One good thing about Second Life, it seems, is that razors are not necessary. That's good, because I've noticed that shaving technology in Real Life is getting worse, not better.

Recently I decided to upgrade to the latest in 2007 shaving technology. I had been using an old, 2-blade shaving system for years. I think the technology was invented sometime in the 1980s, replacing the hundreds-years-old single-blade technology. It always worked well, but over the years it started to feel older and older -- notwithstanding the fact I was buying new blade cartridges regularly, of course. Like any consumer, I became entranced by shiny new technology. With a name like Gillette Fusion Power Phantom, who wouldn't be?

The razor cartridge now has five blades (six if you count the special trimmer on the back, which I didn't even notice until I read the instructions on the web site -- and that's a problem in and of itself in too many ways to count. "Razor" and "web site" were never meant to be in the same sentence together.) Not only that, but it's battery-operated. It has a little vibrator which I suppose is intended to make the blades glide more smoothly over tough facial hair. Or intended to get you stopped at airport checkpoints.

Here's the problem. The vibrating blades don't do anything but make your face feel numb, making it more likely to get nicked. The cartridge has a flexible piece of rubber on its underside which separates the blades from your skin, which causes you to have to press harder, which makes it more likely to get nicked. And the five blades still miss the trouble spots around the chin. As a result, I end up with a patchy shave which I have to touch up afterwards, making it more likely to get nicked or get razor burn.

The moral of the story? Five blades is not better than two blades. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Don't be hypnotized by shiny objects. Razor blades and batteries should not be in the same device.

Second Life does have certain advantages over Real Life.

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Hey, is anyone working on a Second Life interface to Twitter? Tell me yes, so I don't have to do it myself!!

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A common criticism of Second Life tends to focus on the fact that the experience of being in Second Life is not game-like. Comparing Second Life to World of Warcraft is like comparing an entire city to a movie theater. Sure, the theater is a good place to have fun and see lots of high-quality graphics, but it's only a part of what you can find in a city. In fact, large parts of a city are incredibly boring, especially when you're looking for fun.

So Second Lifers have taken to countering the "it's a boring game" criticism with the thought "it's like the Web, only 3D."  This makes a lot of sense, of course, because Second Life is a 3D environment entirely designed by its users. There are really beautiful web sites and there are really ugly ones. Same goes for Second Life. And if you're looking for fun, you have to skip past a whole bunch of boring web sites and go directly to the fun ones. Same goes for Second Life. It's just that the Web is more mature in its links, making it much easier to find things than in Second Life. One can only hope Second Life continues to get better, much like the searching the Web did between 1993 (NCSA Mosaic "What's New") and 1998 (Yahoo).

But in a sense, I think the "3D Web" position is missing something incredibly important: the time dimension. This makes it four-dimensional, not three. In Second Life, when you visit a place, you are often interacting with other people visiting it. Depending on the time of day, there may be a lot of people there, or very few. Of course, the same thing is true with the Web, but it's generally invisible. In Second Life, you can't help but notice the other people there with you. Sometimes they even bump into you.

Like the Web, things change over time, but unlike the Web, a large part of the Second Life experience revolves around scheduled events. In Second Life, the time dimension is incredibly important, because the real-time social dimension is incredibly important. Whereas most of the Web is designed for asynchronous interaction (post a message, wait for a reply, come back later to check), Second Life pretty much depends upon synchronous interaction. This makes the time dimension that much more visible, which is why I think we're really talking about a 4D version of the World Wide Web.

Sure, you could argue the relative merits of Web-based social interaction (generally asynchronous) versus Second Life-based interaction (generally synchronous), but the truth is there is probably a time and place for each. (No pun intended.)

Even parts of the web that include real-time chat are only adding one dimension to a typically flat (2D) environment. Not quite 4D.

Therefore, I'm predicting that the real future of Second Life will be seen to be the first four-dimensional version of the World Wide Web. The 4D Web adds a very visible sense of "place" and sense of "time" to our online experience, while accommodating the diversity of communication needs. It's not a 3D game. It's not a flat web page. It's something that combines the best attributes of both, in a way we can naturally relate to.

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I haven't blogged recently because my Second Life time has been taken up by this neat little hack I've been working on... I've tinkered with Linden Scripting Language (LSL) in the past, but this is the first significant undertaking I've, well, undertaken.

The fun part of what I'm doing is that it's a classic client/server thing. There's an LSL script that runs in-world, and it communicates with a backend application running on a server somewhere. I'm using the python language for the server because I like it, and using the TurboGears application framework because it's easy.

What does it do? Basically, this:

  1. Remembers things people say about other people and repeats those things when people wander over or when you ask it.
  2. Tells you what people you trust think about people nearby, or other people.

It also has an API that can be used by other scripts who might want to query, say, someone's reputation before letting them onto their land, etc.

One of the first things I wanted to tackle was inter-script communication, because I read that LSL scripts are severely limited in the amount of memory they have available. I wanted my script to be able to understand JSON output from my app, so I wrote a basic JSON parser and made it into a script which communicated via link_messages. This worked really well and was great fun until I decided to skip the whole JSON thing for my client and just go with extremely basic text output from my server. Oh well. But the good news is, and the whole point of the exercise is, that I now have a library I can drop in in case my scripts ever need to talk to servers that only speak JSON.

The second new problem to solve was multiple client concurrency issues. The little hack I'm writing will be much more fun if it's worn as an attachment, and therefore we have to deal with the fact that there will be lots of little clients running around trying to talk to the server at the same time. This isn't usually a problem, but in this case, my script is designed to take input from any nearby speaker, not just its owner. In other words, it listens to whatever is said within a particular channel, and tries to process it via the server. This means that if there are multiple scripts in the same vicinity, each one will talk to the server with identical messages, unless they know about each other.

Solving this problem conclusively is not trivial. I seem to recall learning something about this class of problem back in college in some computer science class. But the solution has evaded me. Luckily, I came up with a hack that mostly gets the job done, and it isn't super-critical that concurrency be avoided, since the server knows how to ignore duplicate requests. It's mainly a UI thing in the client. I've tested my solution solo with about 15 client scripts running simultaneously, and it works fine.

It's been a fun project so far, and I've been showing it to a few people, and so far so good. It's not for release yet, but I've got some documentation in progress here if you're interested.

My working title for this hack is LOracle, as in Linden Oracle. I've been told it's a terrible name. Suggestions?

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Ok, after posting about Kitto's alter ego's life path, it's only fair to post about Kitto's. Taking my birthdate of March 1, 2004 (from my Second Life profile), here is my life path:

The Life Path 1 suggests that you entered this plane with skills allowing you to become a leader type rather easily. Your nature is charged with individualistic desires, a demand for independence, and the need for personal attainment. Many of our military generals, corporate leaders, and political leaders are men and women having the Life Path 1. When you display positive 1 traits your mind is capable of significant creative inspiration, and it possesses the enthusiasm and drive to accomplish a great deal. You are very good at getting the ball rolling; initiating new projects is your forte. You are at your best when confronted with obstacles and challenges, as you combat these with strength and daring. This is both the physical and inner varieties of strength. With this strength comes utter determination and the capability to lead. As a natural leader you have a flair for taking charge of any situation. You have a tendency to do this, even if, at times, it is not appropriate for you to do so.

Highly original, you may have talents as an inventor or innovator of some sort. In any work that you choose, your independent attitude can show through. You have very strong personal needs and desires, and you feel it is always necessary to follow your own convictions. You tire of routine and highly detailed tasks rather quickly.

You are ambitious and assertive in promoting yourself. Although you may hide the fact for social reasons, you can be self-centered and demand to have your way in many circumstances. That said, for the most part, you are considered very good company, friendly, good-natured, and a wonderful conversationalist. People like you and are drawn to you. It is a good thing they are, because you are very sensitive to disapproval and you don't handle it very well.

There are several ways that the negative side of the 1 can show up. The 1 always has the potential for greatness as a leader, but they may fail as a follower. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to follow for a while before you are allowed to lead and this can be a difficult time. When the 1 Life Path person is not fully developed and expressing the negative side of this number, the demeanor may appear very dependent rather than independent, particularly in the early years. If you are expressing this negative trait of the number 1, you are likely to be very dissatisfied with your circumstances, and long for self-sufficiency. This might be defined as the weak or dependent side of the negative 1 Life Path. On the strong side of this negative curve, the 1 energy can become too self-serving, selfish and egotistical. Avoid being too bossy and demanding.

I will try to be less bossy. :-)

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Attending live events in Second Life is always a pleasure. If you like pain, that is. With a few exceptions, the handful of large-scale live events I attended have suffered from various problems. Over a year ago, this was a common problem, and since then, various strategies and hacks have been developed to make live events work better.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The way out...

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!

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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.

Postcard from Second Life

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."

Postcard from Second Life

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...

Postcard from Second Life

Ahhh...

How could this have happened?

Postcard from Second Life

Help!

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