this has nothing to do with virtual worlds, unless you are thinking of quitting Linden Lab

my new hero! =)

http://thechive.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-her-job-on-dry-erase-board-emails-entire-office-33-photos/

i love being an avatar. many people love what their avatar means to them. for most people, there is a deep connection with that little you running around in-world (ener <– often runs in circles, hands in the air, screaming) =D

research reveals what you and i already know (gee, imagine that!)

Researchers at Concordia University in Canada report in the journal Psychology and Marketing that online avatars usually reflect the personality of their creators.

*so proud to be Canadian – hey, wait, was that with my tax dollars?* =p

the way i see it, what other personality could you reflect?

i know you can fake to be something that you are not in real life, but that can only go so far and be carried out for so long

if you can be all fake in real life, then you can be all fake as a virtual world avatar or a screen name in a forum. but that is your personality isn’t it?

sure, you can be a furry or a gender bender, but even as a tiny beaver it is still you, just an online expression of who you really are (not that you are a furry, but that it embodies aspects of you as a person – warm and fuzzy or cute and prickly or big and bad)

what is an avatar after all? is it really that different than anything else we identify ourselves with?

i tend to think of Ener Hax as more “me” than i am in real life. that may sound weird but i had more to do in choosing my avatar’s name than i did in choosing my real name. and with the veil of the web, i feel more free to actually express my feelings (what? ener unfiltered?) =p

Québec is a neat city in that it has an old town (basse-ville) and the newer city (québec is over 400 years old). separating the two are the cliffs of the st. lawrence river and a steep climb up

ever since i was little, the “ascenseur” has been a fixture of quebec city and an iconic symbol. it’s like a cog railway mashup with an elevator. it’s free and makes it a quick trip between the historic lower town and the château frontenac up top

in Enclave Harbour (OpenSim), i also have a hotel overlooking the water up on a cliff and decided it needed some access from that parking area below. so i built an ascenseur =)

Micheil Merlin, an expert scripter and often contributor to this blog, graciously created a script for the new and almost finished elevator. he is so thorough and gave me a prim with all the scripts in it that was exactly positioned to allow me to simply drop his scripts and notecard into the ascenseur’s root prim

thank you Micheil, this makes my heart smile! =)

photo by Copyright of Mixtape Masterpiece

opensimulator just released version 0.7 and it seems to have several very good fixes. i am not sure what half of them mean, but the core developers have been doing a lot of work. our fave coder (cuz someone is crushing on jcc) predicted that we may see version 1.0 of OpenSim this year. i guess that would be the first beta version? it is still considered alpha software. as OpenSim continues to improve, more and more virtual options will come online as well as providing a better experience

in this version, they consolidated some tables meaning less complexity and fewer tables to call on and they did a lot of work on hypergridding

being able to hypergrid is both a good and bad thing. remember when Linden Lab and IBM made the first hypergrid teleport three years ago?

it was considered huge news and promised a more open virtual world experience. but LL never went anywhere with it – partly for piracy reasons and partly for money (imo)

hypergridding, to me, is kind of like surfing the web. you can hop around to different grids with your one avatar. that opens up a great number of sims and grids out there, from grids on people’s own machines to grids in OSGrid (see a list of HG grids). Alec mentioned a very interesting concept about Google and other web search engines indexing virtual world places. that would be a huge change and add traffic to Second Life as well as other grids. how great would it be to hit Google or Yahoo and search “virtual world Aeron chair” and get results showing what worlds they were in and so on? click the link and go there via hypergrid just like hitting a SLURL

but hypergridding also opened up security issues. if you were to hypergrid to Enclave Harbour, 216.75.6.85:9002, i could copy your inventory. lol, that is super theoretical because i have absolutely no clue where to even start that nor do i have any interest in collecting other people’s stuff – i have enough junk of my own! =D

but that is a legitimate concern for creators

in the 0.7 release of OpenSim, they have addressed this in a very smart way. when you arrive on another grid, rather than downloading your entire inventory, a suitcase is created in your inventory as a folder. the welcoming sim can now only see into that folder, plus see anything you are wearing. your inventory is no longer exposed, unless you open it and search for something

they also fixed a vulnerability that had allowed for people to spoof your avatar (ener clones wreaking havoc all over the place) =p

lots of little bugs were fixed and all in all, this looks like a significant update

thank you OpenSim developers! =)

last week we wondered about Second Life’s biggest private estate owner, but what about Second Life’s creator – Philip Rosedale?

the last we heard of him was a new company he started called lovemachine

the lovemachine blog is a bit sporadic so it’s hard to judge what is going on (heck, this blog would be sporadic too if i had a fraction of the money Philip has) =)

his new website is interesting in that some of it is very much the opposite of what is going on at Linden Lab under Kingdon, such as this quote:

Love is the answer – Everything presented above [his Tao] will lead you astray unless your actions come from love. Love is the most subtle and complex emotion. The direction of evolution is toward love.

over at Linden Lab, people are likely not operating under that premise =(

but in an eerie way, i found that his Rules: The LoveCode had a line in it that sounded a bit like the new Second Life TOS as far as the things people create:

Anything you choose to contribute here, upload to our servers, or say in the journal is freely given to the LoveMachine to use in whatever way it wants, whether or not you are paid for it.

there is not much meat over on his site or blog to draw much conclusion from. it was just kind of interesting to see what someone who is very smart and obviously passionate (to raise what he did in venture capital to start Linden Lab takes lots of confidence, charisma, and true belief) is up to these days

for some reason, it made me a little sad to see a post about a survey monkey (could of used a google form) that he had his 10 employees/friends/whatevers complete, well some completed it . . .

i applaud your vision Philip and many people and religions do believe that love is the way – hopefully your work impacts American corporations, many who seem to think that the ROI on love is too low to bother with

for #2 - how is 8/10=100%?