New stuff is at http://avaganache.wordpress.com

An archive of this site is at http://aghistory.wordpress.com

This site will vanish under the waves, and some point in the future. Thanks for the compliments you’ve paid over the last couple of years.  I hope you enjoy the new home as much, or more, than this little oeuvre (which means a work, not an egg, by the way. Calling this site an egg would just be plain daft).

For now, here are some photos that used to appear on my temporary, experimental, wordpress.com site.  At some point, I think that will become my permanent blogging home, because although this place is nice and flexible, I think I’ve exhausted what I want to do with it by way of fiddling and tinkering.  The wordpress.com freebie is fine, and it handles sl postcards better anyway.  I’ll find some way to package up everything that’s on this site into perhaps one file, or one file per posting (ideas for that, anyone?), then move the domain name over at some point too.

Great photo, by Peter Stindberg.

Enmeshed

There’s no better way to describe the two of us.  Enmeshed, in each other.

Argrace – nice store Visit shin zushi (102, 99, 44)

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Vextra. Me. Couch. Perfect.

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The alternative I’ve used to get around this problem is ‘Posterous‘. It makes sending postcards from the sl client to a Wordpress blog much easier, but it’s not without its own issues.  For one thing, it forwards a link to any images in the posting, rather than the image itself – which is ok, unless you ever edit or delete the Posterous blog.  The second thing which annoys me is that every sl postcard comes with a section beneath the main image, which contains a slurl and the sl logo – and it’s a nuisance to have to manually edit these out if you don’t want the boring repetition.

Now, I’ve discovered that if you end the text portion of the postcard with ‘#end ‘ (ignoring my quote marks), Posterous conveniently dumps everything that follow – which means the slurl and the logo aren’t passed on to the blog.

Sometimes it’s useful to include the location, other times it’s not, but it’s good to have the option.

All I need now is to find a way to copy the image itself over, rather than just the link.

Winter balcony I think I need a coat.

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Yet more hair Ok, so I'm a hair addict. I confess.

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At this time of year, people ask me why I bother with Christmas if I don’t believe in god.  They forget, of course, that belief in a god does not require belief in Christmas (other religions get along quite well without Christmas, it seems).  Then a while ago I came across this thought (I can’t remember where), which serves me quite well as a reply:

If you understand why you reject all those other gods, then you understand why I reject yours

The need for reassurance at this time of the year – when the days get shorter, and the weather gets colder – is age old.  If it helps to believe that it needs a god to keep pushing our planet around the Sun until Spring arrives, that’s ok.  Just don’t expect me to believe it too.  (From a very young age, I could never get a good answer to this question: “Why does Australia have its Wnter celebration in their Summer ?”)

Anyway, I thought I’d also throw in a link to the Humanist Society, and Richard Dawkins ‘OUT’ campaign, for good measure.

It’s my little effort to stem the tide, belatedly, that overwhelms the world at this time of year, in one flavour or another.

Happy Solstice!

Triton Flatley, Photographer

and his work…

Me, by Triton Flatley

Embryo Visit embryo (114, 120, 22)

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After a week without Vextra Visit Volvod (25, 167, 162)

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N-core (again… ha!) Shoes. Some of the best. What more is there to say? Visit Heels (58, 127, 66)

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My lovely Vextra Visit Scepterd Isle (151, 13, 29)

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It's Christmas (nearly) It only comes once a year. Must be male. Visit Scepterd Isle (188, 59, 37)

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Just relaxing

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Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.

Thanks for that, ‘lkjhg’.  Your friend ‘phrick’ is a bit more inspired though…

Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.

Sounds good, but sadly, I have no idea what it means.

Anyway, the skin is basically the same Symphony skin I’ve been using for a while now… but one shade lighter.

Vextra Messing – new store layout Vextra's updated her store – a cleaner layout altogether Visit Freydis (32, 220, 81)

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Fusemelon's new home Fusemelon has moved from its original sim, to a new home in Soundr. What a wonderful build! I just love lawns and topiary. Visit Soundr (158, 28, 48)

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Fusemelon's new home Fusemelon has moved to a new home on Soundr… and what a lovely new home it is. I love lawns and topiary. And I love the collection Aems has put together here. Visit Soundr (195, 11, 2)

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Las Islas Check this out! Visit Las Arenas Rosadas (147, 124, 20)

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I can see right through you

Vex – always knew she was a saint.  Now I know she’s holey

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Rezday cuddles

Visit Scepterd Isle (152, 8, 29)

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YAT (yet another test) This time, to see whether (a) an sl postcard – not this one – can be sent direct from sl to Facebook, and (b) whether a second postcard – this one – arrives there first, despite going via Posterous, and being sent a couple of minutes later. What's the point of this test? I have no idea at all. Visit Scepterd Isle (146, 21, 24)

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Garden snapshot

Saw this, thought it looked lovely. Our garden, in moonlight (or what passes for moonlight in sl)

Visit Scepterd Isle (140, 53, 26)

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Burning Life – again

Yet more incomprehensible nonsense at Burning Life

Visit Burning Life-Nightingale (8, 203, 54)

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Burning Life

Chaos !

Visit Burning Life- Deep Hole (6, 67, 121)

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Scary Anti-Cancer Pinkishness

Bits of Scepter’d Isle – and its population – turn pink in an effort to ward off breast cancer.

Visit Scepterd Isle (104, 101, 34)

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Art Box A neat idea… put yourself in the picture… Visit Klaw (30, 22, 47)

This is my quick attempt at Munch’s ‘Scream’…

My rendition is far enough away from the original that no-one could accuse me of counterfeiting.  Plagiarism, perhaps, but not counterfeiting.

]]> http://www.avaganache.com/2009/10/art-box/feed/ 0 http://www.avaganache.com/2009/10/snugglebathing/ http://www.avaganache.com/2009/10/snugglebathing/#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:49:08 +0000 Ava Ganache http://www.avaganache.com/2009/10/snugglebathing/

SnuggleBathing

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TBR quiet

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It’s connected, in some way, to the ancient radio set on the table below, but when the airborne structure is probed, it reveals a landmark

The landmark takes you to a landing point near this isolated, water-bound building… and maybe a radio mast…

These images are brought to you courtesy of the talented Mr. AM Radio

Nothing.

1. Build yourself a new pc
2. Use a free operating system set up to take advantage of the new hardware
3. Run the Second Life viewer on the new system.

Taking one step at a time…

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1. Build yourself a new pc

My old pc was getting long in the tooth.  It worked well enough, but at three years old it was showing its age.  A couple of the fans were worn out.  Compared with more recent machines, the graphics were noticeably sluggish.  So, on the face of it, I convinced myself I had a reasonable case for buying myself a new pc for my birthday.

It would be fair to ask ‘why build it yourself’, when Dell will sell you something similar for not much more, and with a warranty.  I have no answer to that, except to say that I like the challenge of building things – and for me, that’s a good enough reason.  It’s a good feeling, once you’ve put everything together and powered it up, and it looks good, and it all works.  I can say ‘I made this’ with a degree of pride.  In all honesty, it’s not all that difficult to build a pc, but the feeling of achievement is genuine.  It also impresses my friends.

If you’re going to build a pc, you may as well build one with an eye to the future.  My philosophy is this: aim to build a system that would have been bleeding edge four to six months ago.  It’ll be almost exactly as good as the current bleeding edge, but the components will have had a degree of reliability testing (stores will de-stock items with high failure return rates), and drivers will have bedded down and be on their second or third release iteration (though that’s more relevant to the motherboard BIOS, and drivers for Windows systems – few manufacturers fully support Linux drivers), and it’ll last a good while.  Not least, the price will have lost its ‘bleeding edge’ premium, so the whole thing will be more affordable.

So that’s what I did.  Nice new Phenom II, ASUS motherboard, 4Gb of 1600 MHz ram (a luckily timed half-price offer), two sata hard drives, a sata CD/DVD, and a BFG nVidia GTX260 graphics card.  Oh, and a quiet power supply and a quiet well-cooled box to put it all in.  Three hours later, I have a nice black box and a room full of cardboard and polystyrene.  And some cables left over, to add to my cables-left-over collection, sad tart that I am.

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2. Use a free operating system set up to take advantage of the new hardware

For many people – most people, probably – this takes some explaining.  Why use something like Linux, when almost everyone else uses Windows?  I’m afraid I’ll disappoint the Linux evangelists by saying I’m not a purist FOSS addict.  I use closed source drivers, for example.  But my reasons are fundamentally philosophical rather than technical.  I simply don’t like the Microsoft monopolistic one-size-fits-all business model.

It’s also a part of the reason I build my own pc’s.  With a few limited exceptions, if I buy a ready-built pc, I either have to pay Microsoft for their OS – whether I want it or not – or I have to stick to the hardware selection made by Apple.  I’d like to be able to try Apple’s BSD-based OS on my pc at some time, but Apple don’t really want my business (which is a choice they’re probably sensible in making, given the ensuing customer support pain and loss of brand cool they’d inevitably suffer).

In practical terms, my philosophy (doesn’t that sound grand ?) has limited me to using a flavour of Linux, or BSD Unix.  And I’ve been using Linux since RedHat 5-ish (I think it was).  Of necessity because of hardware and software support, I used to dual-boot between Windows and Linux, but for the last three years I’ve used only Linux.

So.. new box, nifty quad-core 64 bit processor, all-new sata drives, and a free OS ready to go.  No problems.

Oh wait.

I started with 64 bit Ubuntu.  I’d used Ubuntu for a year or more, mainly because I got bored with the chore of keeping my Gentoo distro up to date before that.  Partly, also, because the in-fighting in Gentoo at the time was sapping the life from the project.  Gentoo limps on, but it’s a shadow of what it was, I think.  And Ubuntu is out-of-the-box guaranteed pain free, right ?

Oh wait.

32 bit Ubuntu 8.10 was pain free on my old box.  It niggled that I could only use 3 Gb of the 4 Gb that were installed in it though (that’s down to memory addressing in 32 bit systems, not down to Linux).  64 bit Ubuntu 9.04 installed sweetly enough.  Everything looked good, and I was happy.  I even had SL running (more of that in a while).  Then I tried to rip a CD to my hard drive.

I think it was Seasick Steve’s “I started out with nothing and I’ve still got most of it left”.  I’ve bought three copies of that CD now – one for me, and two as presents for friends – I absolutely would not, ever, countenance ripping off copyright material, whether it’s music or DVD’s or software.  The physical CD is sitting on a shelf above my pc, and I’m listening to it from my hard drive.  It’s more practical for me, and the record company and artist still get rewarded for their work, just as though I was playing the CD itself.  You’d be surprised how many believers in free software are equally vehement about protecting copyright.  Free software means free as in free spirit, not as in free beer (as the saying goes, roughly).  But I digress.

I tried to rip Seasick Steve to my hard drive, only to find that my shiny new optical drive – one that can supposedly write DVD’s 22 times faster than you can watch them – could barely play an audio CD without skipping.  After much googling, it appeared that other people has seen this sort of problem in 64-bit Ubuntu all-sata systems.  I tested every permutation of BIOS setting possible, to no effect.  Since the problem seemed to be that the Ubuntu stock kernel was attempting to use two drivers for the same piece of hardware, I thought I’d attempt to compile my own kernel.  It used to be an everyday activity in Gentoo (literally every day for a while, actually).  Ubuntu was originally designed to make custom kernels difficult to make (for reasons relating to technical support, I think), and although it’s no longer frowned upon quite so sternly, it’s still a pig of a thing to do.  I gave up.  Some people suggested Fedora didn’t have these issues with their stock kernel, so I downloaded it.

It was true.  I could rip poor old Seasick Steve at a phenomenal rate using Fedora 11.  It even looked quite pretty, and the install was painless and slick.  The desktop was neat and well thought out, too.  Then I tried running the Second Life viewer.  Which brings me to…

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3.  Run the Second Life viewer on the new system

The ‘official’ sl viewer is a 32 bit application, a pre-compiled binary program.  It needs a 32 bit environment to run in.  Now, Linux distributions tackle running 32 bit applications within a 64 bit environment in one of three ways.  They provide a set of ‘compatibility libraries’, or they duplicate a 32 bit environment side-by-side with the 64 bit environment, or they don’t really bother at all.  I’m simplifying, but that’s the essence, I think.  Fedora 11 tries to run 32 and 64 bit environments side-by-side.  If you know this, you install the 32 bit graphics drivers to support the sl viewer.  If you don’t know this, you spend several hours scratching your head, and wondering where you screwed up.  Sadly, I was in the latter camp.  Eventually, after much fiddling and installing the right libraries, and deleting the libfreebl3.so library from the secondlife-xxx/app_settings/mozilla-runtime-linux-i686 directory (so that sl is forced to use the native version, which works), I had 32 bit sl up and running in Fedora 11.

It would be nice to run it as a native 64 bit application though, right?

Wrong.  There’s a great project – omvviewer – aimed at building a true 64 bit sl viewer.   You can install it on 64 bit Ubuntu, and it works well.  Very well.  But there’s no pre-compiled binary for Fedora 11.  No matter – it can be compiled easily enough from the source, right?

Wrong.  Try as I might, even hacking my way around the labyrinth of makefiles, I couldn’t get the thing to compile.  One library or another was missing.  In the end, I gave up.  I thought I’d give openSUSE a try, because of the different way that distro handles 32 and 64 bit environments (more along the compatibility library route).

Bad move.  It soon became clear after installing openSUSE that I wasn’t going to get along with it.  It didn’t help that the install didn’t recognise my graphics card, so SUSE and I got off to a bad start.  In the end though it was a personal thing.  It just felt uncomfortable, if that means anything.  No matter.  I’d try Arch Linux, since there was (sort of) a version of omvviewer in the Arch Linux repository.

Arch Linux is a minimalist thing, similar in character to Gentoo, but without the compile-it-yourself paradigm.  It looked promising.  Unfortunately, the version of omvviewer in the repository wouldn’t compile for me (and I was losing the will to live at this point).  Not only that, but Arch sort of falls in the third category of 32 bit support methods.  That’s the “don’t bother trying” category.  Well, that’s not quite true.  I tried.  Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t get past one missing library – again.

So I threw in the metaphorical towel, and went back to Ubuntu.

One day, I’ll work out how to properly fix the broken sata CD support.  Or someone else will.  It can’t be hard, and it’s most likely the result of a poor set of kernel configuration choices, given that every other Linux flavour seemed to manage the CD ok.  I rarely copy CD’s to my hard drive, so if I have to, I’ll let it take an age.  Bizarrely, burning data backup DVD’s on the same drive seems not to be a problem.

At least for now, I’ve got a choice of running 32 or 64 bit sl viewers, very fast indeed, on a shiny new box I built myself.

This whole episode is a little bit like climbing Everest, I guess.  It’s hard work, it’s a challenge, there are highs and lows on the journey, you feel a sense of achievement, but… when it’s all over, you’re right back in the foothills where you started.  Luckily, I quite like foothills.

Here’s a classic example of how to do a nice detailed study, and miss the point completely.

The space between…

Visit Welsh Lakes (164, 99, 20)

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I’ll admit up front that I’m not much for religion, and particularly the hokum that goes with it, but this was a happy day for everyone involved.  Much nervous tension, but it all went well.

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Unfortunately, Larson is taking an absence from sl, due to a posting overseas, which will see him gone for a few months.  Every silver lining has its cloud.

Vextra, I love you.  Thankyou for making my day.  And so much more.

I thought I’d found what I wanted – a plugin for Wordpress that shows a timeline of posts… but sadly it’s borked with wp 2.8.2.  At least I think it’s borked.  It might just be me.  If it gets updated I’ll be giving it a try.

In the meantime, take a look at this… it’s an embedded version of a timeline I set up in dipity, built by importing the posts from this blog.  Rather roundabout, I know, but it gives a very rough idea of what I’m after.  A sort of timeline-based microblog.  Who knows, maybe dipity, or xtimeline, or allofme (when it’s working), or timeglider (ditto) might be what I want.  I’ll let you know.

As good as it was, the best part of going on holiday was the coming back home – and settling my eyes on Vextra again after far too long.  I can’t describe how much I missed her.

Accept my apologies if it takes a while to load this post.

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Thing is, Vex make some really spiffy deck chairs.  She plurked about them, even.  And she parked them on the roof of our house.  Almost as soon as I saw them, I threw out the old ones I had, and Vex put the new ones on the balcony outside our bedroom.  I wanted a photo.  I sent a postcard from SL.  And that’s where the trouble started.

For a kick-off, you can see there are two posts below this one: the earlier one has no picture, which rather defeats the object of trying to show you what these chairs look like.  The later one does have a picture.  So far, so good.  So what’s the difference between the two postings, I hear you clamour (ok, I’m actually fantasizing that you clamour to know, when really you’re only reading this to be polite).

The difference is that older postcard was sent straight to this blog in the expectation that Postmaster would handle it, as it always has done.  The more recent postcard – the one with the picture intact – came via Posterous.  If this is all sounding familiar, then you’ve probably read stuff here from a year ago, when I concluded that Postmaster was good and Posterous better, as a means of getting SL postcards into this blog.

Well… here’s the update.  Maybe as a result of the Wordpress upgrade to 2.8 (did I mention that ?) Postmaster seems partly broken – the postcard email title gets through, but the picture – the only but that really matters – gets dumped somewhere.  It disappears into the ether.

So, that prompted me to go exploring the bowels of wordpress (again), and fiddling with email handling plugins (again).  In the process, I found that the old original plugin, Postie, that never really worked for me, has been resurrected and is now under new management.  What’s more, it seems to work, based on the limited testing I’ve done so far.  But testing it caused a few issues, I’m afraid – largely as a result of my convoluted cross-posting arrangement that I’ve mentioned before.  Sadly, a few test messages escaped into the plurkdom.  I don’t like spam, so I’m not happy at creating it.  So I’m blaming Vextra.  If her deck chairs had been rubbish (or ‘garbage’ if you prefer), this would never have happened.

So here’s a couple of pictures, so you can see what caused my problems…

Not bad, huh?  Talented girl, that Vextra, but God does she cause me problems

Vextra's new chairs Another snapshot… hopefully this'll make it through the web 2.0 maze complete with the picture attached Visit Scepterd Isle (152, 7, 29)

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Having admired one view, I admired another…

and then…

a goodnight kiss.  Yeah, I know it doesn’t look like night, but that’s because Vex and I are on opposite sides of the planet.  This is how I saw it – and Vex saw it as nightime.  Maybe.  Or maybe she cranked the clock around to mid day too.

—

ps: standing on an ice-cap, wearing heels, is just daft.  Don’t do it.

In and among all the excitement of last weekend, on the spur of the moment I decided to change the theme of this blog to the somewhat awesome Carrington.  What do I like about it?  I can tweak the configuration.  Not content with that, at Vextra’s request, I went digging around inside the theme files so I could hack the header graphic to include my piccie.  Fun fun fun.

I’ve also been playing around with ’social network’ sites like Facebook and Twitter, and I was starting to link those in to my site – you might have seen the odd experiment here before.  And you might even remember the series of experiments which resulted in concluding that Posterous was the best way to post SL postcards to several sites at once, as well as poking them into this blog as postings.  The idea that you couldn’t do this easily pre-Posterous is… oh, well.

Then, Vextra mentioned Plurk, and I played with that.  And pretty soon I had plurks being copied to facebook, facebook linked to this blog, twitter linked to this blog, this blog sending plurks and tweets whenever I post something new, and.. and… well, at this point I was beginning to fear that I might trigger entropic interneticide, as tweets and plurks interbred (twurks?  pleets?) with facebook updates (facetwurks?,  facepleets?), multiplied, and eventually swamped us all.  Not pretty.  Actually, facepleets sound really ugly.

And then, just as Poserous solved the issue of posting pictures to many places, I found – or was pushed towards (I can’t remember) – ping.fm.  Quite why I hadn’t found it before, I’m not sure.  So I can email, or SMS text, or browse to ping.fm and it will then pass that message on to a whole host of other… erm… hosts.  Sorry.  Though I haven’t tried it, I think ping.fm might be able to do what Posterous does too.

And then there’s ‘pinghud’, which allows me to post one-liners from SL to ping.fm, at which point ping.fm scatterguns the internet with my minor pearl of wisdom.  Things like “Ava Ganache has eaten too much for dinner”.  Yeah, that was one of my gems.

As I said, I’m a fiddler.

It’s been such a perfect day.  Thanks Stephen, for letting us use your sim.  And thanks, thanks a thousand times over, Vextra, just for being yourself.  My love.

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This would seem to be the outcome of purple rain. It’s raising funds for the American Cancer Society, and – among other things – helps ‘celebrate survivorship’, whatever that means.

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Hmmm… tug that belt.

Sitting is a sadly overlooked, but widely practiced activity in sl.  Not just for people like me who live here, of course, but for people like my sister back in rl.  Whenever I’m here, she’s there.  Sitting.  There’s every chance that you’re sitting now, as you read this.  And yet sitting hardly talked about.

This isn’t intended to be a deeply analytical piece on sitting, just a simple way to raise its profile.  Sitting up straight, you could say.

So here, to get the ball rolling, are three recent favourite pictures, featuring sitting.

No. 1: Sitting comfortably on the sofa.

It would be difficult to get much more comfortable than this.  In this particular photo, my left leg is completely encased in Vextra.  There is a causal relationship between the pleasure you can see on my face, and the poor visibility of Vextra’s hands.  If you ever have the opportunity to sit in this fashion, I recommend you take it.

No. 2:  The sitting sandwich

In this example,  Vextra and I have sandwiched Dale, using her as a temporary axis of near-symmetry.  This is clearly less intimate than example No. 1, but does allow for better conversation concentration, when catching up with old friends and introducing new ones.

No. 3:  Water sitting

Last in this little series, the less conventional practice of sitting in water.  The opulent surroundings, within which this hot tub forms the centrepiece, are the home of Nina and Ophelia.  It’s a shame you can’t see the place in its entirety, but believe me it’s impressive.  However, to show it would distract from the main theme of this article – that of sitting.

Here, clockwise from the bottom left, are myself, Vextra (love of my life and beautifully slippery when wet), Nina, Corwin, and Tyler.

Hot tubs are wonderful places to sit, and this is the queen of all hot tubs.  They engender a different form of conversation, possibly aided by the heat and humidity, the gentle bubbling, and the exposed skin.  From the sitting perspective, the additional buoyancy further adds to the experience.

Anticipation doesn’t disappoint.

A long time ago, when I started out, I let a part of me run loose in sl.  I did many of the things I should do.  I did most of the things I shouldn’t.  And I came close, very close, to finding the one thing that would keep me centred, one thing to devote my self to.  I have come close with many of the friends who’ve tolerated and indulged me, and found a special place in my heart.  I came close with the land that I had, and closer still when I worked with Ren to build that land into a home.

And then, along came Vextra.

We met probably a year ago now.  Something sparked.  We shared some time.  We drifted apart.

We drifted together, and the spark was bigger.  We shared more time.  We drifted apart.

We drifted together, the spark caught and part of me started to smoulder, I think.  We shared more time.  We drifted, not quite apart, not quite together, slowly falling into each others gravity.  We talked, seriously, about how we felt towards each other.  We talked, seriously, about what a sharing relationship in sl might be.  We talked, and we talked, and at some point – I can’t say when – we both realised that rather than talking about a caring, sharing relationship, we were actually living it.

In Vextra I’ve found a focus, a point about which I want my second life to revolve.  Neither of us would want the other to become her sole purpose for life in sl, but both of us reached one conclusion – that we want to share our thoughts, our experiences, our fantasies and fears with each other.  After a long time circling, we both understood that we love each other.

And we both want our friends to know.

We gave each other a ring some time ago, as a mark of what we mean to each other, and with an unformed thought of what we might do eventually.  Then I moved my house, and asked Vex to come and live with me, and turn the house into a home.  And now, we’ve taken another step.  Yesterday I became Vextra’s partner in sl.  I’m proud, and I’m tingly, and… passionately Vextra’s.

Neither of us wanted a big wedding, although we may well have a party some time soon – a sort of house-warming / body-warming affair, perhaps.

Vex invited me to be hers with a wonderful poem which she’s put on her blog, along with a beautiful image of the moment after we’d married, so I’ll leave you with that.  It says what I want to say far better than my words do…

Vextra – I love you.

ID4, to summarize, is a film about Will Smith struggling to defeat an invading alien race by smoking a cigar.  In the nick of time, Jeff Goldblum is persuaded to take up cigar smoking too, and the planet is saved.

Among the effects in the film was the destruction of numerous toy buildings using a really, really bright alien flashlight – one of those LED types, I think.

If you’re interested, you can now get the movie on Blu-ray.  OK, don’t groan.  I’m sorry.

Anyhow, below is the Scepter’d Isle remake:

In the background is the prototype Scepter’d Isle 3-stage ICBM, cunningly constructed from local Tuscan stone, thereby avoiding clause 182(c) of the SALT Treaty.

ps… Vex sent me the original ad, to replace my kludged sl-to-rl version above: sadly the viewer makes a real mess of aspect ratios.  I’ve kept my version, and put the proper version below, so you can see the difference.  I think I look rather less fat in this fatpack…

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One good way to spend a little time in SL: have your girlfriend take photos of you, in clothes she designed.

Rushes, but no hurry

Slowly but surely, the new house is taking shape.  Vextra’s been helping me steadily change the place from my house, to our home.  That has a good ring to it.  Our home.  While I’ve looked after some of the bigger things so far… lumps of furniture from my old place, and a little terraforming here and there, Vextra’s been adding all the little things that make the difference between a house and a home, like the bottle of nail polish on the bedroom dresser, or the jar of Vaseline in the shower room (you can wonder all you like, but I’ll not tell you).  And, creator that she is, she’s turning her hand to trimming the primming, and saving a few prims with neat redesigns of her own.

And Corwin has added his touches too…. today, some cattails, or (to us Brits) bullrushes, for the water’s edge.  Oh, and some water sedge for the water’s edge too.  Puns intented, of course, just like the title of this blog.

But more than anything, getting to spend time with Vextra.  I’ve always liked her.  Thought maybe I loved her.

Now, after this week, there’s no doubt in my mind.

And the title of this post isn’t mine.  It’s Vextra’s.

In the end, after considering a lot of options, I moved just a few metres down the hill towards the water’s edge, to a plot which is half the size of the original one.  And half the rent, too.  It’s true that, in the process, I’ve sacrificed the notional capital value I invested in the land when I bought it.  Unfortunate, but that’s the way the land market has gone in sl – now’s not a great time to be a landowner, and I have great sympathy for my landlady, Charlene.  If you rely in rl for income from sl land, times are hard.  I guess that was a factor in my deciding to stay on the same sim, too.  Charlene’s a very good landlady – I’d be unlikely to find better – so in a way I’m being selfish by supporting her as best I can.  [If you're looking for land to rent, by the way, cruise over to Skybeam.  You really won't do better].

So the new plot, down by the water and overlooking Emileigh’s Empire, started yesterday morning as a barren patch, but ended up looking rather better.

That house, by the way, is one of Ace’s Spaces finest.  She built the house on my old plot, so it was obvious to go to her for my new place – I love her work.  Everyone who’s visited my new home has said, before anything else, how impressive the house is.  And they’re right.

The morning was spent carrying stuff down the hill, with Vextra by my side lending immoral support, for which I thank her immensely.  She knows how I thank her, but I’m afraid you’ll just have to guess.  One neat consequence of using another of Ace’s designs is that the furniture I had in the old place fits just as well in the new house, as you can see…

The afternoon was spent sorting out the garden a little, again with Vextra’s help, and the evening was spent in the wonderful company of Vextra, Nina, and Ophelia.  And for good measure, Corwin and Jules both called in at various times in the day and evening.

In the end, what I had feared would be a traumatic experience ended up being one of the most pleasurable days I’ve had in sl.

And to round off the day, when it was all quiet, and I was feeling tired, what better way can you imagine than this…

What can I say, except – to everyone who helped me, and whose names are here – a deep and honest thankyou.

Anyone who’s had any sort of a relationship in sl will recognise elements of this story in their own lives.  I do.

Interesting conversations

Please don’t ask me what this means – I don’t know.  It was simply an interesting picture, and the conversation at the time was interesting too.

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In these horrid times we’re living, being settled is a precious thing.

I don’t know whether I’ll be able to keep a hold of my home in sl.  I may need to shrink it, or move it, or leave it and just rely on my original little place in West Haven.  (Yes, I still have it.  Vicky mows the lawn for me there, and puts the duster around now and then).  As much as I love my home in Scepter’d Isle, it’s a luxury that I could live without, if I had to.  And with rl factors like exchange rates conspiring against sis with a vengeance, and with a sudden unexpected change in her rl income (remember, I sponge my living from her) I need to think through my options.  It’s unsettling.

And then, while this unfortunate state unravels, Vextra circles back into my life, takes me by the hand, and sits me down.  We’ve passed through each others orbits more times than I can recall, touching briefly now and then, yet always moving on again.  But, when orbits cross, inevitably one body tugs at the other and, sooner or later, orbits become entangled and both bodies find a common path, circling each other as they travel.  Not held captive, though not entirely free while gravity continues its work.  An equilibrium develops, and life becomes more… settled.

Vextra and Ava

Vextra

Whatever you think of Linden Labs separating out ‘adult’ content, at least they’re addressing the issue.  They’re also doing it in a considered way, and they’re asking for input from people like me.

The thing is… people have a natural interest in sex.  If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.  Not even Mr. Haines.  It’s trivial to make jokes about it, but the comments at the end of his article are puerile, and in what they infer, offensive.

[I also don't mind editing the post through the day, Register-style]

Nice boots, nice water, nice company. And only a slight risk of drowning.

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Out of the blue – actually, I was looking for something else altogether – I came across ‘hugin‘.  It’s a piece of open source software (my favourite kind) that can take a sequence of panoramic photos and stitch them together automatically, doing neat stuff like bending the images and balancing exposures as it does so.  As well as the source, there are pre-compiled versions for Linux, Mac, and that other thing.

Anyway, I thought I’d give it a try on some sl snapshots…

Scepter'd Isle Panorama

That’s my house at the bottom, with the grey roof.

This panaroama was built from 9 separate images, and took about 5 minutes to assemble with hugin.  And that time includes learning how to use the program.

I wonder if...

Vex took this picture while we were sitting, and chatting, and wondering

Hammocks have their uses

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Vanity… terrible thing. Nice hair though.

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I’ve always had a somewhat ambiguous attitude to relationships.  On the one hand, there are times when I’ll happily go to somewhere like tbr, and explore what it has to offer, to the full.  On the other hand, I’ll sit quietly at home and stare at the walls.  On the third hand (which some might call a foot) I’ll enjoy a platonic chat, chewing over the state of sl, the world, and life in general, and people in particular.  On the other (bootless) foot, or hand,  I’ll enjoy a close, comfortable, friendly and sometimes intimate time with one or more of my good friends.  And lastly, latterly, and anatomically dubiously, there are times when I’ve thought I’d like to settle down, find a partner, make my house into a home.

I’m still in that last place, I guess, where settling seems attractive.  I don’t know whether it’s cyclical – I’ve had a partner before – or whether it’s related to a desire for security in a real world that’s uncertain and changing fast.

Before Christmas, I thought I’d found that person, the one I’d make a life with here.  After Christmas, well, it wasn’t to be.  One of the features of sl that makes a second life peculiarly fickle, is that real life intrudes in ways no-one can predict.  Sometimes, it’s for good reasons – a change in circumstances, progress in a career, that makes finding time here hard.  Sometimes, it’s less fortunate – illness, stricken finances, or – as happened – the loyalty one owes to others in rl when they need care, which must always far outweigh any thoughts for sl.  The person I’d found, who’d found something in me too, had to leave.

There were times when I felt empty.  Not sad, exactly, because my feelings were tinged with concern for the person who needed care, and I know she’ll be in good caring hands.  Empty, though, and lacking a purpose.  Also I was lacking a porpoise, but in that instance, what you’ve never had, you never miss.

And in all of this, I’ve had good friends hold my hand (or was it my foot?), helping me along.  If you’re reading this, you know who you are, and I thank you again.

So I need a kick start, and a direction in which to travel.  I need to reboot, and I will.

I also need to eat – supper’s ready.

(Bonus points to anyone who ties the title and that last sentence together.)

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Several photos of the Black Swan sim here.  Actually, apart from being a nice way to show these photos, this post was also an experiment in using the embedded ’slideshow’ feature of Lazyest Gallery.

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/me sobs

With apologies to Peter Gabriel (from ‘Here Comes the Flood’) this seemed quite appropriate to the rising water experience in Second Life…

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You’re a thousand minds, within a flash
Don’t be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they’ll
use up what we used to be.

Lord, here comes the flood
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It’ll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry.

These moments have happened so rarely recently that I’ve taken to photographing every time I meet Clags.  Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder.  Well, it certainly doesn’t diminish the desire.

Lazyest Gallery cannot access /Flames/Clags/

This little image, by the way, is a link to the gallery. Its behaviour seems a little erratic, but hey.

You should also be able to find these in the ‘Wallpapers’ album in the Gallery

Holding my Clagsy

Check this out!

Visit Sezuan Moloko (91, 214, 33)

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It’s snowing

Thanks to my neighbour, Hans… some good-looking snow

Visit Scepterd Isle (232, 159, 37)

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These are, of course, tiny thumbnail images compared with the originals.  They don’t show the true quality of the original images, but they do show that the weather wasn’t bad.

Christmas, white, dreaming

I finally met up with Clags today, after missing her time and agin over the last week. A wonderful Christmas present.

Visit Scepterd Isle (203, 210, 41)

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This is me, sitting, and waiting.  Someone could probably sit down and calculate the probability that two people who really want to see each other somehow fail to be present in sl at the same time.  Not once, but fail for days on end.  So this is me, sitting, waiting, looking wistfully at the spot in my house where Clags will finally appear.

And this is what I did while I waited… a poor imitation of the sort of treatment Clags would give this photo.

Sitting, waiting

Visit Scepterd Isle (208, 156, 38)

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You saw the title of this post, and you saw the picture, and you thought “Oh no, this is just another of Ava’s snow pictures, with some boring blurb underneath, just like the other ones she posted”.

Wrong.

Well, right and wrong, I suppose.  There’s a certain amount of pointless drivel in this post, as always, but if you bear with me I’ll introduce you to a metaphorical extravaganza (something which sounds as though it should be related to organza, but isn’t.  Organza is a fabric.  Though in turn, organza sounds like it should be an unusually exotic orgy, maybe involving silk somehow).

Anyway…

While tweaking the image you see above, getting the colour balance right, I thought “If I carry on doing this, I’ll go snowblind.  Maybe I should tint the whole thing yellow, as though I’m wearing goggles.”  But then I’ve heard stories of yellow snow, and didn’t want to attract the obvious comments.  Even though I quite like huskies.

And then, the next thought I had went something like this…

I have a dear friend, who I think must have suffered something like emotional snowblindness.  Ordinarily, she’s the most drama-averse individual you could hope to meet.  But suddenly, there she was… ploughing her way through the emotional snowdrift of domination and submission, wearing nothing but a collar to keep her warm.  She’d worn a collar before, but not one so tightly fastened.  And this one felt warm at the time, I think, only because it was chaffing her neck.

Maybe the thing about snowblindness is that you don’t realise that you’re blind.  And maybe you’re inclined to say, when friends ask, that you see everything clearly.

In the end, she found her snow goggles again.  Then, with no small amount of courage,  she dug herself out of the drift.

I really don’t like snow at all.

That’s me!

Posting this image could be vanity on my part, but what I really want to know this… how does Clags manage to see these wonderful images ?  I wish I had a fraction of that vision.  Maybe some of it will rub off.

Corwin, and me, and a tree

It’s that time of year

Visit Semang (160, 231, 36)

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I use Lazyest, because it’s simple, and I find it logical – each folder on your server is a gallery, and each sub-folder is a sub-gallery, so using it is just like browsing through folders and subfolders of images on your local file system, using a file manager (Gnome’s Nautilus, in my case, or Finder on Apple’s Mac.  I think Windows has something similar).

I posted a few more pictures into my gallery yesterday, and realised that Lazyest has had a couple of significant updates – including the ability to add comments to individual images.  For me – having tried a whole load of gallery plugins – this is without doubt The One.  Take a look, add add a comment, why don’t you ?

There’s no doubt it’s been a strange week.  A curate’s egg of a week.  A week to contemplate fortunes and misfortunes, things won, things lost, things found.

And now I’m sitting here, contemplating what might well be the start of a new and wonderful chapter in my second life, while other people dear to me are starting new chapters of their own.

Nice.  All credits to Darren Barefoot.

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It didn’t happen.

This article, by Bill Thompson – a writer I have serious time for – takes a more measured look at virtual living, including Second Life, than pretty much any other article I’ve read recently.  I’d recommend you read it too.

This was a surprise present from Corwin !  A lovely, cute, non-melting snowman, complete with carrot nose and scarf !

Oh… notice how sl snow is so realistic, that my right foot has sunk into it, while my left foot – with no weight on it – hasn’t !  This must be one of the unremarked marvels of the new Havoc engine.  Or a glitch with my AO / shoe combination.  Take your pick.

Chez Clagsy

A good place to be

Visit Kirriemuir (79, 201, 25)

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Sunset at Clags' place

Contemplating snow

Notice there’s no fog when I exhale

Visit Scepterd Isle (204, 209, 42)

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Winter arrives – suddenly

I looked out of my window yesterday, and discovered it’s now winter. Apparently, winter starts on the Americans’ Thanksgiving holiday, and finishes on the 2nd of January, when summer will recommence just as suddenly.
Don’t ask about my neighbour’s balloon – I have no idea of the answer.

Visit Scepterd Isle (239, 117, 50)

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Clags, spotted in her native habitat

Red sky at night... shepherd's delight

Pondering life

It’s been a strange weekend in sis’s rl, so I’ve not seen the light of day until now. Just time now to lie back and contemplate on what a strange thing life is.

Visit Scepterd Isle (218, 170, 48)

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But that wasn’t all that caught my eye.  In true geek fashion, I took a look at the mission website, and then a look at their propulsion system.  I quote…

PSLV has four stages, using solid and liquid propulsion systems alternately. Six strap-on motors augment the first stage thrust. PSLV-XL is the upgraded version of PSLV. In PSLV-XL, the six strap-on motors carry 4 tonne more propellant compared to PSLV; There is also an increase in the length of each strap-on.

Please Santa, for Christmas, I want a strap-on with one of those motors!

Sweetest Goodbye – hello !

Thanks to Vextra for the LM… this is a wonderful outlet. Love it !

Visit Port Jewell (226, 142, 24)

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Sent from my mobile thingumyjigger

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Sent from my mobile thingumyjigger

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Sent from my mobile thingumyjigger

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Sometimes, further testing of furniture is needed, even after manufacturing is complete. And then there are all the promo photographs, of course.

I’m not claiming any great authority in this.  I’m most definitely an amateur and sporadic blogger, and you can draw your own conclusions on my abilities as an author.  I have, however, spent a good time investigating ways to make the process of living a second life, and maintaining a blog about it, reasonably painless.

The first two pages are a general commentary on creating blog postings from within sl, and on selecting a blogging platform.  I’ll add other topics on an ad-hoc basis.

Hopefully, someone will find these pages useful.

This is me looking pleased with myself, after Corwin noticed my name in (rather small) lights in the current viewer’s Help / About box.  Can you see ?  And all I did was report a bug and how to reproduce it.

Another of Nina’s excellent cartoons… this time, with me.  What you see here was the product of hours of gruelling rehearsal.  It was hard work, but it had to be done.

There’s plenty of scope for innuendo in this title, which I would hate to discourage

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I don’t know Cory, and I don’t know enough about his work, so any opinion I might have should rightly count for nothing.  I cut out the argument by having no opinion. But when I read someone expressing opinions, particularly negative opinions phrased in derogatory ways, I find it hard to avoid forming an opinion of the author.  And because I dislike baseless opinion, I did a little googling on Andrew Orlowski – the author of the Register piece.

If you read the Register article, you’ll see this…

Ondrejka was hired by the equally utopian former Googler Douglas Merrill [Taurus | Year of the Dog | extremely dull blog] earlier this year. Ondrejka may not know much about the music business, reliable systems or consumer marketing, but he knows what to do when cornered. Like a squid making a rapid exit, he blows out a black cloud of Web 2.0 buzzwords.

So I thought, well, I’m quite interested in blogging and I’d like to see how my own blog compares with an extremely dull one.  And actually, having done that, I’d probably rather read the extremely dull one than read mine.  It’s quite moving.  I even wonder if Orlowski read it himself.

Then I thought I’d look to see Orlowski’s own blog, or website, or whatever, to get an idea of Orlowski’s background and experience.  Sadly, it’s a poorly presented site, out of date, and somewhat lacking in any substance.  Glass houses and stone-throwing came to mind.  I still don’t know his background or experience, but now I can’t be bothered to find out.

I don’t know if Cory has gone up, or down, or sideways in my estimation – I still don’t have an opinion.  But I won’t waste time reading Orlowski again.

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It must be nice to own, or co-own, an island. Endless possibilities for building. I’m a bit jealous.

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These are a few photos Tiffani gave me.  She’s one sultry girl, with a good eye for a picture.  It would be a crime to keep these to myself when she said I could share them

First, I simply assumed it must be stored as part of my profile on this blog.  Wrong.  In fact, I don’t have an ‘avatar’ in my profile on this blog (sl residents will chuckle here at the use of ‘avatar’ for a static image, but that’s what they’re called in blogspeak).  I do, however, have an avatar for use with my wordpress.com blog – but it’s not the same image as the one I was trying to change.

So I thought.. hmmm… maybe it’s tied to my gmail account (since that’s identified in my blog profile, and it also has an avatar in the profile).  Wrong.  I’d updated that image a while ago.  At this point I was stumped.  I couldn’t imagine where this blog was getting hold of the image.

So I started trawling my way through the Wordpress codex (the thing that anyone else would just call ‘documentation’, or even ‘help’).  And I hit upon the word ‘gravatar’ being used in this context – globally recognised avatar.  Somewhere, a dim light sputtered into life.  I googled ‘gravatar’ and found gravatar.com.  What was surprising is that I also discovered I had an account there.

What was more surprising is that I was able to manage my account, and change the little picture, without actually logging in.  I assume it was picking up data from a cookie left behind by Wordpress, or gmail, or some such, because I was doing all this on my little eee.  And I know I’ve not logged in to gravatar.com using the eee.

Anyway… final upshot is that the little image you see in my comments come from gravatar.com, and is associated with my email address.  And I thought changing it would be simple.

(By the way… if you didn’t already follow the blogspeak link, you should.  Do it now)

But before I got started, I just wondered whether there was really a problem with the plugin I was using anyway, which goes by the title of ‘Lazyest Gallery‘.  I just wondered whether there was some peculiar browser behaviour, or maybe something odd about the cacheing plugin I’ve been using – WP Supercache (sounds cheesy, doesn’t it?).

So I turned off the cacheing thingy, and suddenly I can now drill down into the galleries again when I use Epiphany or Opera, just as I can when using Firefox.  Maybe it was the cache plugin after all, or at least a plugin cache clash.

Anyone tried the gallery with Safari, or something else?  IE, perhaps – if anyone still uses it?

You can see from the posts below this one that I was walking around a sim that was intended to be a reconstruction, with some artistic license, of Vegas.  Several of the postcards I sent arrived safe and sound, but the first one didn’t.  I had an error message from the SL viewer each time I sent a postcard – probably because my net connection was stretched to the limit doing other things.

So rather than look a complete idiot, I thought I’d just explain.  I do know how to count, starting from 1. The message called Vegas #1 is out there, somewhere, lost in the ether(net).

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greenage-20080928-2

One caveat: you’re welcome to download, use, and play around with this theme under the terms of the GPL – just as I have – but I’m not sufficiently skilled in the ways of CSS, PHP, XHTML or other appropriate acronyms to be of any help to you if it goes all screwy.

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Sent by me

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As you will have seen, if you read through the postings over the last few weeks, much of the time I’ve spent on this blog has been concerned with the simple matter of finding a flexible way to post from Second Life.  It sounds like the sort of task that ought to be trivially easy.  My experience has been quite the opposite – it’s hard.

The problem

The problem I found myself with is simple enough: I want to post pictures into my blog while I’m in SL.  I also want to be able to post to my blog by email, from time to time, because I can do that from my phone when I have a spare moment – I can’t always get to my PC. To complicate matters a little, what I describe as ‘my blog’ is actually several parallel versions of a blog, running on several different platforms.  So I have a blog at Blogger, one at Wordpress.com, one at Vox.com, and I rent space on a server which hosts a Wordpress blog, and a Movable Type blog.

You may think I’m a masochist, and you’d be right.  I’m afraid I like to experiment – probably more than I like blogging, if I’m deadly honest. So, my ideal is to be able to post from SL, from a phone, or from a PC, with the same post reaching several blogs on several different platforms, simultaneously. Not so trivial after all.

The best solution

If you’ve reached this page through desperate hours of Googling because you suffered the same frustrations that I have, I’ll first set out what I think is the best solution I’ve found. The single, best solution, is to use Posterous.

Posterous is a respectable free blog in its own right, but it’s geared to providing simple, robust blogging by email.  It’s smart enough, though not very configurable – at the moment.  But the key thing is that it is capable of forwarding (cross-posting) to a lot of other blog platforms.  And it’s simple, simple, simple to set up.  When you’re finished setting up links to other blogs – a process that took me (at most) one minute per blog – you can simply email to  post@posterous.com and that’s it.  The post goes to your Posterous blog, and gets forwarded at once to every other blog you’ve configured.  (You can, if you want, exert more control -  change the addressee to blogger@posterous.com, and the post will only go to the Blogger account, for example). For a resident of Second Life, the one thing that makes Posterous stand out from the rest is that it handles SL postcards perfectly.  I should explain an SL postcard, perhaps…

A Second Life ‘postcard’ is a fixed format email message sent from within the Second Life viewer.  It’s accessed from the ‘File / Take Snapshot’ menu, which also allows images to be saved to disk or uploaded (because the viewer generates the snapshot image, and must upload it to SL if you want it in your inventory).  The message consists of the snapshot itself (a sort of jpeg format screenshot), the subject line and message text which you can edit in the viewer dialog, and a number of other elements over which you have no control – such as a link to the location where the snapshot was taken, the SL logo, and a link to the SL website.  There are several examples of SL postcards in this blog.

Almost every other method I have tried – and believe me, I’ve tried a lot – will mangle the postcard one way or another.  One exception is that postcards will survive intact if they’re sent to a Blogger blog directly from the SL viewer.  On the other hand, Blogger blogs are hard to style well, especially if there are several images in a single post – at least, that’s my experience. Posterous is not without its issues, though.  Currently, you can’t keep posts private (though you can delete them after they’ve been forwarded) – but this feature in coming, I’m told.  And Posterous does two things to images contained in the post: it resizes them, and it stores them on the Posterous server, replacing the image with a link when it’s forwarded to another blog.  Luckily, the image is retained on the server and the link still functions, even if the email posting that it came from is deleted. Hopefully, this aspect of image handling will be addressed by the Posterous guys too, because I’d like to keep each downstream blog self-contained – text and images in the same place – if at all possible.

At the moment, Posterous can’t post to blogs at Vox.com, although that’s being worked on too.  Vox is not a bad platform – one of the better ones actually – though it has some odd behaviours when it comes to cross-posting.  When emailing posts to the blog, it uses a special email address, like (16_random_characters)@moblog.vox.com.  Try typing that lot into the SL postcard dialog without making a mistake.  Go on, try.

Other things I’ve tried…

SL postcard -> Blogger:  works OK, if you like Blogger – as I noted earlier

SL postcard -> vox:  Nearly works.  The image and message text survive, but other elements such as the location are lost

SL postcard -> Wordpress.com: not possible, because Wordpress.com (the free hosting side of Wordpress) can’t accept email. Not at all.

SL postcard -> Wordpress, hosted elsewhere: Wordpress is open source, so you can download it and host it yourself, or rent space on a server and host it there.  This method allows Wordpress to accept postings by email, but… the native email support doesn’t accept attachments or inline images, so it won’t accept SL postcards.  There are two plugins – postie, and postmaster – but both mangle SL postcards.  Neither can accept multiple images.  The better of the two is postmaster, but even this manages to lose the message text.  What’s more, all the Wordpress methods rely on an ability to run cron jobs on the server, which can be a pain if its on a rented host ( I know there is a ‘cronless’ method for postie, but configuring it is a pain, and it’s not very reliable even when it works).  For those lucky enough not to know, ‘cron’ is a *nix utility for scheduling other programs to run at intervals in time.  [update 2009-03-03:  Version 2.1 of Postmaster doesn't lose the text completely, and does claim to handle multiple images.  For me, it still mangles SL postcards, but not so badly.  It does need php5, though, which is a pain]

SL postcard -> Flickr, then Flickr blog forwarding: It’s possible to email images to Flickr (again using an obscure email address which is awkward to type into the SL viewer dialog), and then to have Flickr forward images automatically to a blog, though this facility is somewhat hidden.  Unfortunately, Flickr sees the SL logo as a second image, and forwards two postings when it receives an SL postcard.  First it sends the snapshot image and the message text, and second it sends the SL logo and the message text.  On top of that, I don’t much like Flickr, though I don’t really know why.

SL postcard -> Movable Type: can’t really comment on this, since I’ve not used MT much.  Broadly though, it seems to have the same issues as Wordpress, from what I’ve seen.  I haven’t yet managed to get MT to accept a posting by email.

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

Posted by email from Ava Ganache’s posterous

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___

The original email, sent using Thunderbird, contained the text and two attached images.  Only one of them made it.

Posted by email from avaganache’s posterous

Posted by email from avaganache’s posterous

Posterous – from SL

Let’s see if this is any more successful at preserving text with images

Visit Scepterd Isle (181, 182, 52)

Posted by email from avaganache’s posterous

Posterous – from SL (again)

Well, I’m an eternal optimist, OK ?

Visit Scepterd Isle (181, 182, 52)

Posted by email from avaganache’s posterous

–
Want to try out Second Life for yourself? Sign up at

http://secondlife.com/?u=95edc2cd9ced486680c06bab1da34611

____

OK – at some point I’m going tosit down and write a summary of what I know about trying toblog from SL.  Consider all the forgoing stuff as research material:)

This post started life as an SL postcard, sent to flickr.  Flickr should then forward the thing to this blog, but actually sends each image as a separate posting.  There are two images in an sl postcard: the snapshot, and the secondlife logo.  The post above is the first image to arrive, and I deleted the post which contains just the logo.

This behaviour is probably ok for most purposes, but not for an sl postcard

So far, my bet is:
Yes: avaganache.wordpress.com

No: avaganache.vox.com
avaganache.com/ava_ganache (you didn’t know about that one, did you ?)

Posted by email from avaganache’s posterous

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»This post was processed by PostMaster

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—
Sent using a Sony Ericsson C902 mobile phone

»This post was processed by PostMaster

»This post was processed by PostMaster

The new RC viewer – 1.21 – locks up reproducibly just outside my front door.  It doesn’t crash, it freezes.  The mainstream 1.20 viewer doesn’t freeze, but it does stutter for a moment and carry on at that same point.  I thought it was curious, so I logged it here (it’s VWR-8890).

After some investigation – none of it by me – it seems this lock-up happens on all 1.21RC builds but none before it, and is related to a malformed item on the Sede di Marte sim.  It only locks the viewer if you look at it, which means that it’s affected by the draw distance set in the client, and the direction in which you look.

I’m going to call it the Gorgon bug.

(I wish I had a friend called Zola, just so I could say to him “I know this sounds cheesy, but I’m going to call my bug Gorgon, Zola”)

Well, it just looked nice, so I snapped it.  Call me impulsive, if you must.

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Hmm… not the best of snapshots, is it ?  Reworking it later, in The GIMP, gave this…

And this is rather better than the original, I think.  Not brilliant, but better.

Nice clothes though – a quick tour of Nomine, Attitudes, and Stiletto Moody’s took care of most of it, but the interesting mesh cardigan was from Kitty’s (I think – that can’t be the full proper name though)

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Is there a cuter derrière around ? (And it’s not mine, in case you were wondering)

Cute #2

and are these the cutest boots yet ?

Hmm… Sunday, and a cuteness overdose.  I should be more careful.

PS:  I should have used the American vernacular in the title, of course.  Boots & booty.

That temporal oxymoron is in some ways reflected in the photo here.  Pretty but bleak.  Warmly welcoming but cold.  Soaked to the skin, with the driest humour.

View over Dingle

There are more photos in the gallery, by the way.  Maybe more still, once she’s dried out and warmed up.

[ /me grins ]

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The hosting provider I use does, however, provide a couple of almost-out-of-the-box photo gallery implementations: Coppermine, and Gallery2.  Of course, you know me well enough by now… I tried both, several times, flicking back and forth between them until a winner emerged.  And the winner was Gallery2.  Why?  Because it’s lighter, more flexible, and easier to customise – at least on the basis of my random thrashing of the two packages.  There’s also the prospect of seamlessly integrating Gallery2 with the blog.. but that’s further down the road.

So please go and have a look and let me know what you think.  At the moment, the number of images I’ve uploaded is limited – I didn’t want to upload too many until I was more or less happy with the gallery, but I’ll add some now and then.  The images that are there ought to be enough to get a feel for it.

A roof with a view

Ok, so there’s not much happening inside, but.. it looks good.  At least, I think it does.

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You can’t exactly see what Tiffani and I are watching, but it was very interesting.  Thanks, Perina and Kyle.. nice work.

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OK, that’s interesting.  The SL viewer said this postcard couldn’t be sent, and I thought no more of it (there were the habitual problems that go with a server upgrade at the time I sent it).  But – lo!, and behold! – it’s here.

Well, this place was the destination of a quick shopping trip with Ophelia.  I think she’s more or less bought the entire contents of the place now.

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Sis ended up in Liverpool this evening – driven away from work to a concert in Liverpool to see The Stranglers and Blondie.  Excellent !

[Sorry abut the weird text before - I blame my phone, or my phone company,or both]

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I do like to be beside the sea

I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom

Where the brass band plays

Tiddly om pom pom

So just let me be beside the seaside

I’ll be beside myself with glee

And there’s lots of girls beside

I should like to be beside

Beside the seaside

Beside the sea

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Emailing to wordpress – not trivial by default, but there are (at least) three ways to achieve it.  Wordpress has its own, built-in, email-to-posting feature which requires access to a dedicated mailbox.  That’s do-able, but it then needs external automation (a pukkah cron script, or a kludge like wp-cron) to make it go and read the mailbox.  A couple of plugins also do the basic stuff, but build on it in different ways.  ‘Postie‘ and ‘Postmaster‘ are both more configurable, and probably a better option than the built-in thing.

On the other hand – unless I’ve missed something – they all fail at some point.

Inbuilt wordpress email handling, and ‘postie’, both fail to handle attachments properly, so if you send a postcard from sl you’ll simply get uuencoded garbage.  Lots of it.  Not good.

On the other hand, ‘Postmaster’ is capable of handling the attachment correctly, either from regular email or a SL postcard.  Only problem here is that with SL postcards, it doesn’t find the text part of the message.  That could be a glitch in either ‘Postmaster’ or SL’s postcards, but my money in on SL being at fault.

Other options ?…

A postcard via flickr, with flickr’s email-to-blog feature properly configured.  OK if you like flickr, but I’m not a fan.

And – maybe – blogHUD, or some feature of Snapzilla that I haven’t yet found.

Unless anyone else has some ideas ?

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Home, home gain

–
Want to try out Second Life for yourself? Sign up at

http://secondlife.com/?u=95edc2cd9ced486680c06bab1da34611

Well, you never know… it might work this time

…even if previous attempts failed

[Moved to Takaraduka]

OK… another place to add to my list of regular shopping visits: bijou, in Takaraduka

Well, after the discussion the other day, Mystie came back and tweaked the lighting at tbr. The harsh white has mostly gone, in favour of the softer yellow from the previous tbr, and the texture of the pit / stage floor has been changed, and is now less ‘clinical’.

I think it’s an improvement, and on the last two or three times I’ve visted there was at least some action on stage.

Time will tell, I guess.

[Moved to Volvod]

A quick trip around Sceper’d Isle showed it to be… deserted.

Moved to TBR and it was… almost deserted.

Had an interesting and lengthy discussion with Mystie, Meelena, Janet, and Loli (who all showed up eventually) about the character of TBR these days. I think there was a loose consensus that the place is brighter than it used to be, whiter, and generally less intimate. Let’s see if Mystie thinks it over, and maybe changes things a little – especially the lighting.

Meantime, I’ll snuggle into the couch at TBR, where there’s now several people, and no chat to disturb the ‘atmosphere’.

Everywhere I went was quiet. TBR was quiet. The overall concurrency figures were low whenever I checked. And it’s not as though SL was broken! In fact, on that score it was one of the best weekends yet – though good performance and low concurrency are likely causally related.

Oh well. I’ll just go back to listening to Coldplay and Cohen then. I’ll keep away from alcohol and sharp things though.

In case you’re wondering, I ought to say that I did get to see Dale and Aem ans Shiori, so it wasn’t really as bad as all that

Grrrrr

grrr grrr grrr

There must be a way to ensure that a line of lsl gets executed when you log out or de-rez an object. Mustn’t there ?

Ok, the colour balance is horrible – my apologies for that. But this was intended as a quick experiment to see if it’s possible to produce a stereo pair – a pair of images that can be viewed to reconstruct he appearance of true stereoscopic vision. To do that, you need the right image to be seen by the right eye, and the left image by the left. It’s possible to construct devices to achieve that, but a quick (and uncomfortable) way is to look at the image and then cross your eyes, so that the right image superimposes over the left. With luck, you’ll be able to ignore the two ‘half-images’, and concentrate on the hybrid image in the middle. With a little more luck, the middle image should snap into view, and appear three-dimensional.

If it doesn’t work for you, don’t force it – it hurts your eyes.

Let me know what you think. Is this geeky, or is it just plain sad ?

OK- I think I’ve got the hang of this now. The chatterblog script (nice name ?) needs tidying, but it works. I did have to tweak it a little more, to get paragraph breaks where I want them in my WordPress / postie-plugin combo. And now I’ve done that, maybe I don’t need the postie plugin anyway. Grrr

Whatever, at least it’s all sorta working, and the mail from this script gets processed every 20 minutes as a cron job on my hosts server – which was a pain until I realised I had the php script permission set wrongly.

OK, maybe this isn’t the most practical thing to do: the eee is really too weedy to manage sl. That said, it’s an interesting experience

I just hope no-one tries talking to me !

Sorry about all the earlier testing detritus. Maybe I’ll clear it out later. In the meantime, I’m going to attempt to fly around the Skybeam estate.

When I started with Charlene, there were two sims in her empire.. the original Skybeam, and Scepter’s Isle, where I have my house. In the 18 months since, it’s grown. I thought I’d see if it’s possible to fly around the estae without crashing, and without my shoes stuck up my backside. Here goes…

[Moved to SkyBeam Silver Sea]

[Moved to Fox]

[Moved to Tuscan Sun]

[Moved to SkyBeam FirstLand]

[Moved to Sede di Marte]

[Moved to SkyBeam Tradewinds]

[Moved to SkyBeam Tradewaters]

[Moved to SkyBeam Trailridge]

[Moved to SkyBeam Pastures]

[Moved to SkyBeam Trailridge]

[Moved to SkyBeam Harbour Cove]

[Moved to SkyBeam Estates]

[Moved to Richland Center]

[Moved to SkyBeam Wood]

[Moved to SkyBeam Deep Brine]

[Moved to SkyBeam Moving Waves]

[Moved to SkyBeam Stillwater]

[Moved to SkyBeam Everglades]

[Moved to Apparition Wood]

[Moved to SkyBeam]

[Moved to Scepterd Isle]

[Moved to Scepterd Star]

[Moved to Scepterd Isle]

wow !

I just hadn’t realised how much it had grown – it’s takem me 10 minutes of continuous flying to reach every sim in the Skybeam empire. It’s almost as big as SL was when I started !

I couldn’t see any way to test this script, other than…. erm… testing it. And that meant there would be a few rubbish entries in the blog.

With any luck, I’ve reached the point where this script does more-or-less all that I want of it. It’s moderately configurable, it’ll work out-of-the-box with Blogger and (sorta) Wordpress. To be honest though, WordPress needs a little kicking to get email handling right, but hey… it’s free and open, and I could fix it myself if I wanted

I’d be interested in any comments you have on this script thing. Do you think it’s of any use to you ? Can you imagine anyone paying for something like this ?

From: Ava Ganache

Date: 2008/6/17

Subject: Ava Ganache: Unauthorized Post Attempt

To: ava (at) avaganache.com

The interesting thing about tests is that sometimes they show you that things don’t work like you want them to. In this case, it showed that the body text was getting stripped from the email message,even though the header arrived intact. So this test is to see if the ‘postie‘ plugin can fix the problem (as it seems to have done for other people).

Neat – a little while after he jumps off the LL ship (or did he walk the plank ?) Cory surfaces over at EMI.

The Register is wonderfully rich in its hyperbole, its distaste of all things with 2.0 in the title, and things like SL which need no excuse because they’re just plain fun.  Only someone with his head up his backside would get so animated as the author of the Register article, but.. it’s his prerogative I guess.

Anyway, it seems Cory Linden has pitched up at EMI as head of ‘digital strategy’, where he makes a virtue of knowing nothing whatsoever about the business EMI is in.  Wonderful.

Shame I can’t walk into Microsoft and say "I’m ignorant – hire me as CEO !",  Someone beat me to it.

Oops… sorry about that.  If you were reading this earlier, and you wondered what on earth was going on – it was me.  Playing about.

Of course, I know you commented about the weird disappearance, Dale.  But then, the page wher you commented has also vanshed now, so there’s no trace.

In a nation which is rightly proud of its self-disciplined people, this must be shocking.

If you’re reading this and are in any way related to what happened then, please, accept my condolences.

Straight to my blog (via Flickr)

Originally uploaded by ava.ganache

OK, this started life as an email with a picture attached. With any luck, it’ll end up in my blog, while dropping a copy of the picture off in Flickr along the way. Let’s see, shall we ?

PS:  Thing is, if you delete the photo in Flickr, it vanishes in the blog

I can’t even steal her PC to work on this site if she’s not here to turn the damn thing on.  And there’s an awful lot still to be done on this site.

Maybe she’ll get to take a few days off some time soon – she keeps complaining that she hasn’t had a holiday yet this year.

Until then, though, it’s just a question of using what little time is available.

I’ve preferred gnome over KDE for almost as long as I can remember using Linux. It’s a really personal thing – there are so many flame wars over which windows manger is ‘better’ than another. In the end, it’s all pointless – the best one is simply the one you like best. It doesn’t need any more justification that that. I like gnome, and I forced it onto my little eee despite its objections.

If I had to find a fault with the eee, it would be this: you need to strike the space bar accurately. Hitting the right hand end won’t do. Not much of a criticism, huh ?

All this, of course,is a distraction from the meat and veg of SL. Nina’s been poorly but stoical. I’ve been attemptingly supportive, I hope. I’ve done nothing to my house for ages, and I’ve barely even been shopping ! Incredible, I know.

So… let’s see what the weekend holds…

Actually, the really good thing is that it’s given me a little time to catch up with people. People I ought to have spent more time with recently, and for one reason and another, haven’t.

I’ve been missing Nina rather a lot.  I’ve not seen Corwin in a while, except in IM’s, and it’s longer still since I spent time with Dale.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, I can’t remember how long it is since I spent good time with Ace.  This weekend, so far (it’s only Sunday morning) I’ve managed to spend at least some time with all of these people.  It’s a good start.

I’ve been lucky, I think, that over the last year or two I’ve gained a bunch of friends that I love, and the only ones I’ve lost are those whose RL got the better of them.  I always feel guilty that I don’t – can’t to be more accurate – spend more time with these wonderful people.

I think I did say that I’ve tried the SL client on the Eee. It works – even givees me 1.7 fps – but it’s not particularly practical. The little processor struggles,and the graphics aren’t really up to it – but it’s better than nothing. The other alternative is Gnomiverse, which is also better than nothing. In fact, it might even be good.

Whatever the case, the sad fact is that I’ve had very little time in SL over the last week or more, and that’s simply down to sis’s work commitments. With a little luck, maybe it’ll improve over the weekend… it’s a holiday weekend

Let’s see

So, I’ve been having fun with my eee. I also managed to break it yesterday – i the software sense. I’ve gone through the process of customising the thing and making the ‘avanced’ desktop available (btw, ‘advanced’ = standard KDE in this case. I’ll get it running Gnome some time). And I managed to add a file in the root of my home directory which prevented the machine from completing the startup of X11. Stupid thing is that I knew I’d make the mistake as soon as I’s done it,but by then it was too late. I had to wait until I came to work to borrow an external CD drive, which then allowed me to boot the eee into an Ubuntu LiveCD, undo my mistake, and restart. What a pain. On my desktop machine, I wouldn’t have had that problem – I would simply have let X fail, and drop to a text console, and undone my mistake. Oh well,lesson learned: beware of customised distros.

Getting the modem working was a bit of a pain – my mobile phone company offers two types (which I thought were actually the same internally but with different coloured cases. I was wrong). One type plugs and plays without effort. The other is a monumental performance. I got the monumental performance version – but it’s black, so it matches the eee. And I know enough of linux to hack a solution to getting the modem working (even if it’s a bit clunky right now… I have some tidying up to do, I think.  I can’t claim credit for this fix though – mostly it was down to what I found on the eee users forum at EeeUser.com.

Still, it’s all working now, and it’s so cool. I doubt it’ll run SL (I can use gnomiverse though) – but I may just try.

I have a little eee pc. It runs linux out of the box. It’s black. It’s tiny, and it’s really usable. I mean, really. And it fits in my bag ! And I can IM through my alt – and everything. It even feels well built, for heaven’s sake. The keys are a little small maybe – you probably wouldn’t want to type "War and Peace" on it,but then again,you probably wouldn’t want to retype a boring Russian novel anyway.

So far, I’m impressed. Next test is tomorrow, when I see if my usb 3G model will work with it.

So I was looking for a simple IM client, and after a little Googling came up with gnomiverse. After a little testing, it seems the browser interface works well. There’s a desktop client too, but not (yet) for Linux – and anyway, the browser method would be good enough.

That said, I think it’s a good idea to use an alt, rather than my main account, since it could otherwise be rather confusing to people you chat with. So I’ve created avaganache Acker for the purpose. I’ll try it again soon, once a few people have my alt details, and I’ll see whether it’s worthwhile following.

This number of iterations, to me, implies that the first few must really have been betas or, First Look viewers.

On top of the viewer-induced unreliability, SL itself has suffered badly recently. At least LL have been upfront about the poor performance stats for April, as seen in this blog entry. Oh well, back to the grindstone.

If you were to look back at my WordPress-hosted blog right now, or worse still at my Blogger blog, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’ve disappeared altogether.

The irony, of course, is that I’ve done more with blogs and other webby stuff over the last couple of weeks than I’ve done for ages – as you can see on this site.

I guess one issue is going to be… how to I make sure that anyone looking for me comes here, rather than the old locations which are beginning to gather dust ?

I could almost get to enjoy doing this. Now, if only I didn’t have to go back to SL for my source material… no, I’m kidding

And then I remembered I had a copy of nvu installed, so I could get at features like tables, which aren’t easily accessible from the WordPress editor, but I could cut and paste raw HTML between the two…

And then I realised I can do some of the things I wanted to do without the need for a full-blown wiki sitting alongside this bloggy mashup thing…

Oh, isn’t this fun ?

Please note: in the next phase of this load management strategy we plan to restrict logins to Lindens only at all times other than those which would have been high load (when logins will now be closed to all), so that we can work on improvements to server reliability, and some forthcoming fun stuff that no-one wants.

You may have noticed that we’ve also changed our corporate slogan. We believe our new slogan, “Lindens Labs: we’re having fun, so you don’t have to”, better reflects our corporate commitment to the future of Second Life.

Further details can be found at http://outofsight.anotherSLdomain.com

[Comments are closed]

Even so, it was useful to get it working, if only because it forced me to get to grips with some of the guts of both Wordpress and my hosting package.

Who know’s what’s next ?

And then it got a bit more complicated.

First, the hosting package came with a whole host (sorry) of software packages for web site design. So I’ve tried them all.

In no particular order, I’ve tried Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, Nucleus, Mediawiki (for a laugh), and Geeklog. Bizarrely, I ended up back at Wordpress though. It may not be intended as a proper content management system, but its CMS features aren’t bad, it’s very well supported, reliable, and simple. The simple part is a real bonus for me.

So… I’m getting there, OK ?

Recently, an option to change antialiasing settings was added. This option (like the anisotropic filtering option) is entirely redundant, because it’s possible to change system-wide settings for these (usually using an application from the graphics card maker). Some system setting programs allow different profiles on a per application basis – ideal for customising settings for SL_ipshod™, you’d think. Clearly though, it’s not good enough for the people of SL_apDash™.

There are only two slight drawbacks to the SL_eepy™ approach… (1) it wastes time that could be used for fixing broken things, and (2) it’s broken, so it needs fixing itself. Not only does it not change antialiasing for SL_owboat™, it even disables the system settings, so you end up with no antialiasing at all – just jaggies everywhere. And, as I discovered, if I set 8x antialiasing it prevents my system from creating an application window, so the whole thing crashes on loading, even before logging in. And the only way out is to track down the SL_oppy™ xml settings file and manually edit it back to something useable.

And none of the crashes created by this problem are logged, so none will get back to the SL_ovenly™ authors, and the problem will be carried through to the mainstream viewer. At which point, SL_imChance™ will be inaccessible to me.

Anyway, this whinge is about the current diabolical state of sl. I won’t say anything about the detail – so much has been written in the sl blog anyway, leave alone all the other places. It just upsets me that, two years or more after I started, the service is su much more unreliable than it was then. It’s not even that sl itself is unreliable – I could almost excuse that failing by virtue of its novelty – it’s that simple things like web services are so apalling.  Surely to God, LL must have someone who can manage a bog standard website.

The details: an LG Viewty phone, and a Dell Axim x50v (ancient, I know). Linked via Bluetooth, and then to a 3G phone cell.

Shame there’s no way to email entries to Wordpress, though.

To be honest, sis has been too busy at work, and I’ve been to, erm, occupied discovering places I’ve not been to before. For instance, I’ve bought most of the contents of the Armidi stores recently. And I’ve been spending a great deal of time at TBR.

Meanwhile, the sims now run Havok4, and the release viewer runs Windlight.

Oh, and today – of course – the internet broke.

Obviously I’ve missed out on a few things while I’ve been absent, but I feel like I’ve rejoined sl with a little vigour. As the doctor told the retired actress with chest pains: absence makes the heart grow, Fonda.

On the other hand, I’ve gained an (albeit secondhand) insight to another nation. Her observations mostly reinforce stereotypes, I suppose, but these are the impressions my sister returned with, reduced to a few words in no particular order:
order, cleanliness, community, spirituality, rituals, self-discipline, consensus, seafood, sake, chopsticks, wackiness.

Sadly, she had only a limited amount of free time to explore in and around Tokyo. You would probably have guessed that anyway, given the random subject matter (which is neatly echoed by the chaotic way Blogger display these images, too).

In no particular order… Akihabara (thanks Corwin), the Emperor’s palace, assorted temples and shrines, a toilet, and a pole-mounted power transformer (I think).