’s official, I’m getting a puppy
Over the past week I’ve been emailing with the principles at Nicker Barker Farm about getting a puppy from them. After checking me out they decided to approve my application and last night I sent in my deposit. Sometime between December and March I’ll be bringing home a female pup. My position at Skidmore has finally enabled me to get my own dog, something I’ve wanted to do for over 10 years but have been unable to because of my work situations and the fact that I’m single…well, most of the time anyway.
Skidmore has a dog friendly campus, so I can bring the puppy to work with me most of the time, and I live very close to campus and hope to live even closer. The stars are aligned for me to finally have a dog.
Now all that remains is to pick a name. Somehow the name ‘Soolin’ (pronounce it Sue-Lynn) got in my head while I was looking over the Nicker Barker site, but I’m open to suggestions. I’d like something distinctive – if you have something in mind feel free to comment and I’ll pick one between now and when I pick up the dog.
Who can resist a delicious library?
What a great title for an application. If you have a mac, you simply must go grab delicious library, this cool library management application that uses a webcam to scan the barcodes of objects and build a database of them for you. It’s initially geared towards your personal book, cd and DVD collection, but it uses an open data format and I have almost no doubt that it will quickly be expanded by the development community to store records on virtually anything with a barcode on it. It’s also radically less expensive than similar systems sold to do the same thing, plus it’s high in the ol’ cool geek trick factor.
It won’t actually be released for another couple of days, but check it out, if the screenshots and the notion of pointing your webcam at anything with a barcode and automatically adding it to your dataset doesn’t interest you….er, then you’re not enough of a geek to be reading this site, time for you to move right along now.
I’ll post impressions after I’ve acquired a copy in a week or so.
A mention about the new laptop
Longtime readers will recall that the last mac laptop I purchased so infuriated me that I dropped all personal use of Apple products – it was a g3 ibook at the dawn of the osx age and I still stand by my opinion that it was basically an unusable machine. Subsequent revisions to the OS addressed most of the issues, but that took over a year. In the interim I have been using pc laptops. At their best they were decent, mostly I didn’t care very much for them though, and when I left Maine I sold my laptop to one of my students, planning to buy a new one in NY….
(well, actually that’s not entirely true – I was promised one when I was hired at my new job, but it hasn’t made itself available to me yet, and meanwhile I need the machine at home. That left me unwilling to press the issue at work (after all, my immediate needs for it are at home, not the office) so last week, I bought a new g4 ibook on my own nickle.)
Anyway, so far it’s been great. I don’t like that Apple solders 256 MB to the board of the machine and then leaves only 1 slot free for ram expansion (at a bare minimum if they’re going to solder ram to the board, it should be 512MB), beyond that I have nothing but praise for the machine. While it’s no speed demon, it is more than adequate for my needs – it’s basically a writing tool and something to browse the web and chat online with when I’m sacked out in my living room. It excels at these tasks.
As soon as it’s paid off, I’ll be buying an isight for it and (get ready to chortle in triumph kevin, jesse, and the rest of you who have been hounding me about this for literally 6-7 years) re-activating my long dormant AIM account, or making a new one if the old one has been purged, so that I can use ichat’s built in av chat functions, which is really cool stuff. There’s also a very cool app, Delicious, which I’ll blog about soon that uses an isight in an exceedingly clever manner.
Praise for ecto
I’ve been tinkering with the 14 day demo of ecto on my new laptop and loving it. I’ve been alternating between using the free w.blogger and the built in movable type interface for the last year or so. While ecto isn’t free, it’s interface and integration with mac OSX are just completely superior. It’s well worth a look if you’re interested in using a rich editing environment to write your weblog entries, and at only $18 the price is right.
Letting a bit of myself show through
I’m a bit circumspect here, in the sense that I sometimes worry who might find their way to my blog and what their opinion might mean to me. This has especially been true in the last year when I had begun to look for a new job. I’m settled in now though, the folks at the new job seem to like me well enough, and I don’t anticipate looking for another job for at least several years. A recent acquaintance who made her way her observed that she couldn’t really sense much of me on the site. I’m going to try and do something about that by starting to tell stories about myself that will hopefully be more interesting to folks who come here looking for more than the tech stuff that makes up a large part of what I post.
So, I’ll start with one from my high school years. I had that troubled adolescence common to kids of my generation – by the time I got to high school I was battling with my parents for control, and one of the ways I fought was by screwing up in school. I had been a bright young kid, enrolled in the ‘gifted and talented’ programs and awarded a series of summer scholarships to academic programs, and my father in particular had taken a lot of pride in this. So of course, what better way to lash out than to begin to fail. By the time I was in 10th grade I had fallen into the ‘troubled kid’ category, and aside from the AP English and History tracks I had been booted out of the high end academic courses. Of all the courses I had to take, I hated the sciences the most. I would later come to loathe chemistry even more, but in 10th grade it was Biology. It was a 1st period class, and as it happened one of the schools more notorious potheads was coming to my bus stop most mornings. Draw your own conclusions and then imagine how little attention I was paying to critter anatomy every morning.
Our mid-term was to be almost exclusively on creature physiology. The classroom had various stations arranged throughout it, at each station was placed a creature in some stage of dissection, and in that creature’s exposed organs were pinned a series of numbered flags. The task was to make one’s way to each station, note the flag number, and identify the organ the flag was piercing. We were given a few minutes at each station.
By the second or third station I knew I was screwed – there was no way I was going to pass this test. By the 4th or 5th station a plan had occurred to me. As I sat at each of the successive stations, I watched the room carefully and then plucked the pins from the organs they had been in and placed them in other organs.
The end result of course was that no one passed the test, much to my joy. The following class period we all had to sit in silence, the teacher’s theory being that the guilty party would fess up, which I did not. We had to retake the exam the following week, and second time around I managed to prepare myself such that I passed.
I finally admitted I was the guilty party to my friend Patrick, who was in the class with me, that I was the one who had done it as we sat down over a beer reminiscing this summer and the story came up. We both had a laugh over it. To this day, while I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’d do such a thing, mostly I get a good belly laugh out of it. It’s a great example of my impish sense of humor I think.
I should mention that the teacher did try and exact a measure of revenge on me. While she had no proof, somehow she eventually concluded that it was me who had done it. By the end of the semester I had begun to worry about the regents exam in Biology, and I was failing the course. My friend’s mother was a Bio instructor, and she took her son and I under her wing and tutored us for about 2 weeks. I got a 93 on the regents exam, the highest score at the school that year. My teacher was convinced I had cheated and had me brought before the (dean? I forget what the person’s title was, it wasn’t the principle) and attempted to have my results rejected. But I had my friend’s mom (our tutor) speak on my behalf, and plus I had also done well on my other regents exams so the (dean?) concluded I hadn’t cheated. The best part was that with my regents exam score factored in I didn’t fail the course. That’s the good news, the bad being that it meant next I had to take chemistry, which I just completely loathed – it ended up being the first course I actually failed. All things considered, I would have been better off taking biology again.
Unusual way to spend election day
During the last presidential election I was very concerned that Gore might possibly lose and spent the entire night glued to the television, flipping between networks as the drama played out, finally drifting off to bed in the wee hours. The subsequent mess that was the last election had me obsessively calling up salon.com while I was at work and debating and speculating endlessly with my office mate.
Long story short, I’m not going to play that game this time, it’s just too much for me. I grabbed a copy of the recent Nova documentary ‘Origins’ about the history of the earth from formation of the solar system on, and I am again going to spend an election night glued to the television, but this time it’s all about perspective folks, and how ultimately meaningless this stuff is in the grand scheme of things. Or so I’m trying to convince myself anyway. I’ve also been trying to remind myself that this country survived the evils of McCarthyism and the ridiculous era of Prohibition – surely we can if we must survive another 4 years of the mental midget.
So. That’s about all I’m going to say about this year’s election. Of course I hope desperately that Kerry wins and encourage anyone reading this to get off their ass tomorrow and go vote. Beyond that, I’m trying really hard to let it go.
Jesse goes to hawaii…
…and forgets to take a real camera 😉
I keep forgetting to blog this. My brother had a chance to go to Hawaii and he took his new camera phone with him, then filled his weblog with action shots of his adventures in Hawaii. You’ll probably need to scroll through his archives a bit to get to the photos since he’s posted quite a few since then.
It’s interesting the tradeoffs between spontaneity and image fidelity – most of the pics he posted shade way too far into the purple/blue end of the spectrum, leaving me wishing he had brought a real camera, but on the other hand if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to post them as they happened.
Anyway, worth a gander, especially if, like me, you’ve never been to Hawaii.
Enter yourself in the global human registry
Here’s a clever idea – establish a wiki as the authoritative source of information about people, and allow the people themselves to self edit the content. Check it out over at Biojack.com. I’m not in there yet, nor is the famous photographer who shares my name. What amuses me is imagining the battles that will spring up around famous folks who are controversial, like, say, George Bush. Get bickering folks! Or at least, get yourself in there.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 