Omega Point

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!

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)

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.

After a couple months of fighting to retrieve data from my ISP, arguing about whether or not I had the right to transfer the LSLwiki.com domain name — and finally buying a new one — followed by a couple days’ worth of messing about with MySQL, I’m pleased to say the LSL Wiki has returned, in editable, “current” form. Your old logins and passwords work.

Everything is the way it was at the moment the wiki went down. Nothing’s changed, we just wanted to get an editable wiki back up, but we have some fixes and addons to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

One catch though: this time, it’s at LSLwiki.net. I’ve put up redirects at the old site at LSLwiki.com, but it remains to be seen whether or not I’ll ever be able to recover that domain and put it to more useful… use.

This announcement comes right on the heels of Milo Linden’s “ohhh yeahhhh…” forum post:

Currently on the aditi beta grid.

llSetLinkTexture(integer link_pos, string texture, integer face)
Sets the texture of face for link_pos

llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(integer linknumber, list rules)
Set primitive parameters for linknumber based on rules.

Yes! It’s about time! (By which I mean, “thank you for the continued steady fulfillment of the userbase’s most desired wishes, Linden Lab.”) These are two of the biggest “missing functions” in LSL. With their addition, scripters can update all prims in an object with one script instead of a hundred or more.

Now, let’s get to work updating this thing!

So I’m at Northern Voice this weekend! Friday’s agenda is MooseCamp: the “unconference”. This morning, people seemed interested in a session about Second Life, so I signed up to run one after lunch. Now even more bloggers know about Goreans, furries and lag. Mission accomplished.
Today’s highlights included:

1. Realizing that it’s at the main Point Grey campus of UBC, not Robson Square this year… about 10 minutes before I left.
2. This guy. Jeremy David runs “Choose my Adventure“, a blog where his readers get to tell him what to do. His poll asks, “Should I wear my Dragon Costume at the Blogging Conference?” The answer was clearly yes.
3. Meeting more people who had never used SL but who had heard of it than I ever had before in my life. There wasn’t any “so, it’s like Active Worlds/The Palace/The Sims, right?” And nobody seemed to be aware of it because “you can make money in Second Life”, they seemed to have heard about it because it’s an online community where you can do anything you want. That was… novel.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing a more formal talk on virtual worlds and communities along with Jeff Henshaw, executive producer for Xbox Digital Entertainment. I’m going to make it all up.

Fear not, citizens! To better help me fight crime do my new job, I got a new MacBook Pro for work. It’s pretty shiny. And scratchable, by the looks of things. To protect its finish and maintain a sharp, professional image for meetings, it’s important to always travel with the MacBook secured inside a durable, padded sleeve. Also, the sleeve should have pictures of sushi on it.

Say it with me: “awwwww!”

Want your own? I ordered this spiffy, custom-made sleeve from Saltygal on Etsy.com. She makes super-cool stuff, and for very affordable prices. I’m going to order more. At random. It’ll be good.

(I’d also like to note that while the above photo was posed, it was not actually staged. I really was –and continue to be– that excited.)

How cool is this? Jim Mendenhall at Starry Hope offers some help to us Mac Switchers. Long one of the top Google results for “osx home end“, Jim developed a small app to replace the Mac’s default key behavior with that of every other windowing system ever. (That’s right, nitpickers. Ever.) Unfortunately, it didn’t work in Firefox… until now!

It’s still in beta, and the only way to grab a copy is to bug Jim, but I’m using it and it works great. He’s still working on adding support for Shift-Home/Shift-End text selection, but it’s already made editing text fields in web pages so much easier. Thanks, Jim!

I thought this was kind of interesting: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Douglas“. I don’t just mean the culture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepiness that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the RCMP Security Service and the subsequent creation of CSIS, Canada’s modern intelligence agency. (For those of you outside Canada, CSIS is known for such classy operations as helping to form the white nationalist Heritage Front and participating in the USAUK ECHELON program. Nicely done, guys.)

No, what I actually found interesting was that I’d never made the connection that Donald Sutherland was Tommy Douglas‘ son-in-law. I knew who they both were individually, and I knew Donald was father of Kiefer, but I never actually associated the two.

When I mentioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to understand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact important? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its importance in the article or in our conversation, but that got me thinking — did it actually matter which he actually meant? Why would someone consider that sort of trivia important? Moreover, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a little consideration, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Douglas was. However, several million people watch 24. By associating “Tommy Douglas”, a relatively unpopular brand, however important a figure he may have been, with a highly popular, well-known brand like “Kiefer Sutherland”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audience, seeing the man’s grandson hacksaw off terrorists’ heads every week, have formed an emotional familiarity with him. Seeing the vast number of people: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a single day — causes us to become interested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pursue popular populist — placed in pop-cultural context for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Mounties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?“

Predictably, Ze Frank already spent time thinking about this stuff… presumably so I didn’t have to.

(Original link via Rob Cottingham)

This is really fascinating. Design studio Pentagram has developed the look and feel of the UI for the One Laptop Per Child project. (”Pfft, poor people… right?“)

They’ve abandoned the “desktop” metaphor, in favour of the “zoom metaphor“. This echoes OLPC’s overall design goals in sticking to the basic Children can quickly switch between different views to connect with other users, or collaborate on a single task.

Other cool features include the complete lack of text labels for icons and UI elements, meaning there’s no need for them to be translated for each localized version. Only truly necessary text must be translated to produce a localized version for a given language. This completely avoids problems phrases like “la homepage” may pose for non-English speakers.

(Via kottke.org)