First thoughts about Second Life

(Home and happy and far too tired for thought. So here's a blog entry that I've been writing in bits for a while. There'll be a real post about Hamburg and other stuff tomorrow, promise.)

I have had a Second Life for a few weeks now, not that I spend much time there. (In case any readers should happen to be or become 2L'ers: you can guess my given name there, and my surname is "Watanabe;" do come up and say hello.)

It took me a long time to start, because I couldn't see the point (and still don't, really): "So you dress up and walk around and talk to people, and buy things, but that takes money so you have to work for a living? Gee, that sounds kinda familiar." My inner cheapskate was also put off by the constant talk in articles and reviews about buying this and paying for that, but it's a red herring. One can choose an avatar and walk around etc etc for free; you only need a paying membership if you want to own property.

It's a strange and surprising place, though less of both than I'd expected and hoped. The first surprise is how few people are there at any given time, the islands I've seen were universally empty. I have yet to land on a place that had as much activity as the newbie getting-started tutorial spaces. The second surprise, which is closely related to the first, is that it's deadly dull most of the time. There is acres of stuff stacked up into the stratosphere (avatars can fly! easily the best part of 2L) but most parts of most islands seem to be predominantly private or commercial.

The third surprise is how few avatars are actually interesting to look at, and how few basic types there are. Any big-city bus contains more diversity of height, weight, age, skin colour and prettiness than all that I've seen of Second Life. This is a feeling that builds up over time, one's first impression is of great diversity because this tall thin beautiful long-haired perky-breasted white 20-something has a cat's ears and tail, whereas that tall thin beautiful long-haired perky-breasted white 20-something has an eagle's wings. It takes a while to spot that they are all tall thin beautiful long-haired etc. Nobody is old, weak, worn, tired, sick or even fat or ugly; nobody is not a successful and productive free-market capitalist democrat.

There are two standard body-types that one meets on every street corner in Second Life. The commonest male ego-gratification-body is the Russian-Mafia bodyguard: biceps as thick as your thigh, shoulder-breadth nearly half of his height, seventy percent of body mass above the diaphragm, cranial capacity less than his shoe size, and a phallic bulge that would intimidate a donkey. The commonest female ego-gratification-body is the Barbie doll: enormously tall and skinny, legs nearly two-thirds of her height, waist narrower than the male's biceps, no hips, would weigh less than fifty kilograms were it not for her enormous but perky breasts.

Body type as wish fulfillment, one might say, and more power to your fingertips, were the bodies not so un-humanly perfect, so insulting to those of our First Life. I haven't seen many experienced 2L'ers yet, for geographical reasons I know mostly newbies like myself, but still I am inclined to very much doubt that one percent of avatars look anything at all like their owners. Which is fine in itself: it's a fantasy world, go ahead and fantasize. What came to disturb me is how relentlessly similar the core of the fantasy is: almost all avatars look like the same one percent of the real world's population.

Yawn and yuck to them. I can't help thinking that wearing such a body in Second Life must make one dissatisfied with one's real body, with its petty flaws and disobediences.

I decided to rebel against this by modifying my avatar to be realistically un-beautiful—meaning, to look like a human that one might meet on any street corner in First Life. Watanabe-San began life as the "Japanese punk boy" readymade type: an animé wannabe, with the usual tall, slim shape but less muscle than the bodyguards. I reduced his height by nearly half (his head barely reaches the ribcage of some of the Barbies), stripped off what muscle definition he had, and gave him a realistic "package;" he has stumpy little legs, a beer belly, love handles and a budding double chin. I couldn't find a way to give him a bald spot or a receding hairline, else I'd have done that too. I think he looks fuckin' great, dude—and he really stands out among the muscleheads and fashionistas.

You know, I think there is probably a great, untapped market in "non-pretty" body types, because I surely cannot be alone in being disturbed by the predominant narrow-minded, exclusionist beautyism. I should learn how to build avatars and introduce a line of Uglies©®™: street sweepers, garbagemen, illegal-immigrant gardeners, can't-speak-the-language office cleaners, exploited-to-hell-and-back maids, bag ladies and cat ladies, back-alley drunks, back-of-the-bus monologuists. Woot. I reckon they would a great business!

Useful tools for Macs

I was thinking about certain blogging buddies who have recently switched away from the Dark Side, and it occurred to me that there are probably many clever little tools and tricks that I use daily which they don't know about. Without further ado, here are sixteen seventeen pointers for new Mac users:

1) Investigate the "Services" menu, which is part of every application. Many useful things can be found here, for instance you can mark text in any application (e.g. while composing this blog piece in Safari) and have the Mac automatically create a new TextEdit file and put the marked text into it.

2) Depending on your work habits and the size of your monitor, you may find Stickies useful. This programme puts little yellow (red, green, ...) Post-Its on your screen.

3) Clean up the dock! Dock space is limited and too valuable to waste on programmes that you don't use regularly (especially if you have TigerLaunch installed (see below). To remove an item from the dock, click and hold on it, and pull the item out of the dock into mid-screen, then let go. You can add items to the dock by dragging them into it: existing items move aside to make a place for it. You can also get any currently running app to remain in the dock: click and hold on the item until a context menu appears, then select "Keep in dock."

4) Use the Keychain to keep track of your accounts and passwords; allow the browser to save and recall these. However, if you do this, then you must:

5) Set a really good password (more than six characters, lower-case AND upper-case AND numerics AND graphic symbols) for your login account, and disable the automatic login feature. This prevents someone who steals your laptop or walks into your office in your absence from getting at your online banking or whatever. [Updated] Warning: use only characters and symbols that appear on a standard American-English keyboard (i.e. no ä or ß or ñ characters). If the computer crashes and damages your preferences, it may start with an American-English setup on which such characters are not available or in different positions.

6) You can jump between running applications by pressing Apple-Tab. This is faster and more convenient than clicking in the Dock or searching for the other app's open windows.

7) Learn to use Exposé to reveal all currently open windows, or to temporarily hide all windows to show you the desktop.

Here are a few recommended programmes:

TigerLaunch

This is a configurable equivalent to Windows' Start menu: a simple list of all programmes on your computer for easy access. Unlike the Start menu, it is easily user-configurable: you can add or remove programmes from the list, and specify which folders it should include.

EvalService

A very useful addition to the "Services" menu, it performs mathematical calculations in context, in the middle of your e.g. Word document, so that you need not reach for the calculator. You type e.g. Mark owes me 18*3.5+3 Euros and select the expression, then choose "Evaluate expression" from the Services menu. The answer is appended to the expression: Mark owes me 18*3.5+3 = 66 Euros, you then delete the original calculation if no longer desired.

Menu calendar clock

This puts a pop-up monthly calendar in the menu bar, linked to entries in your iCal calendar.

Net News Wire

A simple and very comfortable RSS feed viewer.

Senuti

I wrote about this previously. It's the opposite of iTunes, it copies music files from your iPod to your computer and (optionally) enters them into your iTunes library. Obviously one would only use this to make a backup copy of the iPod, not to "obtain" music from a friend's collection.

Tea Timer

A very simple timer app, which bongs a reminder at a specific point in time (15:33:07) or after counting down a number of hours/minutes/seconds. I use this daily to remind myself that something's in the oven.

SnapNDrag

Makes configurable screen shots of the entire monitor, a specific window, a region defined by two clicks on the diagonal, or after N seconds (which allows you to take a screen shot with a menu open). It's very useful to me when I'm writing user guides for or answering questions about my software. Unlike the built-in screen shot capability (Apple-3 for the entire monitor, Apple-4 for a region) the results can be saved in one of several image formats, or can even be drag-and-dropped directly into an open e-mail message.

Spam Sieve

A spam filter, in case your Internet provider doesn't offer one or their price is too high. Simple, very effective, good value for money.

Super Duper!

Cheap and effective backup software. The basic version is free; the full version (22 Euros) can be made to run backups automatically at specific times, e.g. in the middle of the night. Ya gotta make backups!

Cyberduck

The Finder has a built-in FTP browser which can display storage areas on the Internet as though they were normal hard-disks attached to your computer, but if you often work with FTP you will want something more controllable. Cyberduck is simple to use, cheap and very effective.

Flip4Mac

Lets you view Windows Media Viewer (.wmv) clips in QuickTime.

On the enforcement of gender diversity

The Internets are much exercised lately about intimations of gender bias among tech-conference organizers, because only a small fraction of the speakers at most conferences are women (the original article; sample responses here and here).

(To be clear: gender imbalance in the tech world does exist, and it is a bad thing. It saddens me to see only three women among roughly 140 attendees—and only one woman speaker in four years—at the annual conference of the database toolkit software I use, or to read that "the percentage of women receiving bachelor’s degrees in computer science dropped from 37 percent in 1985 to 28 percent in 2001, and only 20 percent of computer science PhD recipients are women" (Gruber quoting the Boston Globe): is this where two generations of empowerment and feminism have lead us? What a waste of potential for us males, to hear only the same voices telling the same stories. Diversity works to the benefit of all parties: you get so speak, we get to hear you. Both sides are enriched.)

I think that to base an argument on one number taken in isolation (the percentage of speakers) is fallacious: there may well be gender bias among conference organizers, but the number of women speakers in itself can neither prove nor disprove it. What counts is whether women are being prevented from speaking: whether the organizers reject women applicants in greater proportion than men (it's always the case that more people apply to speak than can be given a podium); and whether the proportion of women speakers corresponds to the proportion of women in the audience.

The organizers could end this particular wrangle (though without resolving the issue) by revealing one number: the percentage of would-be speakers who are female. If 20% of applicants are female but only 10% of speakers, then women are indeed under-represented. On the other hand, if 5% of applicants are female and 10% of speakers are female, then this proves a gender bias in favour of women. I am willing to take any bet you care to place, that exactly this gender bias does exist in many cases: that enlightened conference organizers do try to have as many women speakers as possible. (Going back to my database toolkit conference and that one woman among roughly 24 speakers. Four percent of speakers were female; two percent of attendees were female. One in four years is not a lot, however it's twice as many as one would expect statistically given the population. No under-representation.)

So where do the women speakers come from? Dori Smith talks about (not) being asked to speak at a conference; well, my experience and belief is that unless one's surname is "Gates" or "Jobs" one must apply to speak. Why don't more women apply? (The answer "they have better things to do" would be valid and acceptable, but raises the question "what does 'better' mean?")

May I ask you, yes you dear Reader: most of you are women (judging by the comments I receive); by definition you are all computer-savvy, by inclination as blogwriters you are alert and interested in the world, good with words, and at least marginally geeky. Have you ever applied to speak at a conference (of any kind in any field)? If not, why not; if so, what happened?

How embarrassing

I blush to confess that the database problem that I has had me swearing a blue streak for nearly a week is not, in fact, a Windows problem at all. The structure file (the source code; think of it as the recipe for making a database) is damaged in a very peculiar way, which only shows up in the compiled application on Windows (the Mac application is fine too).

None of my various testing and repairing tools could find the problem, which I only discovered by following up a clue from the online help forum. I still don't know exactly what is wrong, and the application still doesn't run on Windows; but I know where it must be and am pretty sure that I know what it'll look like when I do find it.

A clever person once said that one learns best by making mistakes: how true. I've learned one hell of a lot about resources during the last few hours, including the fact that I made a truly awful BSDT of a mistake about two years ago which is only now coming to light. Fascinating.

On the suckitude of certain RSS feeds

Dear Blogger*,

you may remember that I have complained many times in e-mail and once here about the godawful suckitude of the software that generates RSS feeds. Having upgraded to the ex-beta Blogger2 I am saddened but not in the least surprised to find that this is still crap—but in a new and exciting way.

Two problems of the old feed software have been solved: all posts are short-form, and the strange jumping back and forth between paragraphs of some feed items no longer appears (in this sample of posts). Well done! Thank you!

However: the new software has a new bug which is every bit as irritating as those: it has no understanding of "newness."

I've been going through my archives, applying labels to posts that deserve to be thus hauled back into the limelight, and your software has picked up on this. The RSS feed now lists the twenty-five most recently labelled posts, some of which are three years old. No post which was written in 2007 appears in the feed.

This is absurd. Surely your software can be made to distinguish between "new" and "modified?" And furthermore: is your software really unable to tell the difference between editing content and applying a label?

love and kisses
Udge


* not you, dear blogreading person! I mean the company named "Blogger."

Friday

Walking home at sunset, it occurs to me that the Jews were right about that too: it's just obviously the correct and fitting time for the Sabbath to begin. It was a pleasure and a delight to be walking home in the fading daylight, as the shops were closing for the evening and the birds were giving their end-of-day songs.

Speaking of the Sabbath reminds me of something I forgot to mention earlier. When I was in Düsseldorf for four hours between trains last month, I walked around the Altstadt and on impulse stopped in at a church. There was only one other person there, a man in a wheelchair who sat at the back as though waiting for someone, yet paid no attention to me or his surroundings. I sat in a pew near the front and thought about life and death and the whole damned thing, then lit a candle to the memory of AH and watched it burn for a while. I remembered a morning many years ago when I was a student in London, working on a project about the (Roman Catholic) Westminster Cathedral—not to be confused with the (Anglican) Westminster Abbey—and stopped in one morning on my way to college to have another look at the building. I noticed a man going from altar to altar, praying and lighting a candle at each one; he made no attempt to stay the tears that were flowing down his cheeks, literally dripping from his chin as he prayed. I watched him with an odd feeling of awe and respect, and realized that I envied him his belief.

In other news The world is once again spinning around towards Spring, the sun touched the rooftops across the street at 8:15 this morning. I saw a tiny plant growing in a crack in a south-facing stone wall which was already flowering. Photos tomorrow, if I remember where it was.

In other, other news I bought myself another little toy, an Airport Express station so that I can hear my iTunes playlists through proper speakers. It's very nice. Setup was easy, once I figured out that my firewall was blocking the Airport from asking for instructions; and to give Apple their due, this was the first suggestion in the troubleshooting section of the manual. A look at the TCP logs reveals that I've already sent over four gigabytes of music wafting through the air in this way. Dear me, how time flies: a gigabyte used to fill a very large, heavy and expensive physical disk.

I was amused to discover, while configuring the system, that there are three unprotected WLAN networks available from where I sit, so I need never pay excess-volume charges again. Not that I would do that, of course.

In related news Philip once asked whether I could post an MP3 of a song that I had written about. Well, I found a service that does exactly that with exemplary simplicity: choose a file, set its expiry date, click on "upload," note the resulting URL. Here is a test, a 5 megabyte MP3 of my current most-often-put-on-repeat song. Don't delay, it's only there until 22:30 CET on Saturday.

What I haven't yet figured out, is how to tell you what it's called and who's playing without leaving a google-trail here that the copyright police could follow; and I would ask any commenters to please refrain from mentioning any such info. Anyone wants to know should mail me at the address up top, and I'll send you all the details.

[Updated] the solution is obvious: Amazon to the rescue. But please: mention no names.

An open letter

Dear Blogger*,

I think it's utterly wonderful that you are working on the new! improved! Beta Blogger. Bravo, hurrah.

HOWEVER, in the two years that I've been blogging, your RSS feed generator has been and remains to this day a piece of crap. Let's leave aside the fact that it usually reports a half-dozen items as "new" although only one of them was, even though this defeats the purpose of an RSS feed.

We can even leave aside that it ignores the blog's settings (which say that all items should be short-form) and seemingly at random puts up excerpts or the whole post.

What really bothers me is that when it does put up an excerpt, it often mangles the content of the posts. Consider its version of my previous post:

The text of Orhan Pamuk's acceptance speech has been published at the Nobel Prize website (yes, of course there is one). It's a marvellous piece of writing, full of love and insight and closely-observed realities of life. The writer's secret is not inspiration I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. It's a long piece, 6200 words, but don't

That was the entire first paragraph, followed without indication by the first 6 words of the second paragraph, and then a huge jump to the last twenty words of the third paragraph, then the first 8 words of the fourth paragraph, then it just trails off in the middle of

Disturbing, isn't it?

Tell me please, dear Blogger: What in Hell's name is that supposed to be? And why haven't you bothered to fix it, or at least to reply to one of the dozens of e-mails or formal bug-reports that I've sent? The only "response" that I have been able to detect, is that it's now impossible to find an e-mail address for Blogger Support on the so-called Help page. Bah.

Rating: not bloody good enough.

love and kisses,
Udge


* not you, dear blog-reading and probably blog-writing person! I mean the company named "Blogger" which is a sub-unit of Google, and which doesn't respond to e-mail or bug-reports.

And now for something completely different

I've heard some very good music on the onboard radio station in the ICE trains: the new Zauberflöte which I mentioned some months back, Til Brönner (Miles-ish breathy-whispering jazz trumpet), and recently Chris Rea's retirement-from-touring live album The road to Hell & back. He's been a name on the edge of my consciousness for decades, but for some reason I never listened, assuming that I wouldn't like. Duh. Anyway, better late than never; and I do like it very much. This album (double CD, bound up like a little hardcover book) is - may I speak plainly? - just bloody brilliant. Bottleneck slide guitar of the finest kind, great songs and that famous rasping voice. Blues and/or guitar-hero fans will swoon at this. It's all great, but the standout tracks are "Where the blues come from," the ten-minute jam of the title track, "Somewhere between Highway 61 & 48," "Let's dance" (of course), and for my money the best of show "Work gang" which changes gear from semi-acoustic to bell-like ringing guitars and then changes up again to a roaring, whistling slide solo. Wow. Music for hyperventilating to.

I walked down to the river today, to give myself a break from the computers and to enjoy some sunshine. Winter is coming on slowly but surely, most of the trees in the Schloßgarten have turned colour and some are already bare. There will be photos sometime soon, but I'm struggling with work and also have a backlog of shots from Toronto still. At least the series down at the Beaches must be posted, great work if I say so myself. To be continued.

I have just discovered something wonderful! I was editing this post on Burton and uploading photos to Flickr on Alberich, and wanted to get the photo's URL into the post, so did the logical thing and copied it ... ah, but how to paste it in? Wouldn't it be great if one could share a clipboard across the network, if one could "copy" on machine X over there, and then "paste" on machine Y over here? Well, if the machines involved are Macs, the answer is slightly yes: it's not really a shared clipboard but it is definitely cut and paste between two computers.

Connect the computers via network, and on the "copy" machine mark the desired text. If you now click and hold in the marked area, you can move the whole marked block as an object. Put it down on the icon of the other computer's desktop. Now switch to the "paste" machine, find the block on your desktop, click and hold on it, and put it down where it belongs in the document you're editing. It's a Mac, it Just Works.

Twelve down, eighteen to go.

Regina

The cold and rain have caught up with me, after a single day of relatively good weather. There will be very few photos taken during this holiday, I fear.

I had forgotten what clever, interesting people my sister and her family are: the speed of conversation, the balletic weave of jibe and retort, are like a Billy Wilder movie come to life. It's fascinating to observe, and dizzying to take part in, their conversations after such a long time away. I find myself to have slowed down, to have adopted the Germanic zeal for precision at the cost of the easy fluency that we once shared.

Their computer (one of those Windows things) died last week, so the first thing we discussed on my arrival was what kind of Mac they should buy. We phoned around yesterday morning, and after some difficulty found the only Mac Mini available in the city - which we promptly bought yesterday afternoon. I have been fine-tuning it and teaching them the basics of Macism since then. The question of salvaging their data from the wreckage of the Winbox is still open, of particular interest are the 4.5 gigabytes of music files that nobody remembers (or admits to) downloading.

Three days until the opera starts! I'm very excited. There have been some last-minute changes in the cast due to illness (and politics, it is whispered) but should still be quite good indeed.

In other news during my nearly three-hour stopover in Frankfurt on the way here, I signed up for a pilot project run by the German Bundesgrenzschutz (border police), testing automatic passport control by iris recognition. It was impressively simple and efficient: sign the release forms, present my computer-readable passport, stand in front of the camera, stand in front of a test system to confirm that it could recognize me. Finding the ofice where this was done took twice as long as the actual sign-up. It worked well, too: I walked from there to the passport control, ignored the three hundred people waiting to be checked by a human and laid my passport on the checking console. The first set of doors opened, I stood in front of the camera which flashed and beeped, and the second set of doors opened. Took about twenty seconds. What's not to like?

Mind you, I would not have been so willling to stand in front of an American version of this system. I am willing to trust the German = European security apparatus and its political masters; I have serious doubts about the CIA/FBI/NSA and actively distrust their political masters.

On trains

I am halfway to Berlin on a cloudy and cold day. This is an older, first generation ICE, which are slower, noisier and less comfortable than the new ICE-3's - though they are much quieter and comfier than the British Rail 125's which I rode daily when I worked at a computer company in the west of England.

For some reason, the train is nearly deserted (at 11am on a workday, on what I expected to be one of the busiest routes in Germany). I have a compartment to myself, and am typing contentedly as the world flashes past my window. The corridor is full of babies crawling happily back and forth while their parents stand guard.

This particular train has been retrofitted with power points for the laptop but not with canned music, so I am limited to what's still lying around from when I last topped up my iPod. Since the iPod has a larger hard disk than the laptop (o tempora, o mores!) this isn't much at all for a five hour trip. Currently playing is "A Stream with Bright Fish" from The Pearl by Brian Eno and Harold Budd, which is exactly what anyone familiar with either of them would expect it to be; excellent music for being alone and thoughtful on a cloudy day. Budd's contribution is clear, the songs are much more melodious than Eno's rather austere recordings in this vein. Serene, very beautiful in a minimal way, the album is highly recommended if you are into ambient sounds but certain to appall anyone hoping for a tune that they could whistle in the bath. Listen before you buy.

The further north we go the more snow there is on the ground, although even here the temperature seems to be above freezing, the ice on that lake was definitely rotting. The snow looks to be only ankle deep, no danger here of roofs collapsing under its weight.

I have to amend the impression I gave earlier of the flatness and decaying-industrial-sprawl unsightliness of northern Germany, which seems to apply only to the Rhine valley and the coal&iron complex around Essen. This is a different route from what I took then, we are heading northeast from Frankfurt through what I guess are the Taunus mountains, and the landscape is correspondingly open and hilly, at times quite pretty.

Just saw a big whitish hawk, recognizable as such by its beak, the upswept feathered-out wingtips and its sheer size, but it was gone too quickly to identify it exactly. There have been a few rabbits in the fields, and some larger birds. I think I saw cormorants on a river near Frankfurt.

Germany is threaded through with quite large rivers, the names of which I don't know and cannot easily discover. It's odd that each Autobahn bridge is clearly labelled with its name, length and height above the valley bottom, in a little sign beside the road, but there is no equivalent sign for the rivers that we cross. I should suggest this to the Powers That Be, surely other people would also be glad to know?

I will spend some 220 Euros (not counting my time = lost earnings) and nearly 12 hours in trains, buses and taxis, to attend a two- or three-hour meeting. 762 kilometers each way, not counting the local ground transport at each end. Call it 1540 kilometers, just under a thousand miles, in one day for one meeting. Is this not absurd, foolish, frivolous and wasteful?

(Going by plane would have cost about the same and taken nearly as long, door-to-door. This way I can avoid airports and enjoy the scenery, both big advantages from my point of view; on the other hand, Lufthansa's coffee is free and much better. 'Tis an imperfect world, and we must live with compromises.)

The purpose of the journey is to sell a client/server system (worth nearly what I earn in a month from the architects) and additional data import (worth half a month of work), with possible knock-on effects should they in turn recommend us to other companies, which is of course the reason we are I am knocking ourselves myself out. This pair of Dilbert cartoons seems relevant to the trip: in theory I am responsible for development and my partner is responsible for sales, however when the going gets rough I am the one who stands behind the car and pushes. Pah.

[Continued at 7pm on the journey home] And now, the punchline:

It was a complete waste of time and money.

Their server runs on Linux, our database does not. End of story, thanks but no thanks, don't let the door hit you on your way out.

I am so mad that I could just kill somebody, but I'd have to start with myself: I too have spoken to them, I too failed to ask this particular question. I just assumed that someone among my colleagues would have cleared this up before wasting my time by passing on the inquiry, and further assumed that the inquirers would have read either the website or the promotional bumpf that came with the CD, both of which clearly state that the DB does not run on Linux. (In my defence, when we spoke they mentioned "Mac" and "server" in the same sentence, they are running the demo on a Mac, and they never mentioned any other operating system. But still: Bah.)

For all the good it has done us, I might as well have spent the day at home, drinking beer and picking my nose reading blogs.