Country Life

I'm sitting at a posh desk in a library in a huge house in the country; I'm house sitting for rich people.I do this on occasion for a couple of couples of my rich clients when they shoot off round the globe and have so much stuff they are worried about getting nicked that they get me to be Object Sitter.

Minding objects is OK, the responsibility is just about right for me...i.e.. not too great.... and the place is well supplied with alcohol, food and hunting scenes on the walls, or at least those that don't have huge portraits of unknown dead people.

The couple I'm stuff-minding for a some of my nicest clients and their country ambitions are kinda cute seeing as they are both townies at heart.

Although I have no idea how many bedrooms and TVs this place has, I do know the computer is rubbish. Firstly its a PC with Vista installed, and, worse than that is the keyboard. Mac has probably made the greatest contribution to mankind in the form of their keyboard, it is pure genius and I recommend anyone who hasn't, to get one. The difference between my Mac keyboard and this is like the difference between a wheel barrow and a Ferrari .... except this one would be no good for horse manure.

Anyway... as you will see, no effort has been spared in slowly tapping out these few words, just so you know I am not gonna be silenced by Medieval Technology...

In other news...well...lots of drama as usual and now, to make matters easier for us, Wizzy is doing a Drama Watch on her blog ... here..... that should be interesting.

Anyway... catch up later in the week when I have had time to aclimatise..

Oh, yes, the photo doesn't have much to do with me except I helped serve the 30 or so horse riders with scotch and port and nibbles before they went off pretend hunting ... (not a Meeroo in sight).

It's another world...


:))

Mid week bloggery

Yes, I know I have made a sort of promise to myself to stop taking the Michael out of the Boys, but I was slightly amused at the following suggestion which arrived in my Inbox today from the strange Sandbox publication from the Boys....

I was very glad that they have taken onboard all the suggestions that Phaylen and Toxic and Chantal had to offer in their recent (not so recent) podcast about how machinima is a vastly underused tool for positive SL PR.... Indeed the first actual action taken by the infamous LEA was to open a month of machinima ... then the sim crashed...(details here).

Oh well, it won't crash all month.

....anyway....under "hot tips" for places to see original content....at Number One... Treet TV



That's a really good recommendation.... for InWorldz, anyway, as the latest interview with Lady Sakai and Jim Tarber is a great bit of coverage on What It Is Like To Move To InWorldz.... so great bit of PR for InWorldz by LL...

The Interview is so good I can recommend it and the transcript on Jim's blog is well worth reading, I think.....especially if you are thinking about moving (as two friends have said they are today).. Paisley blogged it too...

....and UWA have launched another competition, this time a Photographic one, both in RL and SL, and featuring the Campus. There are, as usual, good cash prizes to be won....get all the info....here. This is again down to Jayjay promoting SL to his boss and getting SL included.

No prizes of any kind from the Boys, of course..only the following amusing advice. This... Did You Know?.... from the SandBox (how did I manage before they started sending out this??)



DUH!!

In other VW news, Open Sim has just released 0.7.1 according to Ener. ....who is a great source of OS news... with an interesting security feature (OS, not Ener).. permitting grid owners to disallow taking objects off the grid while still allowing Hyperporting (or whatever the tping between grids is called). So the security of the Hypergrid increases...expect a blog from Maria soon (guess only).


...and to all my Mac owning readers... what about the new iMac and VWs... well Trilo Bytes has blogged a few answers... here.


So ... that'll keep you 'busy' at work... have a good week...


:)))

In No Particular Order...

Yes, just a sporadic assembly of bit and pieces of news from my miniverse.

I'm struggling a bit with the old 3 year/4 year itch that many of us get.. a sort of "where to next?" feeling. I have managed to get a hold on it as I have started on a new sim, well...a sim-wide build high in the sky at Iwz hovering over Rainbow Country. It's a big enough project that I am being challenged severely (by myself). I figure that this may be the root of my annoyance with the Boys... I am ready to make another step....and want some extra technology to fuel that...

Now, Phaylen, who I respect immensely, has had a sudden gush of enthusiasm and optimism (well, strictly speaking she is always positive..) after her long chat with a couple of Lindens ... and it is well worth a read...here... there are many of us that hope that she is right.... but I won't be selling up my InWorldz sim and moving back anytime soon.

The big Grid News, as I reported (you read it here first) is about Blue Moon/Mars and it is covered fully here with the best title for a blog going to Honour McMillan for "Dear Blue Mars - It's the community, stupid."...here....

....and, believe it or not...it was most obvious of my New Years predictions which I decided not to post in the end as everyone else was predicting and it looked lame.... Blue Mars received less blog coverage, less gossip and less interest than any other single grid I have heard of... almost, anyway.... more on Mobile Me (not the mac thingy...) later...

To finish off on grid topics....this report/research by Ayla Holt I thought might be of interest for those of you looking at some of the smaller grids... here.. (more on SpotOn later...)




My InWorldz news this week is the discovery of a coffee bar called Morning Coffee which seems to be masterminded by Rowland Larkham and populated 24/7 by a varied mix of people who are welcoming and chatty. It is certainly on my list as a great place to pop into to say hi and hang out inbetween building my prims off.

Also worth mentioning is a new website for singles to meet... its aimed at Iwz peeps and it is here... it's still early days, and I will be interested to see how it develops.





The Wild Swan Lotus is my latest new product in Iwz and had not been released for sale yet, but it is designed to compliment the Moth Orchid Lilly Set which, altho a classic, I was getting bored with and wanted a new take on it..






The InWorldz Jacaranda which grows happily on land or in the water is another forest tree like the very popular Oaks and, being of a similar shape and size would compliment the oaks in any forest of woodland.... again...not quite on sale yet..but v soon....





Now, I think that this photo of Nur in her new skin says a lot about InWorldz. You kinda can judge the maturity of a grid by how well some people can dress. It points to shopping possibilities which have developed beyond the freebie and cheap-but-cheerful to a sophisticated economy, or, the basis of one anyway.

This skin is by Roshina Opaline who I hope we will be hearing more of, the style is pure Nur... :))




In contrast I am having ongoing discussions about skins with Tessa from SpotO3D from back in October where I complained that I couldn't buy a skin as it was classed as mature content... and you need to pay membership first before you can see a skin.
(The default ones have glued on underwear....unhygienic??)... discussion ongoing...here..... and really it's not that interesting....except....

Mobile Me... i.e. me on a mobile phone, or you for that matter... how will that work with Mature Adult etc when you can just log on "from the cloud" (head-in-the-clouds more like) without any age authentication... it will all have to be PG. The only part of SL that will be available will be PG sims, and avatars will presumably be nippleless. Nipples and genitalia will be far too corrupting to be available to mobile phone users (not that they could see them on a 4 inch screen anyway...unless we see a new breed of enormous male....no...stop it soror!!)...

Anyway... I think the argument Tateru posits about downloads is very relevant...namely.. "Do you know what a mobile operator does when a user starts streaming a gigabyte per hour through their device from an Internet service – or even a half of that?
They cut it off. They block whichever end will make it stop most effectively, and they point at the terms of use and acceptable use policies if anyone should complain about it." ... read the full article here.

....and while I'm on the subject of hardware ...Kinect... now if God had wanted me to jump up and down in front of my computer screen like a loon he would never have invented the keyboard...

...just sayin'

:)))

Vitriolic posts of 2010...

This just had to be blogged..... I was mistakenly thought to have been angry when writing my last post, I have often called Facebook crap, so nothing new there, really, and so I got to thinking about my 2010 posts, 301 in number and how many of them where written in a red mist...

Now, normally, I have my tongue in my cheek to such a degree that I am somewhat amused by the various nefarious moves of our beloved leaders... with one exception...

I am Absolutely Furious was by far my angriest post of 2010 and heralded a bit of a change which you may or may not have noticed. It was this messing about with my wardrobe by creating folders to hold clothes outside my clothes folder that really got me thinking about withdrawing my financial support of the Lab, which I did two days later.

It was, however, the proposed introduction of Display Names that irritated me most. Nothing I could do, no point in complaining (tho that never stopped me) and no-one to turn to with my frustration, and I still see it as the worst move of 2010. To a certain extent, everything the Boys have done since then has failed to irritate me much, I do feel somewhat distanced from it having two new homes, both InWorldz and my Local OS, NishiLand..... more of that in a future post.

The post that attracted the most irritation from my dear readers, by far, was my Mystified Musings on Madame Mesh which was taken by some to be an anti-mesh post, but was genuinely born out of a certain bewilderment on my part..

The most read post of last year was however my simple Second Life vs. InWorldz posting of building tools with almost twice as many hits as the second most popular post about Wizard Gynoid breaking the world record for space travel.

Other contenders were... Third Life Syndrome and RL Relationships to SL Addiction... all in all it's been a good year for this blog, with returning visitors more than doubling.

Thank You for your support, even tho I do get it wrong a lot of the time....

...as I said before... I'm not writing a PhD here...

Have a great evening.... will write more next year.

:)))

The Best of Soror

soo....a new show, thanks to Juanita of Virtual Treeline Galleries.

I have set out some of my newer work along with some very early stuff, like my first prim and my first flower, and tried to put these things alongside my most recent textures, trees, flowers and prims. The Best of Soror, like a compilation CD....:)))

It's really to show an outline of what I have been up to for the last three years......... not only of personal interest cos I think it shows what new builders can do if they keep at something and develop it.......hehhehe.... funny to see my first sculptie, it's really crap, but I have also a shelf of my best ones too.

I have also shown some of the stages in my search for the ultimate low prim tree, a sort of chronological arrangement of my flowers and my most recent textures.

There are some very old trees upstairs, including the 4th Ancient One, alongside The Bubble Tree which is my 94th Ancient, and downstairs is my very latest tree...called "Tree Sisters", the 95th Ancient One.

Anyway....the show starts at 2 PM SLT Sunday, 21st March at The Virtual Treeline Gallery...

Virtual Treeline is an interesting project and one worth supporting, you can read a bit about it here or talk to Juanita Deharo, who is a very good artist and an all-round Good Egg.

Do pop over if you have time, it's next to Alizarin Goldflake's place where we had a great party last night to celebrate her new gallery ....the layout is very cool and the sort of thing I love to see....room to cam around and plenty of space given to her lovely pieces.

Colemarie Soleil played live last night and unfortunately the sim was full and it was my bed time..... no suprise here, then.... she's such a popular person as well as having a great voice.

Ah well, let's hope you do this more frequently Colie....


:)))

God, Max and I... and other stuff

Well, after a fairly good run of weather here in my little corner of Google Earth, it's turned sour and wet and generally grotty, tho, obviously not as bad as Queensland where things may be closed down for a while.

Well, it seems to me that God has let me down, and the Holy Ghost and worst of all, he's let himself down. It's not funny and it's not clever.

Now, this has come to be a Second Life issue because of Max, my new machine.... when I was grinding my slow way around SL on Baby Mac the little graphix thingies were hot enough to warm up my keyboard to such a degree that I could have baked a pizza on my lappy. Now, however, Max just purrs, (although my neighbour complained yesterday that my computer has been interfering with his radio signal (he doesn't know about Max) and I am wondering if the street lights dim when I turn him on in the morning) ......he doesn't even approach room temperature and certainly isn't breaking into a sweat .....leaving me with a freezing cold right hand. (there ya go..more RL info to go on that future profile that will leave us no alternative but disclosure...)..soo...what's the point of this little chat..well, ..

...to coin a recently critised phrase......"There is nothing to stop.."....Mac producing a little electric blanket for my mouse. I need a winter mouse, clad in fur and a summer mouse in ice-cool aluminium, otherwise I am gonna be sitting here next winter looking like a demented Michael Jackson lookie-likee with one hand clad in a wooly glove.

In other (equally important) news.... Zha's comprehensive piece on the new viewer says about everything you could say on this new turn in our lives......(no, I didn't read it all either)...and...it seems from Q Linden that...there will be no choice of viewers..like it or lump it... check out his comments ...here..

Interestingly, in regard to my recent rant about megas, Q Linden makes a point of telling us that LL has used the equivalent of 50 years work to produce this new UI...so.....that just goes to confirm my suspicions that mega's are possible but the will is lacking, not the expertise...

...and...I must say, much as I am really very positive about the stability of the grid and the amazing things we have created on it, that the new "beautiful people" Second Life advertising is a major mistake in my eyes for hundreds of previously blogged reasons.

As disclosure becomes more and more the desired outcome for financial reasons and the objectors are marginalised and ridiculed (the normal process according to Naom Chomsky) a migration of older residents who enjoy their partial anonymity is an obvious outcome. Beautiful typists will then be the order of the day. The relief that many of us feel, being able to socialise on a bad-hair-day/year/life will disappear...or.... people will simply post very old photos on their profiles..or...one's of celebs..

As it seems to me that society is pretty sick, (in that it is what you look like rather than what you accomplish that counts) it seems to me a mistake to use this sickness as a main marketing compaign philosophy, but... what do I know...

:)))

About this blog... a small news item.

It’s a very important thing to know your limits, well, actually to know my limits and limitations and to live, as far as possible, within those boundaries.

Time is always a constraining factor and so, this blurb is really just a sort of justification and explanation for the most recent news ....which is that I have given up writing for Koinup.

I have been very aware, dear reader, that I have not been making the most of this blog, and have a good dozen or so unwritten posts which I should have or could have written to entertain, inform or, at least, amuse you, with.

As this “boring little melodrama” (so-called by Rezzable’s boss) approaches it’s 20,000th hit, which means 30,000 page turns, I am suddenly amazed and pleased that so many of you get something out of following my strange meandering mind as it wanders from scene to scene in this compelling VW adventure we are currently experiencing. Assuming, of course, that it is not one weirdo reading my blog 30,000 times.

Of the recent posts I have blogged, Wizzy, self-proclaimed media tart, attracted 600 hits, including a large portion of the Lab Boys, and in second place, with 300 hits was the post on pseudonimity (NWN then blogged a similar post with a survey which showed that 65% of it’s readers favoured some degree of pseudonimity).

As there is a continued interest in the psychology of virtual existence I will be following this theme up in the near future, and, as I hate almost all fashion blogs I will try and throw in a few ideas on alternatives to the norm. Trees, crappy posts and general ramblings will features as well....so don’t worry, I’m not about to go strangely intelligent but hope my rabbity mush of a brain will continue in it’s usual mode.

Those of you who have followed my blog for a while will know my only interest in sport is tennis and a small typist-outage may be experienced next week, the second week of Melbourne, then it should be plain sailing til May (French Open) and, shortly folllowed by Wimbledon which has me glued to the goggle-box like a moronic lounge-lizard.
so.... onward and upward....

luv ya all

:))

Alienspeaking Sunday and Happy Monday

Well, Sunday, before breakfast, is a great time to hear some of the best music around. This is Casino Hammerer, an alien, laying down some tunes......for the Alienspeaking Nation......... live from Alien HQ.





Jinx....





...and Raintears were dropping it like it's hot.......





.......and I need to get some new dances....anyway.........it normally bodes very well for my week when I can get a sunday alien session in, and this week is no different





I started the week with a new friend, Nur, and went out dancing Monday night too...:)) Happy Monday.


In other news.... I am building my first goat.....and with bits of goat laying around my workshop it looks like Eid ul Fitr (a Muslim festival)....:))
I have the feeling it may turn out to be a sort of Frankenstein goat...but here's hoping.....

..... will also be building Yggdrasil, both (tree and goat) for Frigg Ragu's new project, a snowy sim with trolls caves and thingies ....real Norwegian fairy story stuff.

yes, you'll all be invited.....hmmm...might be time to put my bikini on, I did threaten to...


:)))

Isabella Alphaville

Well, Isabella is a customer who has become a friend, and, as you can see, I have been helping a bit with the gardening...:)) and, as she's a bit of a culture vulture we have been checking out a few shows together too.

Artee has also been helping with getting Isabella settled in as she's fairly new to SL and still finding her feet...

Well, still very much a work in progress it'll be interesting to see how it looks in a years time.. (interesting to see how I'LL look in a years time too)... hmmm

:))

stuff

Well, bit of a mixed bag of blog stuff, in no particular order.....



This has still got to be my favourite toy of all time, ever, its Selavy's "Nested Cubes" and Sporadic and I spent time there, messing about.....lots of fun.... its at Avendale. Didn't have Wizzy's stamina, she demolished the whole thing....:))




I went to the LALALA Gallery, just to check the place out cos i am going to hold a show there in january, and couldn't resist this photo, an installation by the talented Bryn Oh..... who, it seems is pretty busy at the moment, getting good blog coverage, and very deserved it is too.

If I look confused.....well...its being in that situation...lolol.... staring into a pram..... eeekk!!



And last but not least... Dorney Vaher.... a new friend for me, and aspiring building student of mine.... she is a real ray of sunshine, and a gem. Congratulations to her ..shes engaged to the lovely Dani...!!

Here pictured at Selavy's latest build, relaxing on the wall.
Yes, on the wall.





Otherwise...well, I went to a depressingly boring meeting of architects at Orange, the discussion was about architecture, obviously I guess, but the depressing thing was their determination to make SL as "real" as possible.... Michael Linden (Public Works) was there, seemingly reassuring us that the Lindens were not going to fill the place with THEIR content.

Hmmmm, I think I was the only person there to question the validity of calling road-building an improvement. Petrol heads and planners in perfect symbiosis win again... lol




But not on my beach....:)))))


xxx