Posts (page 2)
Via Dolma, I found this neat thing which, based solely on my alter ego's birthday (not Kitto's, but Kitto's alter ego), described his life path:
The Life Path 5 suggests that you entered this plane with a highly progressive mindset, with the attitude and skills to make the world a better place. The key word for your Life Path is freedom. In the pursuit of freedom, you are naturally versatile, adventurous, and advanced in your thinking. You are one of those people who is always striving to find answers to the many questions that life poses. The byword for the positive Life Path 5 is constant change and improvement. You want to be totally unrestrained, as this is the number most often associated with the productive use of freedom.
You may be one of the most compassionate of people as the 5 is surely the most freedom-loving and compassionate Life Path. Your love of freedom extends to humanity at large, and concern for your fellow man, his freedom and his welfare, may be foremost in your mind. A great Life Path 5 American President, Abraham Lincoln, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and ended slavery in America. As the ultimate progressive thinker type, your potential in government, the law, and other positions of authority is unlimited.
You are a good communicator, and you know how to motivate people around you. This may be your strongest and most valuable trait. Because of this skill, and your amazing wit, you are a truly natural born salesman. This ability to sell and motivate extends to any sort of physical product all the way through to whatever ideas or concepts you may embrace.
You abhor routine and boring work, and you are not very good at staying with everyday tasks that must be finished on time. On the average, the number 5 personality is rather happy-go-lucky; living for today, and not worrying too much about tomorrow. It is also important for you to find a job that provides thought-provoking tasks rather than routine and redundant responsibilities. You do best dealing with people, but the important thing is that you have the flexibility to express yourself at all times. You have an innate ability to think through complex matters and analyze them quickly, but then be off to something new.
A love of adventure may dominate your life. This may take the form of mental or physical manifestation, but in either case, you thrill to the chance for exploration and blazing new trails. Surely you belong to a group considered the most worldly and traveled. Clearly you are not one to pass up a good venture. You have quite a lot of the risk-taker in your makeup. If you aren't putting your money at stake, you are surely open to a wide variety of risks in your everyday life. Taking the conservative approach is just not in your nature.
In romance, you hate to be tied down and restricted. This doesn't necessarily mean that you are unfaithful or promiscuous, but it does mean that a good partner for you needs to understand your nature. A relationship based on jealousy and having tight reigns is not going to work at all for you. A partner who understands your need to be free and trusted will find you trustworthy, even if you aren't constantly available and totally dutiful. It is important for you to mix with people of a like mind, and to try to avoid those that are too serious and demanding.
If you are living on the negative side of the Life Path 5, you are apt to be multitalented, but suffering from some lack of direction, and there is confusion surrounding your ambition. Restless, discontent, and impulsive, you may bounce from one job to the next without accomplishing much at all. A negative Life Path 5 can become very irresponsible in tasks and decisions concerning the home and business life. The total pursuit of sensation and adventure can result in your becoming self-indulgent and totally unaware of the feelings of those around you.
Scary. I know, everyone says that about astrology/numerology; it's written in such a way that the ambiguity can apply to most anything. But c'mon, this is ridiculous. There are some pretty unambiguous statements in here, and they are accurate. Sheesh.
Last time I tell anyone my real birthdate.
More photos from my Second Life travels at my flickr photostream...
Kudos to the Snapzilla (aka slpics.com) folks for making it so easy to get snapshots out of Second Life into flickr! I guess I could just as well use the direct upload-by-email thing at flickr, but it's not as easy as typing flickr@slpics.com.
I got this thing called blogHUD yesterday. It's neat because it lets you chat short messages from within Second Life that wind up on a stream-of-consciousness blog over at bloghud.com. All your own messages are shown on a custom page, too. Here's mine.
The other neat thing is that the website displays a Second Life map with little markers of where recent blogs are coming from. You can click on a marker and be instantly teleported to the source of the blog, and start a fight with the blogger if you want to. :-)
Using the website, you can also filter the messages to a particular region, in case there's a lot of chatter and you want to focus on what is going on in a particular geography. There are also several standard channels you can post to, using the HUD to select them, like "news," "events," "clubs," etc.
All in all, quite neat. The website design is a little cluttered for my taste, but it's neat functionality.
I didn't finish the story last night because it was late, so I neglected to mention how I eventually got out of there...
(Read the first part of the story first if you haven't already and come back after.)
Eventually after hopping from strange furniture item to strange furniture item, madly trying to position myself and the camera angle to take interesting pics for posting to slpics, my client crashed. So I went over to slpics to see if my pics had been posted, and they had. One of the neat things about slpics is that the pics are geocoded, which means you can just click on the location link and teleport right to where a snapshot was just taken.
So after a few minutes I logged back in. Of course, you generally wind up where you where when you signed off, so I ended up back in that odd furniture chamber. But I wasn't alone. Someone must have clicked on one of the pics and decided to check it out. Turns out it was a girl, so I said,
"Hello there."
She turned around and took a look at me, then ran screaming for the door.
Of course, it wasn't a real door. She tried to walk through it, and bounced off. Next I saw her hand go out as she clicked on it to try to open it, but no go. So I said,
"yeah, I was trapped here too."
And she immediately vanished, teleporting out. Or maybe logging out. After never having said a word. People are funny.
So that is how the story ends. Be careful out there, folks!
So, there I was, chatting with my good friend Sue Stonebender (also here) about the intricacies of scripting within Second Life, when I innocently asked her if she could tell me, off the top of her head, of a nice quiet place for me to tp (teleport) to while we finished our IM chat.
(I asked, because while I was IM'ing with her, a half-naked woman walked up to me and started chatting me up. Turns out she was Dutch, and was just waking up. Apparently she had a place nearby and saw me standing there, in the middle of my lovely barren wasteland in Newman that I call home... decided to strike up a conversation, totally oblivious that she had neglected to put on any pants over her thong.)
Anyway, Sue thinks for a minute, and sends me a couple of landmarks. One is for the International Space Museum, which is cool, but a little too "out there" for my mood. Another is for a place called Tusk I think, in Jubata. (I say "I think," because I never quite ended up there.) Apparently it's quite nice, so I click the tp button and I'm whisked over there.
As I say, I never quite ended up where Sue was sending me. For some reason, as soon as I arrived, I started teleporting again. So I hit the Cancel button, and looked around. The first thing I saw was a pose ball that said, "Get spanked." Gulp.
The music stream started, and I kind of liked it, so I decided to stick around. I found a safe place to sit.
I asked Sue if she knew anything about "Get spanked," and she professed her innocence. Seems like a glitch in the teleporting thing or something.
So I started looking around. I saw all sorts of things you could click on that had titles I had never seen before. Things like "posture training," and "click for cuffs." Even "humiliation table."
So I decided to get the heck out of there.
The first thing I did was look for the door. There was a door, but I quickly realized that I was in a building that was actually suspended 700 feet above sea level. And the door wouldn't open. So the only way out was to teleport out. Sue suggested another of her landmarks, so I clicked the Teleport button. No go. Simply no response. As if I hadn't clicked.
I had read about places in Second Life where you could get into some trouble. But supposedly, you could always click the Go Home button on the map to teleport out of wherever you were, and get back to home base. So that's what I did. No go.
Seems I was stuck. The only thing to do would be to quit the client and then log back in. But that would be admitting defeat. And, by this point, I was becoming intrigued by the various displays in the room. Strange objects kept rezzing and derezzing every minute... so I decided to try some of them out, and I posted the pics to slpics.com, and here they are, courtesy of slpics.com's flickr gateway...
So, here I was, working merrily away on a cool Second Life hack, when it turns out someone beat me to it.
Grr, I hate it when that happens. Kinda takes the fun out of finishing the hack, when someone else has pretty much already done it, and maybe a better job at it, too.
Here is a picture of me on a first-generation Segway in SL.
As it happens, I ride one in RL, too. They really are incredible machines. The feeling of effortless motion is wonderful, yet you can easily stop and have a conversation wth your neighbors or pedestrians. After a few minutes on the machine, it begins to feel like it's a part of you. It's really cool!
But not everybody thinks so. There is a fair amount of fear out there about these machines, mostly from people who haven't learned how they work. It is very difficult to hurt a pedestrian while riding one of these, unless you are reckless. But the same thing applies to bicycles, wheelchairs, people running down the street, etc. When I teach people how to ride a Segway for the first time, I have them try to run into me at full speed. I stop them with very little effort just by pushing up against the handle bar. The leverage of the handle bar upsets the rider's forward balance, and the ends up standing straight up, which brings the machine to a stop.
Anyway, there is a good amount of information on the Web about which US States allow the use of Segways on the sidewalk. But there is very little non-US information, and I couldn't find a single reference to private property permissions, such as shopping malls, office buildings, hotels, etc.
So I created a page on KittoWiki to try to collect that information. If you know of any particular places that have either allowed or prohibited Segways, add it to the list.
That reminds me, I need to put an entry there for Second Life. :-)
Did I mention that I really like DokuWiki? With the possible exception of having to shoehorn in some code to make it work on my hosted service provider, it installed easily and beautifully in minutes.
I installed it on my laptop (a MacBook Pro, of course) a few weeks ago without a hitch. It's a clean, simple, and elegant wiki.
Send DokuWiki some PayPal love. I did. :-)
Saw this via the del.icio.us link farm for secondlife. It's a Q&A with Anshe Chung, who recently announced she had accumulated virtual assets worth $1 million US.
It's great to hear about entrepreneurs like Anshe. She is a sometimes controversial figure within the Second Life community, but anyone who thinks it's easy to run a business that can create value like she has is living in a different fantasy world. Business is business, whether in a virtual world like Second Life, or in the real world. The same principles apply, and at the end of the day, hard work is the most important success factor.
I knew Anshe in Second Life, though we haven't seen or spoken to each other in over a year, since I dropped out of the world. She is an incredibly committed and focused person, and I think her business results speak for themselves. Good job Anshe!
