Archive - 2007
October 24th
OnRez on CSI: NY
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/24/2007 - 19:54This evening, millions of viewers will watch CSI: NY and be invited to solve a mystery in Second Life. Many will click on the CSI: New York Virtual Experience web site, set up an avatar, download the OnRez viewer and enter Second Life. How well will the grid handle the influx? We can only wait and see.
How good is the new OnRez Second Life Viewer? Well, you can download that now and start playing with. I did, and here is what I found.
It appears to be based very closely on the current Second Life viewer. The keystrokes all seem pretty much the same. You can even go into debug mode by press Ctrl-Alt-D and turn on and off the all the extra images with Ctrl-Alt-F1. This is exactly the sort of thing that Electric Sheep hopes the standard newbie in Second Life doesn’t do. It will confuse them horribly.
Yet Electric Sheep has done a great job with the new viewer. In the lower right hand corner, there is a friends button that makes communicating with your friends in Second Life much more like communicating with your friends via other instant messenger programs. They’ve added a nice navigation bar, similar to web browers to go to your home page, or in Second Life, your home region, as well as forward and back buttons to go to places you have recently teleported. They’ve added the section for ‘My Stuff’, ‘Shop’ and ‘Buy L$’. This should make the Second Life shopping experience easier and more pleasant for the casual user, so who knows, it just might help the Second Life economy after all.
Connecting via OnRez also brought up a box for CSI: NY. ‘Happening Now’ the message reads and encourages me to make sure that I’ve visited the White Rabbit crime scene and completed the orientation experience. It also provides links to crime scenes and of course shopping malls. Monkey Canning is offline right now, but I’m sure that when he gets a look at this, he’ll be trying to find some angle to get all these new Second Lifers to stop by at the Virtual Stock Exchange and by some Atlas Venture Capital stock or perhaps pick up some shares of Dawes Financial Corp or Springboard Publications currently in IPO.
It actually makes a lot of sense. Given the failed banks and corporations in Second Life, the allegations of fraud and so on, I’m sure CSI: NY could have a great episode about people hunting down notorious financial avatars like Jasper Tizzy.
So, for the casual user, it makes the experience much more enjoyable, without detracting seriously from the experience of the frequent user. For the hardcore geeks, there are some interesting tidbits. First off, the OnRez client appears to be based very closely on the traditional Second Life client, perhaps a little too closely. When I tried to install OnRez while I was in Second Life, it told me that OnRez was already running. When I shut down my traditional Second Life client, the OnRez installation resumed.
I’m running OnRez on an old Laptop running Windows 2000. It runs fine, although it requested that I load DirectX 9 and Quicktime 7.1. I have older versions of both which work fine for me, and I’ve been having difficulties getting DirectX 9 or Quicktime 7.1 for Windows 2000.
With OnRez up and running, I decided it was time for the next level of testing. Could I connet the OnRez viewer to an OpenSim? Fortunately, I have an OpenSim Grid running on my home network, so I fired up OpenSim with the –loginuri paramenter and sure enough, there was my OpenSim avatar in my OpenSim grid, ready for me to move it around.
I decided to push the envelope a little further. Could I run OnRez connected to the OpenSim grid and the traditional Second Life viewer connected to the Second Life main grid? Sure enough, they ran nicely next to each other, at least for a little while. Next thing I knew, I hit a blue screen of death. So, you can do it, but if you’re running on a flaky old Windows 2000 based laptop, you might see some crashes.
When I started up OnRez again, it gave me a message about how the last time I had run OnRez, it had ended abnormally. It was essentially the same message I’ve see too many times from the Second Life client.
So, I’m running the OnRez client. I’m going to keep my eyes open to see how Second Life and CSI: NY get along. To paraphrase Rick Blaine, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
CSI: SL - Down the Rabbit Hole, BNT back up
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/24/2007 - 07:15Wednesday 10 PM ET/PT/SLT, “A woman's murder sends Mac into "Second Life," the internet-based virtual world to track down the killer in both the real and cyber world. TV14-V.”
This is expected to bring a whole new wave of people to Second Life. To prepare for this wave, the Electric Sheep Company is expected to release a new client for Second Life, the OnRez viewer, which people are already arguing the pros and cons of.
Over on the Second Life Educators mailing list, people are wringing their hands. “What's going to happen on Oct 24th … and shortly thereafter when the 100s of new sims come online? Is that a good day NOT to be teaching or building in SL?”
Prokofy Neva in The Future of Content: Watching the Detectives wonders what all the new residents will do to Second Life. They “may or may not contribute to the existing inworld economy as consumers or even producers. I'm betting they won't, and that the inworld economy will take a severe hit.“
Well, if they don’t consume or produce, how are they going to deal the inworld economy a severe hit? How will such a severe hit compare with the closing of gambling, the decline in real estate prices, the runs on the Second Life banks, or the turmoil in the Second Life capital markets? How will such a severe hit compare with people becoming more involved with alternative grids?
Maybe some people will stick around, rent or buy some land, invest in some stocks, or put some money in banks. Some might be simply feed the next fraud du jour, others might make some good investments.
How much of an impact will CSI: SL really make anyway? Depending on how close a game it is, a lot of people may still be busy watch the Rockies and the Red Sox fight it out.
A different person commented, “Terrific. This will get the vast TV audience an opportunity to get a taste of "stepping inside" the TV. Should be mind-changing.”
I’m the eternal optimist. I don’t think Second Life will take a serious hit, either in the grid or in the economy, and somewhere, someone will have a mind-changing experience, and we will all be better off for it.
Also relating to Second Life finances, AnCapEx is now up and running. This is IntLibber Brautigan’s new stock exchange. In terms of functionality, it appears to be using the same software as the Second Life Capital Exchange (SlCapEx). I’ve always liked the SlCapEx interface, and I especially like their webservices providing an easily processed feed of stock prices. It would be great to see other exchanges pick up this format.
Currently, the only stock available on SlCapEx is Brautigan & Tuck Holdings, (BNT). This includes the merged in Countless Galaxies (CGI) shares. It will be interesting to watch the initial trading. On top of that, AnCapEx is talking about adding options. This will be a nice feature, although I’m curious about how exercising options will work. Ideally, they will list options on other exchanges which will require the exchanges to adapt and facilitate transfers of stock, such as through the exercise of options, as stock lending or stock gifts, and so on. This will move the capital markets in Second Life forward in ways greater than any influx of CSI views is likely to damage.
October 23rd
Second Life Bankruptcy Court
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/23/2007 - 22:05Recently I pondered if Directors’ and Officers’ Liability Insurance Coming to Second Life?. We may be getting closer after the Virtual Stock Exchange’s (VSTEX) decision to freeze Investor Merlin’s assets.
This action has raised a lot of eyebrows and a lot of questions. They report that they are transferring assets to Skip Oceanlane, Merlin Investment Bank’s vice president. Should the assets be transferred to Skip? Or to someone else? Should VSTEX liquidate the assets, or should that be left up to Skip? Should VSTEX have listed what the assets are?
October 22nd
The San Diego Fires
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/22/2007 - 19:49As I continue to dig through the messages in my inbox, another theme I’m finding is one about how we respond to disasters. The fires in San Diego bring an immediacy to these issues, but the issues are much greater.
One group that is doing important work on looking at how we deal with disasters is the Disaster Accountability Project (DAP). It was founded by Ben Smilowitz, a UConn Law student who volunteered with the Red Cross and a managed a client service center in Gulfport, MS, during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Around a week ago DAP sent out a press release critical of the timing of the TOPOFF4 exercise,
because an updated National Response Plan is not yet in place. Originally, the Exercise was planned to follow the close of the comment period for the newly proposed and highly controversial National Response Framework (NRF). In a large-scale emergency, it would be critical for plans at all levels of government to be aligned with the national coordinating plan. But, state and local officials have not had time to align their plans with the NRF because it has not been finalized.
They also point out
that the Department of Homeland Security made a similar error in April 2005, when it held TOPOFF3 before the deadline by which state, local and other federal agencies were to have revised their own plans to reflect the National Response Plan (NRP) issued in December 2004 with little input from state officials.
While the timing of the exercises might not have been optimal in terms of making the exercises as effective as they should have been, they do illustrate what seems to be a key aspect of dealing with disasters. Disasters often come unexpectedly or at inopportune times.
Today, DAP issued a press release about the comments they are submitting on the NRF. They note that "The description of the FEMA Director and DHS Secretary's responsibilities conflicts with requirements of the Post Katrina Reform Act…Federal exercises frequently ignore recovery or give it lip service if addressed at all… Not all 'lessons learned' are publicly reported or followed up with changes to plans… the TOPOFF III after-action report still has not been issued."
Only seven and a half hours later, they had their next press release out about San Diego.
Noting that ‘Gaps In Disaster Services [are] More Likely To Get Fixed If Made Public’,
The Disaster Accountability Project's toll-free hotline (866-9-TIP-DAP) is ready for CA wildfire-related calls. California residents, firefighters, and relief volunteers can report problems or whistle-blow gaps in disaster relief services in the wildfire response and relief effort. Individuals should use the toll-free hotline (866-9-TIP-DAP) to report the specific location and nature of the disaster relief/response gaps.
Soon afterwards, I received an email from a good friend of mine who is a therapist in San Diego. She notes that two of her friends have lost their homes and were evacuated this morning. Her family is still safe, but they have been close before. She notes a huge dislocation of people, currently over 250,000 evacuated. She urges people to send money to the Red Cross and to help out in other ways because, she notes “this is not going to be over soon as so much housing and business has been destroyed.” She also notes that the therapy community is mobilized and helping, which I believe is too often overlooked in the aftermath of a disaster.
So, for the people of San Diego, I offer my prayers. If you know people struggling with the disaster in California, make sure they know about DAP’s toll-free hotline. It might not help with the current disaster, but it will help as we all learn to deal better with disasters in the future.
(Technorati tag San Diego Fire)
Teach your parents well
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/22/2007 - 16:44Sunday, I received an email pointing to an article in the Hartford Courant, Moms, Dads Urged To Be Stronger Advocates. The article spoke about a meeting organized by CT Parent Power, “a statewide parent action network with a history of strengthening the voices of parents on the many decisions that affect our children and families.”
They advocate subversive activities like encouraging “members to register to vote” and “to go to their children's schools”. It was interesting to see the responses. For some reason a bunch of people don’t think parents should be involved and one went so far as to claim, “Parent Advocacy is NOT linked to better student performance”. Those looking for real information are encouraged to check out the research summary of the National Middle School Association.
Today, I received an email pointing me to another article in the Hartford Courant, I Am...Running for Mayor about Raul De Jesus’ campaign to become Mayor of Hartford. It is feel good sort of article and I wondered what is behind Raul’s campaign. The issues page of his campaign website leads off with Education, and his first point is about Parental Participation.
Educating our kids is a task that not only lies in the hands of leadership in our community but also lies in the hands of the parents. Many are single household parents and have more than one job. I acknowledge the effort that many put into our school system. Sometimes due to fact that they are multi-tasking, it’s easy for them to forget to allocate the time for their kids’ education.
He goes on to talk about "Parents Report Cards". He then tackles Outside Suspensions noting that in 2005-2006 there were 13,159 suspensions which he considers to be schools avoiding the real issues. He suggest he “would replace outside suspension with inside suspension and supervised community service.” He goes on to talk about public safety and taxes, and of course, he has a Register to Vote link on his webpage.
Soon after I got the email about Raul, I received an email about New York State’s Parenting Education Graduation Requirement. I don’t know of this requirements talk about the importance of parental participation in schools, but I sure hope that is does.
Raul is right to note the difficulties some parents have in finding time to be involved in their children’s schools. However, it is worth noting that this involvement doesn’t have to be an onerous task. This weekend, Kim is helping with the Halloween Hoot organized by the Beecher Road School Parent Teacher Organization and I am sure that everyone will have a good time.
I hope and expect that the majority of my readers are already very involved in their children’s schools. Good for you. I hope that some of these stories will re-enforce your commitment to be involved and provide useful thoughts for when you talk with others about the importance of parental involvement.
