Omega Point

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver — Learning in Virtual Worlds!

This Wednes­day, (March 21st, 2007) I and the rest of the Social Sig­nal team will be at Social Tech Brew­ing Van­cou­ver, for this month’s topic, “Learn­ing in Vir­tual Worlds”.*

From the Social Sig­nal blog:

If you work at the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­ogy and community-building, we hope you’ll join us for the March gath­er­ing of Social Tech Brewing’s Van­cou­ver chap­ter. Social Tech Brew­ing brings together folks from social media, non­profit orga­ni­za­tions, com­mu­nity ser­vice, social activism, social ven­tures and tech­nol­ogy to share ideas — and beer!

Beer! Vir­tual worlds! Community-building! It’s got it all! If that sounds like your mug of beer, you should join us!

From 7–8 PM, we’ll be at Work­Space at 21 Water St. (See Google Maps)
After­wards, we’ll be mov­ing across the street to Six Acres.

See the blog post at SocialSignal.com for more or RSVP here!

* You know, like that Sec­ond Life thing.

Second Life usage graph roundup!

I found a fas­ci­nat­ing* post about Sec­ond Life’s much-debated usage num­bers over at Social Sig­nal.

“That num­ber will likely be over 4.6 mil­lion by the time you read this blog post. So what does that actu­ally mean in prac­ti­cal usage terms? Are there 4.6 mil­lion reg­u­lar Sec­ond Life users? Well, no.”

* Where “fas­ci­nat­ing” may or may not mean “writ­ten by me”. Link!

Singing in the shower

For a long time, I was embar­rassed about the way my voice sounds. It’s still one of the things I have the most trou­ble with since the great “Hey, let’s grow 8 inches taller than every­one else in our class!” deba­cle of my teenage years.

It’s taken me a long time, but I’m finally feel­ing more com­fort­able with my body. I actu­ally own (and occa­sion­ally wear!) heels now. Take that, feet!

Now I’m start­ing to warm up to my voice as well. When I think about it, one of the biggest cat­a­lysts hap­pened sev­eral months ago. I ran­domly met a group of women vis­it­ing Van­cou­ver from Seat­tle — two cou­ples a decade or so older than me. We struck up a con­ver­sa­tion and, one of them men­tioned –with­out any fish­ing on my part– that she thought I had had a great voice. The other three chimed in, agree­ing that my voice was “hot” and did I sing? Oh, but I should! I’d sound great. One of them com­pared it to “Shane, you know, from the L Word?” This was met with agree­ment and much nodding.

What!? These are not sen­ti­ments I’ve often heard. Were they mess­ing with me? No, that didn’t seem likely, given the spon­tane­ity and appar­ent sin­cer­ity of their words. Sure, per­haps their com­par­i­son to Kather­ine Moen­nig as Shane was a bit of a stretch, but then again, I’ve always known that I was being just a tad inse­cure and self-deprecating by describ­ing my voice as sound­ing like Cap­tain Janeway as por­trayed by Bea Arthur.

Days later, after I’d given their words some thought, I real­ized that even if their opin­ion isn’t one that’s broadly agreed-upon, that’s not impor­tant. What is impor­tant is the source of the sen­ti­ment: a group of seem­ingly suc­cess­ful, socially-inclined gay women. Sure, in gen­eral terms, it’s nice being told you have an attrac­tive qual­ity, but I know that I’ve always been far more recep­tive to com­pli­ments from the cute girl hand­ing me my cof­fee than from some ran­dom dude as I step around him on the street.

So maybe it doesn’t mat­ter if every­one thinks my voice is hot, so long as it’s pos­si­ble that some­one does. We all seek val­i­da­tion from oth­ers, despite mostly real­iz­ing that it’s not par­tic­u­larly healthy and that we should feel good about our­selves with­out need­ing some­one else’s approval. Still, free com­pli­ments feel good, par­tic­u­larly when they come from some­one unex­pected. The fact that it came from sev­eral some­ones — sev­eral les­bian some­ones — made it all the more sat­is­fy­ing to hear.

So where does this new­found sense of not-total-loathing leave me now? I came away from the North­ern Voice 2007 con­fer­ence with an inter­est in video blog­ging. I’m beta test­ing Sec­ond Life’s upcom­ing voice chat sys­tem, and as I write this, I real­ize that I can’t remem­ber the last time I felt anx­i­ety about using the phone. Wow. Maybe just singing along to Dar and Ani isn’t such a far-fetched idea after all.

Some­times, pos­i­tive change hap­pens with­out us even being fully aware of it. I’d like to keep that up.

(Cross­posted from a com­ment on ChangeEverything.ca)

Why is the Pentagon pentagonal?

One of ben­e­fits of being me is that I have the sort of ran­dom thoughts that other peo­ple can gen­er­ally only expe­ri­ence dur­ing some kind of med­ical exper­i­ment involv­ing the injec­tion of highly con­cen­trated THC directly into the brain. For exam­ple, when drift­ing off to sleep the other night, it occurred to me to ask: why is the Pen­ta­gon pentagonal?

Huh. Why is it? That can’t be the cheap­est design for a build­ing in wartime.
A short getting-out-of-bed-instead-of-sleeping later, I was much more knowl­edge­able about mid-20th-Century civil plan­ning projects than I had been before.

From Wikipedia:

Its unusual shape results from the fact that its orig­i­nally intended site, Arling­ton Farms, fronted on Arling­ton Ridge Road and the Arling­ton Memo­r­ial Bridge approach, which inter­sected at an angle of approx­i­mately 108 degrees (the angle of a reg­u­lar pen­ta­gon). Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt had it con­structed at its cur­rent loca­tion because he didn’t want the new build­ing to obstruct the view of Wash­ing­ton, D.C. from Arling­ton Cemetery.

In fact, Arling­ton Ridge Road no longer exists, its route now mostly replaced by Eisen­hower Drive, which winds through an expanded Arling­ton National Ceme­tery and ter­mi­nates near the orig­i­nal site. The Pen­ta­gon was con­structed as planned, just some­what south of its intended location.