Reading Radar

Seems like a lot of people I know are taking their land and shutting stuff in and making everything private. I’d rather see people making use of stuff. The SW corner of podcaster island may not be spectacular, but it’s open, and meant to be used by people.

I’m still messing around with the main buildings, and there will be a deck again to replace the one I tore out.. when it’s there, use it. It’ll have a dj area again, granted no one can change the stream atm, but I’ll put in something for setting the stream that anyone can make use of. The merry go round and the bouncy animal rides that Chug set up are still in place.

Look, I even put in a laptop for you to gaze in wonder at my podcast site on. It’s got high speed wireless too…. as far as you know.

Once I get the building figured out and find something likeable in those prims, it’ll have a lounging area for video podcast viewing for SLPN and Torley videos.

There’s a fire and benches on the boomerang boardwalk if you want to sit and talk and hope I don’t pop in and start asking lots of personal questions.

It’d be fun to have a whole sim full of residents who put up things they like and then open them up to anyone. But that’s not really how podcaster island is set up and it’s not really what people want to do in general, I guess. I understand wanting your own “stuff” but let’s face it.. in SL, if someone wants in, they’re coming in. Besides, you meet the coolest people and have a lot more fun encountering those people than you do hiding inside a closed up building. Rocky and Jane have been long time practitioners of making stuff that others can wander in and make use of on Edloe. And here on Podcaster Island, Rob’s place has long been open and accessible to anyone.

Come around and see who’s around sometime.. or just hang out and use whatever’s there.

Hopefully people will come around more with the SLPN building moving to Podcast island, and a couple friendly accessible spots on podcaster island, and people will realize that, despite pronouncement on a recent SL podcast that we’re stuffy and boring on PI, that’s never been the case with the people I know here. You just haven’t been around.

I’m just one little avatar, and I’m not really trying to change the world. All I’m saying is, come use the stuff on these islands. Respect those residents who aren’t so open, but come play on the SW corner of podcaster island and hit the Destination Station on the south end of Podcast Island (west of center on the south end). Or stay locked up playing house and be stuffy and boring yourselves. Either way’s fine with me.

Sitting here with an iPod touch, posting to my blog from it, it occurs to me once again, people need to create. It’s in our DNA.

SL is full of examples of it. Builders, scripters, artists, bloggers, podcasters, teachers, community developers… all working to build things of lasting value. To DO something.

I’m going to be exploring this in more detail, but not from my iPod!

I’m using the wordpress app from the apple apps store on my ipod touch to write this. Yay tiny mobile things with really slow input methods!

After a lot of babbling for the podcast, Stuart turned the SLPN building on Nowhereville physical and we all fell down. It seemed like the right thing to do… after all, that building had never hurt anyone in its life, and that seemed kind of stupid. Time to fix that little failure on its part.

They need some warning stickers about falling buildings being dangerous. I got hit on the head a couple times. How was I supposed to know?

It’s pretty easy to really want Microsoft dead sometimes, and to read something like this and be angry automatically. But wanna know something? Sql Express would probably blow MySQL out of the water for scalable database solutions and a version of C# for coding in would not be bad either. If Microsoft has ever made any good products, their names are SQL Server and C#, IMO. While I’ve evicted Windows and MS products in general from my house, I used to code asp.net apps in C# and using SQL Server as the db. Guess what? They scale pretty damn well.

Oh, umm. None of this has anything to do with Las Vegas. I just needed a title.

If you’re thinking of voting robot in this upcoming election, you might want to watch this video first. Clearly they are planning something. I’m not sure exactly what.. I think the Wright brothers got further on their first attempt. And his driving? I mean, you’d think robots and machines would be like cops and donuts, but… not so much.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen much of the martian lately, so is it better to vote incompetent, or absentee? Not sure… I think I’ll just vote for Donald Duck again.

I was all set with a nice long blog post on community the other night.. thoughts about why it matters, what it is, how to build it and how not to build, it but… hey. Every time I get serious, people tell me that’s not like me and that I should lighten up. So screw it. Instead, here’s 20 minutes of video on the now defunct Narnia build we toured in SL on the Papillon Isles sim.

Warning: It’s 25 minutes long! Or something close to it.

By the way, did you know you could get these videos on your video capable iPod? You can… here’s the rss link. Plug this into the “podcasts” category in itunes. http://slpnvideo.blip.tv/rss

As for community? Eh. Figure it our for yourselves. At least those of you who keep telling me that my role in it is to be the village idiot.

Dizzy Banjo sent me a link to his blip.tv page tonight, for his “message in a bottle” movie. Dizzy made the exhibit for the SL5B and it’s a really cool concept. Check out the movie. And check out his other movies as well!

(Movie embedded with permission from Dizzy Banjo)

LL posted release candidate 1.20 RC 13 today (under the test viewers section, release candidates).

First off, the biggest thing about the RC’s since 10, I think… 99.9999% of my crashes are gone (crashed once in RC11 or 12 with a lockup) and no more beachballs, at least not on the MBP. On the Mac Pro, which has an ATI card, I do get very infrequent beachballs. Completely tolerable. on the MBP, it’s become a very stable, very frustration-free client.

Ok, so anyway, the new version has switchable skins now, currently offering the old brown skin and the new light blue skin. It’s up to people to make new skins for those of us who have better things to do. Now if someone could do a whole new UI, that’d be something. Skins? Meh. Who cares.

Using the old look skin:

Using the new look skin:

I have to say, when the new skin first came out, I didn’t like it. At all. It caused eyestrain. But, having used it for awhile now, I greatly prefer it over the old, dark, heavy, clunky, boring look. When you first fire up the new RC, it defaults back to the brown UI. You have to enable the new look, which I promptly did, then log out and log back in again. That should satisfy all the whiners who can’t tell the difference between the blue skin and Dazzle the skinnable interface technology. I hope. But they’ll probably just find something else to fill up every single blog post on the LL blog with replies about.

Doh. We explored Privateer Space a couple times. We blogged it. We videoed it. Now it’s closed its doors and declared its asteroids off limits. Why? Not really sure.. but I would like to see if Aley Arai would be willing to do an ep of SL Under the Radar and talk about it or not.

This was by far one of our favorite builds of the many we’ve explored in SL and it’s a shame if it’s to stay closed.