SL and RL on a budget

I’ve been having financial problems in RL for a long time ever since I lost my job. So I had to take the difficult decision to downgrade my SL accounts (two of them) and to sell my land.

I had the land for sale and tried to advertise it on Xstreet but no one bought it. So I had to come up with something else. Then I got the idea of asking the other merchants on the Xtreet forum for advice and the response was great. I got so many good answers that I really think I can get this to work. I’ll look through all the suggestions and then try them out.

Thank you all the wonderful people on Xstreet for your care and knowledge. I’ll post updates here about my progress.

For now on I’ll live in SL as I do in RL – on a really tight budget, but I’ll survive:)

Cool SL resource

When I checked stats for my blog today I noticed that the visitors had come from a new resource for SL blogs.  At least it’s new to me. They have put together a sort of   top list of  SL blogs and mine was on it. Not very high up,  but still:). Want to see if  your blog is on the list or check out other SL blogs, here’s the link:

http://www.secondeffects.com/2009/04/active-second-life-blogs-2009.html

The future is here

Eddie is only 4 years old and he spends every day in a virtual world. No, I’m not talking about the average computer game player, but the Artificial Intelligence created at Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Lab. Eddie is programmed to reason and to predict other people’s actions and has also passed a few reasoning tests. Eddie or really, Edd Hifeng, isn’t yet walking around in Second Life, but it’s possible to talk to him. When I tried to contact him the other day, he wasn’t online so I couldn’t meet him “face-to-face”. Imagine meeting this new lifeform in a way, a first contact.

The researchers of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute aren’t planning to leave little Eddie in the virtual world. They are working to bring him to us in real life. But first he’ll play in the 3D world of Second Life so he can grow and learn about how to be more like us. Eddie is part of a bigger project that Renselelaer is working on. It’s a holodec project like in the scifi series StarTrek. So our “first contact” might not be in Second Life, but in a holodec and a full size Eddie or someone else. The future awaits us and it looks really promising.

Eddie is 4 years old and lives in Second Life

haley-j-oNo, I’m not talking about the average player in SL, but the Artificial Intelligence created at Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Lab. Eddie is programmed to reason and to predict other people’s actions and has also passed a few reasoning tests. Eddie or really, Edd Hifeng, isn’t yet walking around in SL, but it’s possible to talk to him. When I tried to contact him in SL the other day, he wasn’t online so I couldn’t meet him “face-to-face”. Imagine meeting this new lifeform in a way, a first contact.

The researchers of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute isn’t planning to leave little Eddie in the virtual world. They are working to bring him to us in RL. But first he’ll play in SL so he can grow and learn about how to be more like us. Eddie is part of a bigger project that Renselelaer is working on. It’s a holodec project like in the scifi series StarTrek. So our “first contact” might not be in Second Life, but in a holodec and a full size Eddie or someone else. The future awaits us and it looks really promising.

The dynamics of the web

I had pretty much closed down this blog for several reasons. One was the computer crash. Another was that I pretty much had lost interest in SL so I didn’t have much to write about. Of course my readers lost interest in my blog because of no new material for weeks.

Then the other day, I stumbled up on something from the past that was SL related so I thought I would post that. In just a very short one I had the first comment on the post and the hits were starting to grow enormously. I wondered why that was. How could anyone know so fast? That I had written something again and what it was about.

I can see a few explanations. 1) A coincindence. Well that’s always a possibility, but on the other hand, that’s never happened before. Only the “spinders” find posts that fast. 2) The first one to find it was someone who had been watching my blog closely for months. It’s a flattering thought, but judging from my tracker info that wasn’t the case. 3) Trackback. I made a trackback back to motherFIC’s blog so, whoever is behind that blog knew I had posted my blog post. If that’s the explanation, then the owner of that blog either knows someone that’s part of SLU or he himself is a part of it.

Anyway, that’s not my problem and for others to worry about. What’s clear is that after that first person visiting, then the information of my “dangerous” blog post spread like a virus through plurk. Remind me not to sign up there btw;).

Finally…

… I can go back to SL. My computer crashed a while back and I wasn’t able to do anything really. I could access my email accounts but nothing more. It’s so frustrating when nothing works for you. But now I’m back and can go back to what I was doing before. Work with my store and hang out with my friens.

Closing a chapter…

I was really amazed over many that actually came to the rescue when I posted that last post. 160 hits in just a little while. Someone or someones must actually read my blog. Would have been nice with some feedback in the past. Well, I got more than I had ever hoped of getting in just one post.

Anyway, just to make things clear. I don’t know motherFIC and I don’t put any special credit to his article and I used to know Josh and Cris and I liked them. I reposted his article out of interest about a community I used to be part of. I would suggest anyone interested to know more about the background would read Surreals comments on my last post for more info.

If anyone wants to discuss this further with me, and with discuss I mean communicate, then I’ll be happy to. But to those who only want to showel dirt on me, then I won’t comment. I hope everything is clear now.

Microblogging

Apparently, microblogging is getting more and more popular these days. As far as I can tell, the theory behind it is that people are busy, they don’t have time to sit down and write a long blog post. In a way, that makes sense. On the other hand, who says you need to blog ten times a day? A while back I read about some people doing ‘slow blogging’ – quality blogging, not quanity. That too, makes sense.

Being the sad, lonely misfit that I am, I don’t have that much to say, when it comes to ‘what are you doing?’. If I were to really microblog, it would be mainly things like ‘I’m sitting here at the computer’ ‘Just got back from a walk’, ‘Had dinner. It was delicious’. Boring. Pathetic.

That reminds me of an even newer thing – nanoblogging. One word at a time. Brilliant? Trendy? Cool? Poetic? Maybe, but pretentious and snobbish are words that spring to mind. Meaningless too. In my book. But maybe it’s something you get used to.

All this hasn’t stopped me from getting no fewer than five (I think) microblogs (not nanoblogs) and I’m doing my best to keep up. At least I will, as long as it feels fun.

What do you think? Should I give nanoblogging a chance too? Here is a nanoblog site (I haven’t tried it, but I found it when I did a Dogpile search.)

More about tumblelogs

Now that I’ve tried Soup, I can say that for me it works like a cooler version of FriendFeed (or Multiply – but without the annoying ads). It collects posts from other sites, which can be convenient if you have friends and family who would like to keep up with what you’re doing. Of course, it’s also possible to use it like any tumblelog. I haven’t had mine for long, but I’ll keep exploring it and see what else it can do.

Tumblr (for me) is a great ‘scrapbook’ – in my case a photoblog (though like I mentioned before, I also like to post links and other shorter entries). To be honest, it took me a while to figure out how to use it, but when I did, I fell in love with it. It’s so – creative and do-it-yourself, compared to more evolved blogging platforms like WordPress or LiveJournal. I still haven’t tried Publr or Plurk. In fact, I still haven’t figured out exactly what Plurk is and what use I might have for it, if any.