Sunday miscellany

I dropped in on G and U yesterday to see how they were getting on with their eight-day-old son Ralph. All seem tired but happy, and Ralph is as cute as babies that age usually are. He has a full head of black hair and his father's long fingers.

Afterwards, with G to that bastion of deutsche Leitkultur IKEA for shelving and glassware (me) and picture frames for sending to new grandparents (him). I shall put up the newly-bought sixth Billy bookshelf this afternoon, it should be enough to handle the overflow which currently lies in piles in front of the existing units.

After that, I spent more hours than I'd like to admit in Second Life working on scripts, chatting with M2 and—you'll never guess—buying a new avatar. This marks a transition in my Second Lifery, the first big-money purchase I've made there. (I can tell you, by the way, that purchasing virtual goods with virtual money is accompanied by just as much angst and doubtful hesitation as in the real world.) My alternate self is a close-to-lifesize, realistically four-legged black and white alleycat (not a furry).

The experience of buying this avatar strengthens my incomprehension (if that's the right expression) of the economics of SL. The avatar-maker, Nimbus Rau, spent nearly an hour talking to M2 and I (and another woman who wandered by) and demonstrating the various different avatars she'd built; at today's exchange rate, the avatar cost under US$3. That might just make sense in SL terms, she need only sell two avatars a month to pay her land-use fees; but an economist would call that a very poor use of her real-life time. Even McDonalds pays five times as much as that!

From a recent conversation

Sis: I'm sorry that I wasn't better prepared and you had to spend a day helping me clean the house.

Udge: No problem. To tell the truth I enjoyed it, I was having a Marie-Antoinette moment: "Hey, look at me pretending to be a peasant! Isn't it fun?"

Two ways of looking at Apple with apologies to Wallace Stevens.

1. Apple has only 6.3% of the US computer market (or is it 8.1%? who knows).

"How can they survive?"

2. Apple is the third-best-selling computer brand in the US, only Dell and HP sell more computers. Dell and HP sell across the price spectrum, from WalM*rt cheap-and-nasty to top-of-the-range. Apple sells only middle-to-top systems, with commensurate prices and profit margins. Apple has 29% of the market for top-of-the-range laptops, and laptops make up 64% of the computers they sold this year. And let's not forget the iPod (73% of the US market) and the iPhone (fourth-best-selling phone in the US) and the iTunes store (third-largest music retailer in the US, by golly, and about to sell its 4 billionth song).

My guess is that they can survive just fine.

In other news winter has arrived: the forecast is for frost overnight. I shall bring in the plants from the balcony summer office.