Posted responses to cokes avatar ad on b …

Posted responses to Coke’s avatar ad on both Eightbar and Massively. I am a little surprised to read all the heat around that ad. If Coke’s idea was to generate a little bit of controversy and viral marketing from the online buzz about that ad it seems to be working. I couldn’t stop playing the ad. I love it. Like I commented there

My personal favorite was the super hero ambivalent to the mother in need and the mother texting while swinging her child.

I found this ad a pleasant, perfect walk down the fine line of showing how avatars are becoming mainstream virtual representations of ourselves and the importance of staying logged into real life. Both are critical parts of society today. It is not one v.s. the other.

I often wonder when I meet a stranger in real life what their avatar would be. Just today while walking around the store, helping a few reach things from the top self (like I am of suitable stature to help there, pfff), and admiring all the people enjoying their day at the store buying milk, eggs, cereal, beer, whatever. I do think about what is the person inside that real life avatar. People, in general, rock.

I have always admired Caleb Booker’s in …

I have always admired Caleb Booker’s insights like this exquisite blog post discussing The Anatomy of an Avatar. He particularly caused me to revisit an issue I thought I had settled for myself, text v.s. voice chat. As I reflect back, I remembered some important realities about my virtuality.

By far the deepest, most real relationships ever fostered in my experience in Second Life where founded on voice. In fact, voice became the means of fun times when wife and I and our friends would attend virtual social events and have so much fun talking to other while our hands were busy with virtual surfboard waves, hang-gliders, bouncy balls, or poking through profiles as we whispered about people over our private line. I miss those times. It has been a while. I think it is because I have been in OpenSim regions so much these days and none of them have voice enabled, yet. It will definitely be a good thing. Although I suppose I could use skype, it just doesn’t come as naturally as selecting ‘voice chat’ with an avatar.

However, one of my most rewarding relationships, professionally and personally, has been purely text via chat and blogs. I imagine this is much like some of the more recognized correspondence relationships I have read of in the 1900s.

At the end of the virtual day, my relationship is deeper with those who I have spoken with as well as IMed. Voice not only creates huge efficiencies in virtual collaboration, it is just more natural for more people.

Learned an obvious lesson in productivit …

Learned an obvious lesson in productivity recently. Don’t even look at any email or IMs or Twitter or Facebook until lunch or even the end of the day. I always review before going to bed anyway which makes me enjoy it more and not waste good brain time in the morning on fragmented interests and curiosities pulling at it.

If you want to communicate with me today you will have to have written something to me yesterday. Either that or IM me directly. I imagine this is the why Twitter is so popular. It is when-i-can-get-to-it instant messaging instead of in-your-face instant messaging.

Just completed another weekly discussion …

Just completed another weekly discussion/office hour for Mo’s Mentored (name still sounds pretentious now–especially since I usually learn as much as I share–but too late to change). Lots of discussion about LSL’s llEmail() and other related email functions, such as sending a snapshot as a photo, not working and if it can even work. IRC friends (thanks sinuc) answered that SMTP can be activated in some sense in the OpenSim.ini configuration file with a wrapper to actually send the email. Sounded too complicated for my friend asking the question. Something to research. I passed on the tip to get involved with http://opensimulator.org and the #opensim and #opensim-dev IRC channels on freenode using my preferred IRC client, Xchat.org.

A friend, with superior pipes, and I will likely work on getting some decent default gestures with voice, like /laugh and /cry and /hey into the default stock content for the OpenSim code base. We talked about that a little during office hours.

Combine that with a good long time ranting about Second Inventory and I think I have another mentoring block. What I really need to do is get back to skinning as soon as MoPose is finished to help the internal OpenSim team get those default avatars finished up. So little time–especially during holidays and while holding down the fort while the rest of ‘day job’ team are away.

Helping a friend find her inner tiny was …

Helping a friend find her inner tiny was a lot of fun with another good friend. Unfortunately SL was very unkind and I had to log off earlier but that, and two more new friends finish out another block in the socializing category. Granted, it started at 9:00 PM and went until 1:00 AM, but just did not have it in me to do more coding after a full day of day job work (which I am not really tracking here).

Wife, who attended the midnight premier showing of Twilight with her girlfriends, says that socializing is not really a skill, but I have met plenty that can’t and would show just how important it is. I suppose some people are paid for socializing and others punished, so hard to say. I’m not kidding myself, am I?

Either way, really feeling drive to focus on a few good friends as well as aquaintences going into the new year. Life has us all stretched so thin it is impossible to be a close friend to more than a very few people, although you can be friendly to everyone, right? Maybe I will be able to remove, “I am a bad friend” from my profile someday.

Looks like socializing wins another bloc …

Looks like socializing wins another block of my time. Honestly, trying to spread time to other skill priorities, but made three more friends and spoke with them. Also caught up with a few others. Do I regret not having the amazing creations to show that some others have? No, not really. Meeting and serving people is what this stuff is all about to me, followed closely by the creative aspect.

*Turning back to Blender bronze railing project and MoPose sponsored, synchronized, linked poseball improvement.*

Enjoyed catching up over weekend with a …

Enjoyed catching up over weekend with a few friends and making a couple new ones. It was the opening of a friend’s new sim where another friend offered to sing. Also ran into one of my very first builder friends now somewhat of a celebrity for his builds. Great guy who’s favorite thing is to just get absorbed in building real art in SL. Thought a lot about our paths since that time, I have tried to spread the skills out more rather than dedicate the focus he and others have to just building in SL. I don’t regret it, but inspires me to become more focused further on content creation.

[By the way, since this blog is more personal and detailed, I won't be using friend names to keep with SL TOS.]