Tag Archives for personal

Amuse-gueule

I have to apologise. No, not for me, though I am the one unable to post the grand thoughts my numerous fans are clamouring for, but for my typist. My operator. Whatever you want to call her. Until a few days ago, I have been calling her my atomic me, but we have had, well, you might call it a spat.

The reason, you ask ? She has a new love. No, not a man, nor a woman. Worse. A machine. She has been stroking it, toying with it, and, honestly, drooling all over it in a disgusting way for days.

Poor Rheta, of course, only got the crumbs. A perfunctory « well, SL Y-K-W is in the app folder, now get off my back while I set up [oh yeah, right] things » was all I got for three days. When I finally got the run of the thing, it turned out even worse than expected. I mean, before, I had a very cosy little off-world home in the barren wasteland of Windows called Firefox. it was snug, fitted with everything I needed (Google Mail, Google Reader, Open ID identification, my Notefish notes, j’en passe et des meilleures). She said she had relocated it, and that I would miss nothing. But when I went to visit, finally, and after having had to listen to her waxing lyrical about how pretty it is, how polished everything is, how —well, you get the idea — imagine my dismay when I found out the one thing butt ugly was my home. The horror.

She promised to improve it. She had me try something called Fluid, saying « your mileage may vary ». Vary it did indeed, to the point Google Reader was about the only usable thing on it. And whenever I turned to her, she said not to pester her. All the while my news, mails and other things kept piling up. I would feel like crying just looking at my inbox. Insupportable.

Tonight, we had words. It was ugly. We were at each other like harpies. She said she would not spend more money for stuff only I would use. I yelled she’d spent enough already, and I that I was fed up getting the scraps from her ladyship’s table, and what the hell did she mean by « only » me anyway ? True to the law of opposite motions, tempers went up and things went downwards from there.

I have won. I think, at least : I now have a small budget to buy a new home. Strange names — Mailplane, Twitterific, gSync, PixelMator — are going through my head. I feel giddy.

And her ? I don’t know yet. She’s in a huff with me, but I don’t care. We will make up, that much is certain. After all, we are inseparable. But you, my dears, will have to be patient, just for a little while longer, until I get my home nice and cosy again. Things will be better after that, I promise. Stay tuned.

The Greatest Thing

There was a girl
A very strange, enchanted girl
They say she wandered very far
Very far, over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was she

And then one day,
One magic day she passed my way
While we spoke of many things
Fools and Kings
This she said to me

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.

Thank you, Eden Ahbez, for words ringing so true.

Mapping the grid

I don’t know about you, but I have seen a phenomenon well known from my early days of web browsing repeat itself in Second Life, namely the hassle of managing bookmarks. Linden Lab’s system of landmarks organized by folder is virtually identical to the bookmark system built into web browsers to this day. And as in web browsers, it sorely lacks in flexibility when it comes to managing large collections of bookmarks.

Now, on the web, people have been moving towards online bookmark services. They offer a wider range of management options, most useful among these direct access to descriptions (which really help when you’re not sure what that bookmark you set ages ago was for, believe me), a freeform categorization system (the ubiquitous tags, which allow topical access, unlike the taxonomical, hierarchical approach of nested folders) and a social component, allowing for the aggregation of similar locations collected from other people. The best known of these is, of course, del.icio.us.

As a convert to social bookmarking, and not so recent one as my Second Life centric del.icio.us membership might suggest, I have been wishing for a similar system in world. Unluckily, and I think for the near future (unless Linden Lab really change things about the extensibility of their software), no such system seems ready to emerge. Still, clever people have launched the next best thing : web based landmarking systems, based on Second Life’s SLURLY-K-W-URL protocol. Basically, you add and tag landmarks in world through a HUD or chat commands, and a script adds these to a web service very similar to the well known social bookmarking ones.

Two such contenders I am aware of : Sloog and Gridmarker. Of these, I prefer Gridmarker for several reasons :

  • It offers descriptions, while Sloog does not ; see my remark above. Plus the landmark titles are editable.
  • It identifies the landmarks through proximity, which allows for more precise landmarking, while Sloog uses the parcel as landmark unit. I often want to landmark places inside parcels, shops especially, not the whole thing (ever been lost in the Sensations Store ?). Plus it makes for finer grained grouping across users and landmarks, as only landmarks close enough (on a selectable scale) are considered related.
  • It converts SL landmarks to gridmarks : simply drag and drop them on the HUD. Great for getting all those legacy landmarks into the system.
  • It goes less for flashiness than for technical maturity (where it has got a head start, as it is based on the Scuttle open source project). Some might find its design a bit drab, but I prefer it that way.

I have also found I can further simplify entry with a set of gestures using the nifty « replace text » function, which allows me to type « /tag nice fast » instead of the cumbersome « /7 tags: clunky slow ». Contact me in world if you want a copy.

There is a downside to both systems, besides jumping out of world of course, as held in common with all script based extensions to SL Y-K-W : you can’t use it in no script areas. The fallback is to create a landmark with the native landmarking function and convert it afterwards (if you use Gridmarker — see above). Not quite perfect for the power shopper I am, as many shops have disabled scripts to ensure vendor security, but the whole thing is still attractive enough for my expanding collection of landmarks.